River Plate has linked up with the Amazon Prime Video streaming network as the club’s new sponsor for the upcoming 2022 season. This trademark will be visible to everyone on the back bar of the Argentine team’s shirt, beneath the player numbers.
River Plate will be the first Argentine club to brand the famed Amazon under this new annual agreement. Looking back, Amazon has certainly been busy in the soccer world, as São Paulo also had an agreement with the streaming platform last year. Flamengo had previously closed with the platform for the Supercopa Brazil final. Even Juventus has a sponsorship relationship similar to the Argentine squad.
Amazon will pay $2.5 million dollars for this new sponsorship, which began negotiations just three months ago. Not only that, but this collaboration offers up the possibility of creating audiovisual content relating to the club.
🤝 Con la presencia del Presidente @JorgeBrito, del Vicepresidente @MatiasPatanian y del Secretario @stefanodcdc, junto al Presidente de Amazon Prime para América Latina, Pablo Iacoviello, se presentó a Amazon Prime Video como nuevo sponsor del Club.
This collaboration was formed with the idea of investigating content opportunities as well as various sorts of activations in campaigns or interactions. Not only that, but the goal is to broaden this relationship in order to reap the greatest number of benefits. This method is not unusual for a streaming platform. Maradona: Conquest of a Dream, a documentary about the Argentine legend, premiered on Amazon Prime Video on October 29th.
In addition to the Amazon partnership, River Plate negotiated a new agreement with Adidas in November, which raised income from jersey sales. This new bond will require the sporting goods business to pay 30% of sales. Furthermore, a payment of $3 million dollars was given at the time of contract signing.
It’s worth mentioning that Turkish Airlines is still sponsoring the River Plate shirt in the main spot until August. From then on, Codere will serve as the primary sponsor. Big names including Socios.com and Konami logos will also be seen on the players’ shorts.
These figures take into account likes, reports, and comments on posts from clubs in six countries on the three major social networks.
There were 3.66 billion interactions in 862 thousand posts. This impressive figure represents the total number of interactions from first division clubs in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, the three most popular social networks among supporters, throughout 2021.
Brazil, the most populous country among those studied – with 212.6 million residents – gained slightly over 2.3 billion and accounted for 62.8% of total interactions in the study. Along with Brazil, despite being more populated than Argentina, Mexico, with 129 million inhabitants, added up to 384.6 million interactions, trailing the 617 million interactions produced by Argentines, whose country has roughly 46 million individuals.
Flamengo’s success
Flamengo really stands out among the clubs. The Rio de Janeiro club led the three major social networks with 754.3 million interactions despite failing to win the Brazilian Championship, Copa Libertadores da América, and Copa do Brasil, the three major competitions on the Brazilian club calendar.
Credit: Alexandre Vidal / Flamengo Flickr
Of course, we couldn’t forget Bernardo Monteiro, Communications Director at Clube de Regatas Flamengo, who praised the big numbers and spoke a little about the association’s commitment to the digital universe:
“Since we took over the management of the networks, in January 2019, we were committed to consolidating Flamengo’s hegemony in social networks. We have the biggest fan base in the world, with more than 42 million fans and we believe that, by delivering better quality content, in multiple formats of consumption and with increasing coverage, fans not only get closer to the club but also to use Flamengo’s official channels as their main source of information and to be possible, the consistency of the work needs to be maintained”, stated Bernardo Monteiro.
Bernardo highlighted that consistency of material in many formats, such as journalistic content and entertainment content, as well as other genres, ensure growth and audience retention.
“The results shown in the metric rankings are true reveals of the stratospheric engagement of the Flamengo fans!”, he concluded.
River: the Argentinian highlight
River Plate of Argentina is another club that came out on top in 2021. When we consider that five out of every six persons are Brazilians and only one is argentine, the Argentine club has a strong engagement rate with 319 million interactions throughout the year.
In fact, River Plate, the second-most-interacted-with club on Twitter, is the only team to break through Brazil’s domination on the social network. Surprisingly, Boca Juniors is the next team on Twitter outside the Brazilians, at 12th place.
Mexico, with a population 2.6 times greater than Argentina, saw much higher numbers on Facebook, but not on Instagram, where it experienced 2.4 times lower numbers. Belonging to North America, unlike the other countries analyzed, Mexico experienced a change in behavior in interactions throughout 2021. In the first half of the year, Facebook typically had more interactions across the months than Instagram. However, the situation progressively shifted, and Instagram concluded 2021 with 194.3 million engagements, compared to Facebook’s 151.1 million.
