For decades, football clubs have treated media activity as something separate from the commercial operation of the business.

The media department produced match previews, interviews, team news and reports. The commercial department sold sponsorships. Marketing promoted tickets, retail and events.

Each department had its own responsibilities, its own objectives and, often, very little meaningful connection with the others.

That approach may have been sufficient when clubs controlled most of the communication with their supporters. It is increasingly unfit for the way football is now consumed—and for the financial realities facing clubs throughout the pyramid.

A football club is no longer simply an organisation that occasionally uses media to communicate information.

A football club is a media brand.

The clubs that understand that distinction are creating stronger audiences, more valuable partnerships and new sources of sustainable revenue. Those that continue to treat media as an internal content service risk falling behind.

This is not necessarily a criticism of the people working within football media departments.

In many clubs, those teams have been structured, briefed and measured in broadly the same way for years. Their job has been to cover the football: interview the manager, film the players, publish team news and service the demands of the matchday cycle.

That remains important. But it is no longer enough.

Outside the Premier League, a club might play 46 league fixtures and close to 60 or even 70 matches across an entire season. The relentless turnaround can leave little time to step away from the output treadmill and ask a more strategic question:

• What is this content actually helping the club to achieve?
• Is it attracting new supporters?
• Is it strengthening the relationship with existing supporters?
• Is it creating value for a commercial partner?
• Is it helping to sell tickets, hospitality or retail products?
• Is it building an audience the club understands and can engage again?
• Or is it being produced because the content calendar says something needs to be published?

The answer cannot always be directly commercial. Football clubs must inform, entertain and represent their communities. But every part of the club should understand how its work contributes to a wider set of objectives.

Too often, media teams have never been given that context.

A football club is a media brand. The clubs that understand that distinction are creating stronger audiences, more valuable partnerships and new sources of sustainable revenue.

One of the most practical changes clubs can make is to recognise the value of their existing digital assets.

Clubs are beginning to do this much more effectively than they did three to five years ago. But considerable untapped value remains, particularly outside the top flight.

A digital asset does not only mean a match stream or major video series. It could be a team announcement, birthday post, transfer update, matchday graphic or recurring behind-the-scenes feature.

Peterborough United were among the clubs outside the Premier League to recognise the potential value within these assets. Transfer-window activity, for example, creates sustained attention and could provide a natural platform for the right recruitment partner.

The objective should not be to place a sponsor’s logo indiscriminately over every piece of content. That devalues both the content and the partnership.

The better question is:

Where is there a genuine connection between the audience’s interest, the club’s story and the partner’s objective?

At Stevenage, we developed content partnerships that attempted to do exactly that. Rather than treating a partnership as a collection of boards, screens and logo placements, we used the authentic stories a football club could tell and connected them with what the partner wanted to achieve.

That is a fundamentally different proposition from conventional advertising.

It requires commercial and media teams to plan together. It also requires the media team to understand why a partner has invested in the club.

A local construction company, for example, may want to improve its profile within the town, support recruitment or demonstrate its contribution to the community. If the media team understands that objective, it can help create relevant stories that supporters may genuinely want to engage with.

Without that collaboration, the club is likely to deliver a series of contractual assets rather than a partnership with measurable value.

The traditional supporter journey still matters, but clubs can no longer rely on it as their only route to growth.

The assumption that somebody supports a club because their parent did, attends every other Saturday, sits through 90 minutes in the rain and accepts a poor matchday experience is not a growth strategy.

Supporters now discover and consume football through numerous channels. Their first interaction with a club might be a YouTube documentary, TikTok video, player’s personality, unusual shirt, community story or piece of short-form content seen thousands of miles away.

This does not make local identity less important. In fact, it makes that identity more valuable.

A football club is more than the eleven players on the pitch. It is an organisation rooted in a town or city, with history, characters, supporters, partners and stories that other businesses would struggle to replicate.

The opportunity is to use that authenticity to deepen local relationships while also giving people outside the traditional catchment area a reason to care.

The biggest clubs have achieved global growth predominantly through success on the pitch. Clubs lower down the pyramid are unlikely to have the same sporting platform, but they can still build audiences through identity, creativity, access and storytelling.

Como 1907 and Hashtag United demonstrate two very different versions of this opportunity.

Como has built an identity that connects the football club with the distinctive qualities of its location. Its wider offering connects football with retail, travel, tourism, content and premium matchday experiences—including hospitality built around Lake Como itself.

Como is an exceptional location, but the wider principle applies elsewhere. Every club operates somewhere with its own people, culture, history and identity.

The opportunity is not to imitate Como’s output. It is to identify what makes your own club and place distinctive enough to build around.

Hashtag United offers almost the reverse example. It developed an audience and digital identity before becoming a conventional football club with a traditional match-going supporter base.

One club has used an established place to extend its brand. The other used an established media brand to create a football club.

Both demonstrate that football audiences do not have to be built through the traditional route alone.

Likes, views and follower numbers have a place in reporting, but they should not be confused with the objective.

A club can generate millions of impressions without creating any meaningful long-term value.

The more important measure is the lifetime value of a supporter.

Is the supporter base growing?

Do we understand why it is growing?

Are we capturing useful supporter data?

Are people moving from viewers to followers, from followers to registered supporters, and from registered supporters to ticket buyers, members, retail customers or advocates?

Are we improving the experience sufficiently for people to remain engaged and increase their relationship with the club?

Those questions connect media activity to the health of the entire organisation.

That does not mean every post needs a sales link. It means the club understands the role different content plays within a much longer relationship.

The move from content function to growth function cannot be delivered by changing somebody’s job title or presenting a new strategy at a staff meeting.

Leadership must set the direction, but the change also requires genuine bottom-up support.

Football media departments often include people who have served their clubs for five, ten, fifteen or even twenty years. They carry enormous knowledge, trust and institutional memory.

If those people do not understand or believe in the change, it will not succeed—regardless of how impressive the chief executive’s presentation looks.

Equally, clubs must give their teams the time, information and authority required to work differently.

You cannot tell a media team to become commercially focused while excluding it from commercial planning.

You cannot ask for strategic content while measuring success solely by output volume.

You cannot demand collaboration while retaining departmental objectives that actively compete with one another.

The change has to be structural, not cosmetic.

For clubs wanting to move towards a media-led growth model, I would begin with five changes:

None of these changes requires a Premier League-sized department. They require clarity, leadership and a willingness to challenge established ways of working.

Financial controls are placing an even greater emphasis on the revenue clubs can generate themselves.

In May 2026, League One clubs approved a reduction in the proportion of turnover that can be spent on wages from 60% to 50%.

Whatever the precise rules within an individual competition, the wider direction is clear: sustainable revenue matters more than ever.

Owners cannot simply be expected to fund every ambition through continual injections of money. Clubs that want to compete must become better businesses.

That means making more of the attention, trust, data, relationships and stories they already possess.

Media sits at the centre of all five.

Clubs that continue to view it principally as the department that interviews the manager and publishes the team sheet will underuse one of their most valuable assets.

The football club is already a media brand.

The real question is whether it has started operating like one.