The current football craze in the region is providing a boost to the festive retail season, with a predicted peak gross merchandise value of $8.4bn for online retail, compared to $6.5bn in 2021.
When including offline sales, the overlap of the football season with Black Friday will present a massive $70bn opportunity for the retail sector in MENA.
The report found that digital media will take the lead in enabling the opportunity with e-commerce as product discovery is dominated by digital channels. Online searches (69 per cent) were found to be the top channel that respondents plan to use to search for new products during the football season, followed by social media (64 per cent), online customer reviews (63 per cent), and brand/retailer apps (55 per cent).
72 per cent of respondents said they use social media to discover content related to their favourite sport, with 70 per cent saying they expect to consume more short-form video content during the football season.
