Liverpool fears losing fans to Fortnite video game

Dubai: Liverpool CEO Peter Moore is worried about losing fans to the Fortnite video game if they don’t engage them more on social media.

Speaking at the Dubai Sports Conference at Madinat Jumeirah on Wednesday, Moore, who has a background in the gaming industry in Silicon Valley, said: “When I look at viewing and attendance figures of millennial males I’m concerned as a CEO of a football club that relies on the next generation of fans coming through. I’m concerned that if we don’t build technological prowess as a club we will lose them.

“There’s so much pressure on time now and only 24 hours in a day, there are only so many hours to play Fortnite.

“We are competing with so many mediums, platforms, devices and distractions, we need to embrace technology and understand that 90 minutes is a long time for a millennial male to sit down on a couch. We need to package content in bites of 60-90 seconds to keep their engagement.

“We are an industry that needs to harness technology to make sure we don’t miss an entire generation of young people growing up that don’t have that love for football, they have love for Fortnite.

“If you don’t know what Fortnite is, it is the biggest entertainment medium in the world right now. It’s a video game generating tens of billions of dollars a year in micro transactions that rely on you playing for hours on end.

“If it’s true that football is worth $35 billion (Dh129 billion) a year in revenue, we are performing badly. I refer you to the video game Fortnite, which is worth $15 billion. It’s free, but makes a dollar a time (on in-game purchases), that’s 40 per cent of what we are doing in football. We should be a $50 or $100 billion dollar industry.”