REAL MADRID – CLUB OF THE MIDDLE EAST
Over the last 40 years’ football has evolved, from amateur to professional. It has become the most commercialized sport. It all started with Florentino Perez (president) from 2000 – 2003, when Real Madrid started signing big names such as Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane and Ronaldo.
Real Madrid is one of the most recognizable sports brand and the most valuable football club in the world since 2013, valuing at $3.26 billion till present followed by Manchester United and their archrivals Barcelona. They’ve been making the most revenue for the past 6 years with a big margin, again competing with Man United and Barcelona.
Real Madrid have always been few steps ahead in terms of business. They are taken as the new model of business organization for football clubs. Some of the players were signed just to get media attention as they had a large amount of fan following. Real Madrid has a habit of breaking transfer fee records, buying players such as Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Cristiano Ronaldo and Gareth Bale.
The aim for Real Madrid at present is to take over the Gulf by being the biggest global football brand. Mostly the marketing campaigns have been and would be for shirt sales, TV broadcasting and pre-season tours. Madrid traditionally always focuses on the Far East but have switched their concentration towards the GULF.
In particular UAE is the country they have been focusing on and in 2013 they’ve also signed a 5 years’ shirt sponsorship deal with the Emirates which was for Dhs685 million. NBAD, after becoming partners with the European Champions, they started to customize their debit and credit cards that were Real Madrid branded for their customers who were too passionate towards the club. Real Madrid has also opened up a café at JBR which was inaugurated by the players and the president of Real Madrid having such a big crowd that filled up the JBR.
Florentino Perez has also planned to open up a Madrid resort island in Abu Dhabi, the agreement with NBAD means that the team would be traveling to the capital of UAE to have some training sessions over there.
Perez is commercially targeting the region and wants to establish Real Madrid as the club of the Middle east, after winning the Champions League for the 11th time, most ever by any team.
Real Madrid has the best strategy of doing marketing by signing big players and turning them into brand names, they’re all over the Commercial platform, looking at Ronaldo and Bale being the faces of a lot of brands, such as:
Ronaldo: Armani Jeans, Nike, Castrol, Calvin Klein, Tag Heuer and SACOOR Brothers
Bale: Highest transfer fee record, Adidas and BT sports.
The main objective for Real Madrid was to sign as many star players as they could which made their profit margin go higher every year, the youth are too passionate about football and they follow them and the club representing them as it is more than a crest for the youth.
Sources: sport360.com, iese.edu
