Customer Stories - Premier League
ChallengeTo engage and entertain football fans in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. |
SolutionECAL leveraged Premier League’s vast, global, connected calendar audience, to help engage fans in the Premier League’s new eSports offering, that smashed all records! |
1. Introduction
In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, the world’s most popular football competition launched the ePremier League Invitational. This EA Sports FIFA20 battle saw each Premier League team represented by a player in a knockout format to decide an overall series champion.
A prize fund was donated to the #PlayersTogether initiative, which was created by the Premier League players as a collective way of generating funds for the National Health Service and distributing them where they are needed most.
2. Objectives
The main objective was to engage and entertain fans. As Premier League Chief Executive, Richard Masters, said “We are aware of the importance of finding new ways to entertain fans at this time and we are excited to bring together a strong line-up of players for the ePremier League Invitational tournament.”
3. Strategy
The strategy focussed on informing and engaging their vast, connected, global calendar audience in this new eSports offering. This would involve targeted messaging to fans, based on their favourite teams, so fans could tune-in to watch their favourite players in action.
As a given, the solution needs to be responsive, as the ePL Invitational is a fast-paced ‘knockout’ format, with daily rounds held over just five consecutive days, with the Semi-Final and Final played on Saturday with just 15 minutes break.
4. Solution
Premier League fans who had nominated a preference for a team received detailed event information for whenever their team played next. General football fans would receive a daily schedule of match-ups in-calendar, so they could choose to follow the games of their choice.
All entries featured a strong call to action to ‘watch live’, with smart alerts and direct links to the various options for live view, including via the Premier League website, YouTube and Facebook.
5. Outcomes
During the five days of the ePremier League Invitational tournament, ECAL delivered nearly 3 million event impressions, over 30,000 clicks at a click-through rate of over 1.2%.

This eSports solution for Premier League acquired many new fans from all over the world, that the League will continue to communicate and engage with on an ongoing basis.
The ePL Invitational was won by Leicester City’s James Maddison, who echoed the sentiments of players, and fans. by saying: “I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the whole tournament and am delighted to come out victorious.”

Testimonials

"The ECAL platform ensures that fans can easily find out where to tune in and watch Formula E live in their territory, providing us with the ability to deliver targeted messages to users, based on location and behaviour. ECAL is our highest performing digital marketing channel, contributing approximately one-third of new user data acquired. The team at ECAL are a great bunch and I would have no hesitation in recommending them."
Senior Digital Project Manager @ Formula E
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Head of Digital Services @ Basketball Australia
"ECAL has proven to be a great channel for us at AVFC, benefitting sales and fan engagement more and more each season whilst providing data and insight for us to improve the fan experience as a whole."
Digital Marketing Executive @ Aston Villa FC
"ECAL has been a very effective tool where audiences can download full competition schedules or individual team calendars across all cricket competitions. Events provide information on where / when to tune-in to follow matches, and important ticket on-sale dates."
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