Online focus groups: APAC Premier League fans

A long-term client of ours, a UK brand strategy agency, asked us to host a series of online focus groups with English Premier League fans living in various APAC markets. Each focus group was scheduled to last 90-minutes and include football fans representing a range of demographics (taking into account the fact that fan demographic tends to skew towards younger males). The client wanted to hold two focus groups in Singapore, one focus group in Malaysia and one focus group in Hong Kong.

All participants recruited for this qualitative research needed to be interested in the English Premier League, and at least occasionally watch Premier League football matches live or full match replays. It was important that none of the participants already paid for their own subscription to the official Premier League broadcasters (i.e. StarHub in Singapore, Astro in Malaysia, NowTV in Hong Kong).

We tailored the screener to suit our client’s target profiles, covering subtle differences between the common broadcasting platforms in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. We also managed to recruit fluent English speakers for all groups, despite some initial concerns which led to us agreeing to provide English-speakers on a best-efforts basis. Although recruiting a female participant for each group was challenging, we also managed to fulfil this requirement.

The FieldworkHub team scheduled and hosted each focus group via Zoom, and provided cleaned recordings and transcripts for every session ready for our client to analyse. Our client was very pleased with the final outcome, commenting on the overall really good turnout rate (we only experienced one no-show across all four groups) and high quality of insight shared by the participants that we recruited.

Read about related projects with fans who had attended ticketed live sporting events and fans of AC Milan who attend live matches.