Bundesliga aims at Japan

Germany’s Bundesliga is taking increasingly firm aim at the Japanese market with a new, dedicated website as a responseto growing interest from the country in its league.

Ten high-profile Japanese players – including Atsuto Uchida, Hiroshi Kyiotake and Takashi Inui – are currently plying their trade in the Bundesliga, which has inevitably led to increasing interest in the German league from Japan itself. There’s already a fair amount of it screened live on the Fuji-TV pay-TV channel (in fact, an impressive five games per match day) as well as time-displaced matches on free TV partner NHK and in March FOX Sports Japan will join in too.

www.bundesliga.com/jp looks to further strengthen the league’s appeal featuring content originated specifically in Japanese by dedicated editorial team.

“There are three Japanese editors and one chief editor – all native Japanese speakers,” explains the Bundesliga’s Dr. Dirk Meyer-Bosse. “Most of the stories are written by the team, and most of the videos are produced by the team as well.”

The dedicated site allows the team to skew its content towards the understandable interest of the Japanese market in their own players, repurposing video, recording special interviews and summaries, hosting picture galleries and so on.

“Right know we don’t have to do anything special to cope with the increased latency to Japan. The loading time is acceptable but we’re always working on reducing the latency in the future,” adds Meyer-Bosse.

The addition of Japanese takes the roster of non-Germanic Bundesliga sites and content to three, following in the wake of English and Polish. Meyer-Bosse adds that there are no plans for any more language-specific sites at the moment, though a quick glance at the roster of foreign players in the Bundesliga reveals a large proportion of Brazilians. With the World Cup looming in 2014 it’s hard not to think of Portuguese as the obvious next step.

For now though, the focus is firmly on Japan.

“This is a great offer for all Bundesliga fans in Japan,” says Hiroshi Kiyotake, of 1. FC Nürnberg and the Japanese national team. “It gives us the opportunity to be much closer to our fans in our home country in the future.”