Whilst transferring over my old blog on to here, I found these two images from September. Stunning shots from the UCI Road World Champs of Britain’s two cycling legends.. Cav and Wiggo. Beautiful.

Cycling is really going to go places in the UK over the next 5 years - no doubt using Olympic success (touch wood) as a spring board.

Much was made in the summer of Barcelona’s decision to break the club’s life-long tradition to not have a shirt sponsor; but just along the coast, their neighbours Valencia have been making the headlines recently for quite the opposite reason.

With the recession hitting Spain particularly hard, Los Che have been unable to find a sponsor for the season. And so, when the two clubs took to the field for their much-anticipated clash at the Mestalla last week, the Valencianistas did so with the club’s twitter handle adorning the front of their shirt. It is certainly an interesting tactic, and one suspects that many clubs around Europe will be keeping an eye on how it develops.

Of course, it is easy enough to set up a social media presence that will create a certain level of engagement, but the next step – promoting this presence to a larger public to gain wider buy-in - is typically a lot harder to achieve. But with this step, Valencia have certainly taken a bold step towards trying to achieve it.

But where sport (and football in particular) has a significant advantage over the business norm, is that fans actively want to become engaged with the club. They have a loyalty to a particular brand that is unique to sport. In a time when fans have never felt more isolated from their clubs and the players they idolise, clubs have been staggeringly slow on the uptake when it comes to social media. And when clubs have taken the ‘risk’, it is usually behind the safety of a membership firewall (deeming the whole process useless)

But digital is sure to grow in importance over the next few years, and its influence in re-engaging with fans, is sure to be crucial. In the lower echelons of the game, digital will no doubt be invaluable in gaining buy-in from fans unable to afford and attend premier league matches – the ‘Football First generation.’ There has been a trend in non-league circles recently to re-personalise clubs and to return to the days of milkmen and postmen. (There’s always a postman in non-league FA Cup exploits!) in order tfly in the face of the ever-increasingly commercial and out-of-touch professional game. With digital a key tool to achieve this, one wonders how long it will be before we see twitter handles adorning the back of players shirts, and not their surnames?