Subject – FIFA and its Digital Transformation and The FIFA 2018 Russia World Cup
Speaker – Rudiger Muller, Head of Digital, FIFA
The Sports Digital Conference has been one of the most popular at this year’s International Sports Convention, with large audience numbers filling all the conference rooms inside Geneva’s spacious Palexpo halls.
Of huge interest to many, Rudiger Muller gave an insight into FIFA’s digital strategy at the 2018 World Cup.
Mr Muller, Head of the organisation’s digital department, revealed what went on behind the scenes to achieve their goals. The speaker began by looking at how many people engaged with the event for six weeks, but brought laughs when he said “But only for one week in Germany”, his homeland.
“In terms of digital, this was our best ever tournament”, said the veteran of four FIFA World Cups. “We wanted to put the fans in the centre of things, whether they were in the stadium or around the globe, watching on tv.”
The speaker reflected that four years previously, in Brazil 2014, they didn’t have the tools to showcase the event as they would have liked but this time it was done properly, with the help of contributors all around the world but, especially, from the 90 staff working in Russia, of which 45 were in a dedicated newsroom in Moscow.
Hits to the FIFA World Cup homepage made it the most visited site around the world during the competition and all social media platforms reached out to achieve their targets.
Reporters around the various venues were able to use multi-media platforms to show outstanding behind-the-scenes coverage, with the full support of the teams and players interacting as never before. The reach of some players is massive, of course, so if they are involved and share posts then the benefits are massive.
Mr Muller closed by looking ahead to the next FIFA World Cup, in Qatar in 2022 and he called it The World Cup of Innovation and said that plans are already underway for an even bigger presence at that tournament.
