Manchester City uses Fortnite to expand its global audience

By Alexander Lee  •  July 19, 2024  •

Manchester City

Manchester City is looking to become a global sports brand, and it’s using Fortnite as its secret weapon. Tomorrow, the football club will become the first Premier League team to launch its own experience inside the metaverse platform.

Manchester City’s Fortnite Creative experience, titled “The Ladder,” goes live at 4 a.m. Eastern Time on July 20. The game features one-on-one competitions in which players face off for the right to ascend a series of virtual arenas inspired by Manchester City branding. At the moment, there is not a set duration for the experience, but City Football Group head of esports, gaming and metaverse Kris Lewis told Digiday that the experience is “not something that we want as a short-term activation.”

The map is not the product of an official partnership between Man City and Fortnite owner Epic Games, but Lewis said that Manchester City had “collaborated” with the game publisher to determine how to activate within the Fortnite ecosystem.

“We’re really trying to set a precedent with the map, and set something that does have the potential to live long-term in the ecosystem, and that really does resonate with players in the longer term,” Lewis said. “What exactly that horizon looks like will be shaped by the map and what we learn from the launch process.”

“The Ladder” is Manchester City’s most significant step into Fortnite so far, but it is not the sports team’s first flirtation with the platform. In addition to fielding its own roster of competitive Fortnite players, the team partnered with Fortnite Creative studios earlier this year to integrate its branding into popular pre-existing experiences such as “Go Goated.”

“It’s a really good way to test the waters and come to platform in an organic way, where you’re introducing yourselves to existing audiences before building your own world,” said Michael Herriger, the CEO of Fortnite Creative studio Atlas Creative, which helped put Manchester City inside “Go Goated” and other Fortnite experiences.

As Manchester City rolls out its own Fortnite experience, it will have to contend with the fact that this brand new world does not come with a pre-existing user base. To address this problem, the company plans to leverage its network of players and talent to spread the word across their social feeds.

“For a lot of brands, they will favor doing brand integrations, as opposed to launching their own maps. It’s extremely difficult to have successful games on the platform, and discoverability is still an issue there,” said Naef Ba, senior director and head of Web3 and metaverse at sports marketing agency Sportfive. “I really applaud the route that they’re taking, because that sends a strong signal that they’re in there to really engage and grow a fan base.”

Discovery is not the only potential challenge that Manchester City will have to contend with as it pushes further into Fortnite. Among some fans, the team’s brand has been marred by accusations of sportswashing due to its ownership by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the vice president of the United Arab Emirates. In spite of the club’s historic success on the pitch in recent years, these associations threaten to make some Fortnite players take pause before entering the custom-branded experience.

But Manchester City’s sportswashing issues are unlikely to make a significant dent in the user numbers of its Fortnite experience this weekend. As demonstrated by fans’ and sponsors’ embrace of the Saudi-Arabian-owned Esports World Cup, gamers and esports fans appear to be largely unaware of or unconcerned by broader geopolitical issues.

And although Manchester City’s Fortnite experience is part of a bid to expand the team’s global presence, its particular focus is the United States audience. It’s no coincidence that the experience is launching alongside the start of the team’s first pre-season tour in the U.S. in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. After all, the bulk of Fortnite’s core user base is still based in the United States.

“At the moment, we are the most successful Premier League club, so naturally, our engagement in the U.S. is becoming stronger,” said City Football Group CMO Nuria Tarre. “And yes, we are developing a lot of specific activities to engage with fans and potential fans in the U.S. market more broadly.”

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