BOSTON — It’s not hard to create Patriots fans in New England, but what happens when the team wants to expand its reach all over the world?
The NFL has been working to increase football’s popularity internationally over the past few years, especially with its London games, and it turns out the Patriots are on board with growing their own brand, too. Something Patriots president Jonathan Kraft said Friday at the 2016 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference wouldn’t have been possible without technology.
“I think for the NFL, people fall in love with Tom Brady or they love (Rob Gronkowski), and I think we have a bigger challenge, and I think technology is going to help us overcome this, to educate people outside of the country to our game,” Kraft said on the “Future of the Fan Experience” panel. “And without technology we wouldn’t be able to do it.”
The Patriots opened an office in Beijing in 2007, but the NFL asked them to close it after it moved its international efforts to London. But the Patriots still actively try to expand as much as they’re allowed.
“We are within the construct that the NFL lets us,” Kraft said after the panel. “The NFL strictly restricts teams, as they view the international opportunity to be one that they will market and then fans will choose who they want to support, as opposed to teams going out and aggressively trying to market themselves. That’s why we did have an office in China and we had to close it down, but we are very interested in growing and marketing our fan base outside the country.”
For now, expanding the Patriots internationally consists of an extensive fan club page on Patriots.com.
“On our website, fans from different countries can meet and find other fans,” Kraft said. “It’s like a fan locator part of the website, and we encourage and then help people to form fan groups outside the country who then will have a direct connection with our organization.”
Kraft said he believed the Patriots had fan clubs in at least 80 different countries, but the biggest followings reside in China, the U.K. and Israel.
Thumbnail photo via David Butler II/USA TODAY Sports Images
