How Liverpool FC overhauled its fan experience with Wasabi

Liverpool Football Club is building a digital content platform to ensure its engagement with fans and sponsors matches on-pitch successes. During last year’s Premier League title win, the club’s twentieth English top-flight championship victory, Liverpool boasted 1.7 billion engagements across all social media channels, 10% more than the previous season.

Being able to find the right clips at the right time is crucial to this success. The club generated 935 million video views across its branded content last season, 56% more than its nearest rivals. Andy Fletcher, vice-president of technology and digital products at Liverpool FC, says his team strives to ensure supporters are informed and entertained.

“Being able to serve our content is crucial,” he says. “We live in a real-time world. It’s very important for fans that they see this content, and it’s crucial for us as a club that they see us as the destination to get that content via social channels.”

Fletcher uses digital services to help Liverpool maintain a competitive advantage off the pitch. And it’s here that a relationship with technology specialist Wasabi is paying dividends in terms of the club’s engagement with its fans around the globe and its commercial partners.

“We've been able to see a quicker turnaround in terms of the production cycle,” he says. “Our people are spending less time on manual processes and more time creating better content, which ultimately creates greater digital engagement.”

Fletcher says the relationship with Wasabi has developed over the last few years. The key to success has been a knowledge-sharing process between both parties. Detailed technical discussions between specialists from both organizations outlined novel solutions for managing the club’s digital archive and supporting future online engagement plans.

“The collaboration process led to an understanding of the challenges we have around how we create digital experiences for fans around the world, how we optimize the production process, and how we will streamline content discovery and management going forward,” he says.

A future-focused partnership

Back in 2020, Fletcher turned to Wasabi to help Liverpool build its cloud computing infrastructure. While there was a growing awareness that the club needed a better way to manage data and storage, the coronavirus pandemic provided the burning platform for change, as employees had to access digital services securely from disparate locations.

“Historically, most of what we had from a content and storage perspective was based on physical infrastructure,” he says. “But during the pandemic, we had to support remote video-editing work because football games were still going on, and there was demand for us to publish and create content.”

From this initial use case, Liverpool’s relationship with Wasabi continued to deepen. As an early adopter of Wasabi AiR, an AI-powered storage solution that combines hot cloud storage with automated metadata tagging, the club reaps the benefits of 80% lower cloud storage costs and the ability to push content to fans and partners promptly and effectively.

Before implementing Wasabi AiR, Liverpool media creators spent days tagging and searching match footage. This laborious process has been replaced by AI-enabled automation. Wasabi indexes and tags every frame of the club’s video footage, saving more than 5,000 hours of media management time annually.

Today, AI is integrated into Liverpool’s core operations, with asset management used across marketing, e-commerce, partner engagement, and broadcast media delivery. Fletcher gives the example of how metatags in match footage mean the club can push crucial match content to fans as soon as UEFA rules and regulations allow.

“Processes that were manual and slow are now very quick in terms of us being able to cut the packages and the content that we need,” he says. “We can scroll through, we can go to specific moments in the game, and this approach means more insight to fans quickly.”

The tagging process identifies people and logos in each frame. That capability is also crucial for the club’s partners. Fletcher says the club can push content to sponsors that shows how their assets appear, such as on pitch-side advertisements, during a game.

“We can go through that content in a matter of seconds, search for insight, and serve it up,” he says. “We can go to one of our key sponsors and say, ‘Here are your key moments for that game. This is what the clips and the highlights look like,’ and then they can share that content, or use it in the way that they want to.”

End-to-end transformation

Fletcher’s work with Wasabi is part of a continuing effort to transform the club’s off-field activities using digital and data. His role encompasses five key areas. First, he oversees the technology stack for product management and merchandising, such as e-commerce stores, the club website, and the club app.

Another responsibility is ticketing and stadium technologies: “What ticketing system do we use? What's connected at the stadium? And how does all that technology come together as an integrated, fan experience platform?”

Third, Fletcher manages the transformation and delivery function, which focuses on back-office operations and front-office systems. Fletcher’s fourth area of responsibility is managing the digital workforce team, which he describes as IT ops: “Supporting the business with what's required; traditional service desk, plus infrastructure management and connectivity.”

Finally, Fletcher oversees information security and cyber, which means preventing breaches and phishing attacks while keeping staff safe and secure. So, what’s it like running technology for a world-famous football club? The answer, he says, is busy and varied.

“We can be talking about detailed technology integrations and infrastructure, or we can be talking about fan-focused issues related to things like ticketing and the website,” he says, “So, it's a broad role, but we’re focused on specific goals, and I would say technology is viewed as increasingly important from a business perspective.”

Fletcher reflects on the digital transformation his team has delivered. “We've reduced the manual processes, and we've done that really well,” he says. “Wasabi’s singular focus on the cloud is great – the attention, the resources, and being able to design best-in-class storage. The system is fast, secure, reliable, and cost-effective.”

One of the keys to success, says Fletcher, is clear business outcomes. Rather than being distracted by market trends, something that’s easy in a modern technology industry often characterized by AI hyperbole, his team has worked closely with Wasabi to deliver strong results in key areas, including cloud computing and content delivery.

And just like on the pitch, there’s always next season when it comes to the fast pace of data-enabled innovation: “As we move forward, we will go again to the next level of transformation to understand what that iteration looks like.”