Video Views
It is vital to note that when we talk about interactions, we only take into account likes, reposts, and comments on posts and videos. Interactions are not counted for video views.
Using Instagram and Facebook, the six countries total 4.43 billion views of slightly more than 115,000 videos posted in 2021. It is wrong to believe that the number of views is bigger since Instagram interactions are considerably more.
Facebook has a superior track record with 2.53 billion views than Instagram, which has 1.89 billion. Mexico is primarily responsible for this disparity, as Facebook had 1.14 billion views compared to only 104 million for Instagram. In addition to Mexico, Chile and Colombia were among the countries with the highest number of users on Facebook. Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay already exhibit the opposite pattern when it comes to video consumption
This month’s look at the performance of our LATAM club rankings on the key social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram revealed a few surprises. October brought fantastic news, as the Spooky month exceeded September by 13 million interactions. Surprisingly, Brazil, the nation with the most interactions among those studied, was the only one with a more pronounced reduction in comparison to the others. This country received slightly more than 5 million fewer Instagram interactions and nearly 1 million fewer Twitter interactions. While their Brazilian neighbours declined, the Argentines rose to second place, with 47.4 million interactions on Instagram Stories, and almost reached an impressive 49 million in May.
Flamengo has surpassed the 4 million daily engagement threshold on Instagram for the second time. It ensured the club’s 10th place in front of Club América on these two days, and its monthly Instagram performance. Interactions on the 13th were captured in a video recorded behind the goal during Andreas Pereira’s spectacular free-kick against Juevntude. The win over rival Atlético-MG, the Championship leader, the other day was a fantastic effort. Flamengo’s chances of becoming the tri champion were maintained thanks to this stunning victory.
Unfortunately for Brazil, there was a drop of little more than 5 million Instagram engagements compared to September’s total of 163 million. The losses of Flamengo (-9 million) and Corinthians (-12 million) underline this performance. In October, though, there were some bright spots. Atlético-MG and Santos both gained 4 million. Not only that, but among other cities, São Paulo gained 2 million, International got 1.4 million, and Fortaleza gained 1.3 million, helping to offset the loss.
Argentina
We returned to the stadium after 583 days away from the squad to watch a derby against their main rival, Boca Juniors, which they won 2-1. River Plate was the only team – aside from Flamengo! – to have more than 4 million interactions in a single day, which delighted the fans. In total, 4.05 million interactions were recorded, putting Corinthians (BRA) in second place by little more than 400 thousand interactions.
Another significant aspect was River Plate’s dominance on Facebook. They gained 3.3 million interactions compared to 3 million for Flamengo, the team that usually appears in first place. When we consider that Argentina had 5.88 million overall interactions on Facebook, with 3.3 million from River Plate and 656 thousand from Boca Juniors, the data reveals a concentration of concerning interactions and a need for other major football teams to increase content and engage with their audiences.
Previously Facebook and Instagram had the same number of interactions relating to Liga MX teams. But Instagram has begun to stand out, and by October, it had narrowed the gap to just over 8 million: (17.55 million x 9.66 million).
While the monthly record in Brazil and Argentina was over 4 million interactions, Mexico’s monthly peak on October 3rd was 789 thousand interactions. This monthly high was achieved thanks to Club America’s 2-0 Liga MX victory over Pumas in the 12th round.
Video consumption
Brazilian teams make the most use of videos on their Instagram pages. There were 2050 clubs, compared to 1241 Mexican clubs and over 1000 Argentine clubs. Brazilian clubs received approximately 100 million views, 96.4 million to be exact. One thing to remember is that interactions do not include views. In comparison, the 1000 Argentine videos earned 33.37 million views, while the 1241 Mexican videos received only 7.63 million. This impressive result accounted for 50% of Club America’s submissions, which totaled 87 videos.
Colombia
Colombian clubs were the only ones who did not rank among the top 20 on social media. With the exception of Atletico Nacional, which has won the 17th position on our rankings. The country has yet to regain its interaction rates prior to the devastating protests, and it is the sixth month in a row that the country has failed to surpass a million Twitter interactions.
