Many fans of professional sports teams go online and rant about their team\u2019s decisions in assembling a roster. In a myriad of sites such as ESPN, Grantland, Bleacher Report, RealGM and more, fans comment on actual roster moves or hypothetical moves suggested by writers and bloggers. Fans come up with their own moves and discuss them feverishly with other fans. But what if fans had a structured way to tell a team\u2019s management how they would like to see the team\u2019s roster and suggest ideas?<\/p>\n
In professional sports, often the success of a team is determined by management\u2019s performance in the offseason more than the players\u2019 performance in the regular season where teams actually compete one against the other. If management assembled a championship squad, by signing or trading for the best players, chances are the team will perform well and vice versa. \u00a0However, many fans of failing organizations are dumbstruck when management makes an ill-advised move such as trading away a fan favorite or signing the wrong guy for a long contract.<\/p>\n
Assembling a roster in professional sports has become very complicated because of salary cap constraints and collective bargaining agreements. There are seemingly endless opportunities to sign and trade players and to come up with those ideas, teams employ a General Manager and a group of scouts who are responsible to evaluate talent, asses what other teams are interested in and come up with sign and trade ideas and then try to execute on those ideas. Some teams are blessed with great GMs, some have awful ones, but all teams have many great fans with great ideas.<\/p>\n
A sports team\u2019s greatest asset is its fan base. Teams with a large fan base sell more tickets, more merchandise and sell its TV rights for greater sums. However, teams can also utilize their fan base to get ideas on how to assemble the roster by suggesting trade ideas and which players to sign. Teams have highly engaged fans who know the team inside out. Fans know who they want to see on their team, who they will pay to see wear the team\u2019s uniform. Fans also know who they don\u2019t want to see on their team and should be traded away. In addition, surely there are creative ideas that fans will come up with that management has not thought about. Moreover, teams can use such a platform to gauge how fans will react to a move a team is thinking of.<\/p>\n
The value for the teams is to make better roster decisions and gauge fans\u2019 reaction to roster moves before a team pulls the trigger on a move. The value for fans is the opportunity to influence the move their beloved franchise makes. Today fans discuss such decisions in many sites usually through forums or comments on posts. Creating a structured platform for fans to make suggestions will help fans engage in a more meaningful and efficient way.<\/p>\n
For the creators of the platform there are several ways to monetize the platform. The most interesting is to build a fan insight tool for teams and sell that through a SaaS model. Teams would love to understand what their fans want to see because that will increase ticket sales and viewer ratings. Also, agents might be interested on what fans think because they can use that information in negotiations. An additional revenue stream would be monetizing the traffic on the site by advertisements.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Professional sport teams can improve their rosters by crowdsourcing ideas from their fan base.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[672,812,359,358,360,653],"class_list":["post-1969","hck-submission","type-hck-submission","status-publish","hentry","category-crowd-sourcing","category-mlb","category-nba","category-nfl","category-nhl","category-sports"],"connected_submission_link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/assignment\/leveraging-the-collective-intelligence-and-effort-of-digital-crowds\/","yoast_head":"\n