Pro League Committee CEO Colin Smith has big plans for the UAE

Dubai: Pro League Committee CEO Colin Smith has big plans for the UAE’s top football league as his first season in the job comes to an end.

Smith, who has a degree in International Business and French from Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, wants to attract more fans to matches, as well as increase the league’s profitability.

The Etisalat Pro-League is now five seasons old and is a healthy product with growing saleability in Middle East and international markets. But Smith is not someone to rest on his laurels, as he told Gulf News.

Q. What have been your impressions of the Pro League Committee?

A. This season is being used to continue and re-structure our organisation internally and look to put the different assets and platforms in place to work together with the clubs and our partners, broadcasters and sponsors for future seasons. There are a couple of key initiatives that we need to undertake and one of these is to increase attendance, and we want to engage more with fans and spectators. Obviously on a commercial level we want to build a robust commercial programme, which will then enable us to carry on getting more success in these initiatives and moving forward.

Q. So which would be the bigger challenge? Increasing attendances or having a better commercial viability?

A. There are relative opportunities in both spheres. As a league we have grown competitively. As a product, the football on the pitch, the players and the professionalism of the teams have grown in these first five years and this is a great sign. What we need to do now is focus on building more of a live experience through each match for the spectators.

Q. Where do you think you can bring in any changes? Do you see a scope for any of these?

A. I think if you look at our current audience, we’ve got a huge following starting with a large television audience. We’ve got good followers with regards to our Apps and our website and the Fantasy Football has been successfully launched. There is a lot of interest in the league, in the teams and in the people following these. That’s translating into a very loyal fan group that we can improve in size over a period of time. So if you look at the fan groups at the moment, they are almost all made up of Emirati supporters, which is fantastic. So we need to attract even more Emiratis. Going to a shisha cafe or watching at home is a great experience, but enjoying a live experience is a completely different feeling and we need to stress on this. Then we’ve got the non-Emirati population, that is, the other Arab fans who can also attend. Maybe we are not doing enough to bring them to the matches. We want to build initiatives to bring them in. And then obviously we have the non-Arabic speaking large population that can also attend. We are now looking at the most effective ways that we can lure them. The first thing definitely would be to raise awareness among them.

Q. What has been the progress on these initiatives?

A. For the last several months we’ve been exploring and carrying out research to identify exactly where the priorities are and the main reasons why people who are keen footballers are not going to the matches. We want to make their match experience even more enjoyable. We are carrying out research in these key areas in the next few weeks and this research will allow us to prioritise the initiatives we would like to put in place for next season. Any such action needs time to grow and that’s what we’ve been doing this season. We are looking, observing and finding out who our best partners will be and how we can have a range of benefits to pass on to our fans.

Q. So we can realistically look at a fresh start from next season?

A. We hope so. That’s what we would like to do. We are launching a new website. We’ve got a live centre for match scoring. We’ve got the Apps, which allow people to follow detailed scores, statistics and so on. The on-screen televisions are fixed. We’ve started quite a few initiatives this season, some of these in a soft launch way. The idea really is to combine and get ready for next season.

Q. Are you a believer that you can wean away TV audiences and put them in a stadium instead?

A. I think we can do that, though I have always insisted that there is no magic switch there. There are processes and activations and these will take time to move into top gear. Nothing can replace the live experience of a match. People can watch the [English] Premier League or the [German] Bundesliga or [Italian] Serie A live on TV and they can also watch our games live on TV. But I think here a match can be turned into a live match experience for fathers who want to bring their sons, or kids wanting to come with their fathers. Enjoying the live experience is always something special and you don’t get that from the armchair! What we need to do is to work together with the clubs to enhance that live experience and make it something that people don’t want to miss. The idea is going to a football match can be great fun, just like going shopping or going to a mall. That’s what we want to build upon.

If you were to grade the Pro-League, where would it stand today?

You can’t go from non-pro to pro overnight. It is not just about paying players or getting the best coaches. It’s about the attitude and the approach, be it the business side or the commercial side. It’s tough and unfair to grade five years of the Pro-League against 100-plus years of the Premier League. I think it is more important for us to focus on where we are in the region. I think we have a good feeling of where we are. There is a good base and certainly over the next three years we have a responsibility to make sure that football grows on a very firm platform. The game has to be secured in the UAE. We’ve made very important steps but we’ve still got a very long way to go.