On a monthly basis, we rate clubs from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Columbia in our LATAM club rankings. August witnessed a new high since the rankings were created, thanks to the return of matches in Argentina. Unfortunately, this winning streak has come to an end, as September saw a dip in interactions. This reduction resulted in a loss of slightly over 43 million interactions in these six main nations, a 12.5% decrease from August’s record-breaking performance.
Instagram has dropped 12% as a result of this substantial loss of about 79.65% of all interactions. Only one club got lucky in this 12% decrease. With well over 600,000 additional interactions, Chile witnessed an increase. Twitter and Facebook, on the other hand, did not do as well, with Twitter losing 16.5% and Facebook losing 12% respectively. We might blame this decrease on the fact that the World Cup qualifiers were held in September. This, combined with the fact that only three games were played, may have contributed to this drop.
Leaders Again
Despite these dips, there are still winners on the other side. Flamengo is on top of the rankings, with Corinthians coming in second this time. Despite a decline of over 10 million interactions compared to August, Flamengo had its fourth-best year in 2021, with 59.7 million interactions. But it was Corinthians’ performance that attracted attention. With the exception of Flamengo, the São Paulo team had the highest performance of all clubs, with 41.2 million interactions. Prior to Flamengo, the previous club from São Paulo, which had 38 million interactions in May.
We should talk about SPFC while we’re thinking about São Paulo. We can see a pattern forming as they gained 21 million in July, 20 million in August, and 15 million in September. The decline in digital performance on SPFC’s Instagram meant that the club had been surpassed by River Plate and had equaled its performance in March when it had the same 15 million interactions.
Argentina is dominated by Rivers
Even if it wasn’t the finest monthly performance, River Plate stands out among Latin American clubs with 16.78 million Instagram engagements, equal to third place, and 1.91 million Twitter interactions, also gaining third place.
They should be impressed since their performance on Twitter and Instagram is nearly double that of their rivals Boca Juniors. Boca even saw a decrease from 12.1 million to 9.60 million engagements. Despite the dip, the club moved up to sixth place on Instagram, owing to Atlético MG’s loss of 7 million interactions from August to September.
Peaks of each country
Of course, we must include the monthly leader, Flamengo, who set a new record in Brazil by qualifying for the Copa Libertadores final by defeating Barcelona twice. We discovered that there were 7.13 million interactions in a single day, which is rather impressive. This would put them ahead of their archrival Vasco, with a monthly performance of 7.03 million.
River Plate hit its monthly peak on a day when the Argentine team played at Monumental de Nuez, outside of the Copa Libertadores, which helps to minimize the number of interactions. On the 10th, a post honoring its forward Julián Lvarez, who is available to the Seleço and was at home, had a remarkable 2.96 million interactions.
River Plate’s Interaction Rate draws attention
River Plate’s engagement rate with its followers of 2.88% stands out among the month’s top achievers. This is especially impressive since it is larger than any Brazilian squad. This performance stands out since it outperforms even Palmeiras, the Copa Libertadores finalist, with an engagement rate of 2.71%, making them the best in Brazil in September.
Videos
Boca Juniors is the team in Argentina that has the most videos. There were 97 videos in all, with a total of 11.46 million views. This achievement outperforms River’s 10.28 million engagements, despite the fact that River only posted 59 videos.
For comparative purposes, the figure in Brazil is significantly greater. Flamengo had the most videos with 269, followed by Corinthians with 177. Flamengo received 44.4 million and Corinthians received 28.5 million, making these results even more striking.
When it comes to engagement with football clubs, Mexico, which has traditionally relied heavily on Facebook, appears to be following the lead of other nations that use Instagram as their primary social media platform.
Mexico had 30 million interactions in September, with Instagram accounting for 58% of those. In direct comparison to August, however, the number of Mexican contacts fell to around five million. Club America has fallen out of the top ten Instagram accounts as a result of this. Thanks to this drop, Colo-Colo, a Chilean team, entered the top 10 at Club América’s 11th spot. Unlike Cruz Azul in August, Club America also dominated among Mexicans on Twitter. With an impressive 991k members, the club is on the verge of reaching the 1 million milestone.
On Facebook, Mexican clubs compete almost on an equal footing with Brazilian clubs, with four clubs placing in the top ten. The same brand is used by the Brazilians, with Colo-Colo and River Plate rounding out the top ten. The domain of Club América has 2.23 million Facebook interactions. Cruz Azul, on the other hand, was the most popular Mexican club in August, with 2.59 million interactions.
