TikTok Dances Into First Asian Sports Partnership with the J.League

TikTok has struck a content partnership deal with the J.League, Japan’s top-flight football league.

The collaboration is part of an engagement strategy to ramp up the league’s popularity with Gen Z, and will see the short-form social video platform launch three ‘hashtag challenges’ during the ongoing season. These will be designed to encourage fans to share content based on their J.League match-day experience.

The agreement with TikTok coincides with the J.League loosening up its social media regulations to allow fans at games to post content from inside stadiums.

“TikTok has a lot of Generation Z users, which is a segment we especially want to reach,” J.League chairman Yoshikazu Nonomura said during a press conference.

“Our hope is that through this partnership they’ll learn about the league and our clubs, come to the stadium, watch games and grow an interest in soccer.”

These initiatives are landing at the same time as a fan-centric J.League survey revealed that the percentage of fans under the age of 30 has dropped to 22.1%. 

TikTok, obviously popular with younger audiences, has around 43% of the its global user base aged between 18 and 24. The social media platform reached 1 billion active users last year, with its ‘soccer’ and ‘football’ hashtags drawing more than 510 billion video views. Prior to this deal, TikTok has been busy in the football world in recent years; teaming up with UEFA and CAF for the Euro 2020 tournament and 2022 Africa Cup of Nations respectively. 

Outside of football, it has partnered with the Six Nations rugby tournament in Europe, Extreme-E (the off-road spin-off of Formula E)

Meanwhile, J.League has also plunged into the NFT world earlier this year, teaming up with Rakuten, on a series of tokens featuring original artwork as well as highlight clips, in another bid to engage with a younger demographic.