Chinese soccer fans regularly follow matches in the English Premier League. (Photo : www.thefiscaltimes.com)
Current German football champion Bayern Munich is set to open a store in Alibaba’s online retail platform, the club announced on Wednesday.
Bayern Munich, estimated to have around 90 million Chinese fans, will sell jerseys and other products for men's, women's and children's categories in the store to be set up on Tmall, the business-to-customer platform of Alibaba.
One of the most prestigious football clubs in the world, Bayern is poised to profit from China's huge soccer fanbase.
In July, the team will play a friendly match against Chinese Super League (CSL) champions Guangzhou Evergrande.
Bayern is one of several clubs who have started to shift their focus to China, the world's most populous nation with 1.3 billion citizens.
According to a study by Shay Digital Sports in Sept. 2014, 32 European football clubs have set up a presence on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter counterpart. Among these clubs, 10 are from the Italian Serie A, and seven each are from the Bundesliga, Spanish La Liga and English Premier League.
Four of the 18 Bundesliga clubs--Bayern Munich, Wolfsburg, Schalke, and SV Hamburg--also have Chinese language versions of their main websites.
Like Bayern, these clubs don't just make themselves available to Chinese fans online, as they actually travel to China for pre-season training camps and friendly matches, the China Daily said in a report on Wednesday.
In the previous summer, SV Hamburg and Werder Bremen both went on a week-long tour in China, attending sponsorship meetings and conducting pre-season training and friendly matches against CSL teams.
