In recent years social media has evolved from a communication tool between people to a dominant driving force on the World Wide Web. Nowadays social media has a huge impact not only on the digital realm, but also on business, politics, trends and almost all aspects of our world.
A common assumption is that social networks are totally driven by people, but that is partially incorrect, in reality social networks are driven by dominant forces and media giants. In reality people are not shaping social media, but social media is shaped for them and they just follow, which is a sad reality by itself because social networks were supposed to be driven by the people not the other way around.
How this is related to football. Football is the most popular sport on earth, more than 3.4 Billion people watched world cup 2010, almost half of the planet! And it was estimated that about 1 billion people watched world Cup 2014 final between Germany and Argentina. Traditionally football has always been covered by TV, newspapers and news websites. But in recent years social networks started taking an important portion of this coverage. With the shift from traditional news to social media news, and from computer devices to mobile devices, people now are more comfortable in consuming football news in their favorite social network, and at the comfort of their mobile devices. You can get all football news from all sources at your news feeds depending on the pages that you follow, compare this with search engines or bookmarking several websites, the first option became the more popular method of following sports events.
Although football has good presence in top social networks but for football enthusiasts that presence is lacking or not enough, for instance you still do not get updated with all football events, and as a football fan you will need to do exhausting search to follow all the pages you are interested in. Other problem is that football news are buried inside swarm of posts from all other subjects, where you cannot easily filter out posts that are not related to football.
Football fans deserve their own social network where they can talk exclusively about football and share related news and stories. They need social channels that are dedicated for football fans, where they can meet, interact and share football passion. They need a place where they can follow the latest news and matches results without the need to leave to search for the information.
In a new world governed by social media, people are becoming addicted to the ease of access to information that social media provides. And because people are obsessed with ease of access to what they are interested in, the future of social media will be shifting towards niche social networks that are specialized in specific interests and affinities.