Southampton Football Club, a team in the English Premier League, has been embracing new technologies— allowing them to score goals on and off the field. Southampton FC are a very progressive club on the rise domestically and internationally. The team that plays in red and white today can trace their roots back to 1885 when the club was formed, and they’ve come a long way since then. Known by their fans as Saints, they’ve been embracing new technology to optimize digital fan engagement, and effectively store, manage and deliver digital media amongst their wide network of photographers, content managers, website developers, players and fans. We spoke to Matt Watson, Southampton FC’s Senior Club Photographer, to find out exactly how they got there.
Photographers Upload via FTP
As you might imagine, football photographers take thousands of photographs at every match, and that’s no different for the Saints. What is different is the technology they use. Saints’ photographers upload their images instantly via FTP to their media library. Here, they can be tagged with match data, player data, date data and any other metadata that helps the club store, manage and later find those images so they can be distributed to their media partners, players and fans.
Matt tells us:
“Before PhotoShelter we just had basic folder structures, and trying to find images quickly with so many players, matches and images was so time consuming. One of our players was having a 10 year testimonial, and our team wanted to access to a host of images to reflect his time at the club for the various media channels. The only way to do this was with a slow, manual process sifting through folders. We just needed a solution that would enable us to find stuff easily and quickly – a searchable image archive. Now we have PhotoShelter, we just type a name into our library interface, and all images tagged with that players name will come up. Easy!”
Matt Watson, senior club photographer for Southampton football club
Being able to tag images with data is also key to being able to share specific images with players. Using a function called ‘smart folders,’ images tagged with a player’s name will automatically display in the corresponding folder. Players can then access these images with their own PhotoShelter login.
Matt continues:
“Players continuously need images for their own online digital platforms, like social media sites, their own websites and personal PR channels. Smart folders are an excellent way to collate these images so that players can easily access them for their own use.”
Matt Watson, senior club photographer for southampton football club
CDN Infrastructure Handles Hefty Website Traffic
The Saints have also invested in a new website recently to optimize their fan engagement, delivered and supported by the digital agency, UNRVLD. The agency has used PhotoShelter’s API to integrate its media library with their own software, which means images can be delivered directly to the website from the media library. Using PhotoShelters’s CDN infrastructure also enables the website to handle the huge amounts of traffic expected from a premier league website.
Matt concludes:
“The website integration is really a bonus for us and as well as the image delivery, it means that we can send live match feeds to our website. This saves the content team hours of work, having to download and format before sending to the website agency. Now the system does it all for us.”
Matt Watson, Senior Club Photographer for Southampton Football Club
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