Summary and conclusion

Manchester United - Improvements to IT infrastructure to improve financial Strength

Manchester United fondly called as Red Devils is one of the biggest clubs in the football world. It was founded in 1878 as Newton Heath LYR Football club and changed its name to Manchester united in 1902. The club moved to Old Trafford in 1910. The stadium is called as Theatre of Dreams. As per world survey conducted by Kantar market research survey it has around 600+ million supporters worldwide. Currently company is official partner for around 38 brands. Manchester United here after refers as Manu has 134 years of history with 60+ trophies. Manu won more trophies than any other club in English football and it is the only English that won Treble in 1999. They won FA cup, premier league and Champion League(“Manutd”).

Manchester United is one of the highest earning clubs in the world with an annual revenue of 676.3 million euros (Wilson,2018) and is valued as third most valuable club in the world with a value of $3.18 billion (“Forbes”, 2019). Busby years from 1945-1969 and Ferguson years from 1986-2013 are considered as golden years in Manchester United history. They won every trophy available in the club football. They are first English club to win UEFA champions league and FIFA world club Football.

Sir Alex Ferguson retired in 2013 and club is in process of transition and currently has Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is the manager of the club. The club youth system is the most reputed systems in the football world and produced talented players like Ryan Giggs, David Beckham, Paul Pogba, Cristiano Ronaldo, Marcus Rashford and many more. It is the only club in the world that give youth graduates to be represented in first team during the match continuously for 4000 games and is continuing the record that was started in 1937. The perfect blend of combining youth graduates and talented players brought during the transfer windows is the successful recipe of Manchester United. The scout system is well established to identify the talented players around the world and train them with proper discipline, football education helped them to reach the level they are now. They are the only club that give a greater number of minutes across all the European Clubs to the youth graduates and they are never afraid to give under 18 players a chance to play in first team. The current team has Mason Greenwood, Angel Gomes, Tahith Chong, Brandon Williams from under 18 to be regular part of match day squads (“ManUtd”).

The club is not about football, but they lead others by taking social responsibility and support the communities in time of need. The Manchester United Foundation support vulnerable communities around the world by proving them support in partnership with UNICEF. They work with other clubs in supporting local communities, school with innovative projects like educational projects for young people with the help of players and club ambassadors.

The club recently started Women’s Team and is managed by Casey Stone. They promoted to first division within the first of their inception in English Football.

Requirements for the Team to meet the company

The rich history, fan following attracts the interest of the media. There is lot of scrutiny or negative reporting that is impacting the club’s reputation and is creating lot of pressure on the club during the transition period.

The club now must step up to interact more with fans and send out a regular communication to engage them. The support from the fans helps the club to maintain its financial strength and invest in the improvements of entire club structure, youth academy, first team, women team and Manchester United foundation.

The intent of the club is to look at the available social media platforms such as their Facebook, twitter, Instagram, YouTube channels to improve the image of the club and provide fans with proper communications and avoid the impacts of fake news. For example, during the transfer window there is lot of fake articles circulating over the internet causing fans huge anxiety and disappointment when the new turn out to be false. This was brought to clubs’ attention by their 226 officially registered supported clubs. The club is also planning to introduce a platform to hear fans concerns around the globe, match day fans, travelling fans and make improvements to make Old Trafford as the best supported place in the world. The security and privacy of the fans is highest priority while making these improvements.

My team is planning to work with the Manchester United team in supporting their idea

1) to improve communication with fans by suggesting them the way to handle social media platform

2) Design models to run sentiment analysis using advanced AI technologies

3) Provide plan to engage fans and collect feedback via online and during face to face interactions

4) Improve the current infrastructure to design their websites more user friendly and e-commerce platform for buying genuine Manchester United products, Match day tickets, Seasonal Tickets securely without compromising the security and privacy of the fans

5) Upgrade the infrastructure to latest technologies, latest hardware and improve overall security to avoid breaches

Challenges Team is facing

The challenges are spread across different levels.

Leadership Challenges – The development of plan to tackle the issues and get a buy-in from leadership and important stakeholders. The club is planning for transformation so that it an engage fans, improve investments. The measuring parameters to identify the return on investment need to be identified based on intangible factors like engagement and how can we quantify it to investment

Digital Transition Challenges – The change of process workflows, identifying the most engaged sections of the website is an important challenge. The change of workflows might create pressure on current staff so identification of proper training and preparing a guide to support teams is an important task

Software Vendor – Manchester United has a tie up with HCL as their software vendor. The challenge is to convey the security vulnerability issues and have them on your side to work for the betterment of improvement in infrastructure. This is challenge as each team has security experts and has different opinions on the implementation of infrastructure security

Communication Challenges – This is a huge transformation in digital history of Manchester United. The communication is key for the overall process and plan need to be devised to handle the communication properly throughout the transition and also send out a proper message to the fans so that they do not loose interest in using the social media channels or websites or e-commerce sites during the transition

References

Manutd (n.d). Manchester United. Retrieved from https://www.manutd.com/en

Wilson, B (2018). Manchester United remain football's top revenue-generator. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-42767374

Forbes (2019). The Business of Soccer. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/soccer-valuations/list/#tab:overall

Prior, E (2013). Do Man Utd really have 659m supporters? Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21478857