BCL
CASE STUDY

download the PDF

The Club-Focused Content Strategy That’s Driving Growth for the BCL and its Teams

Summary

The Basketball Champions League (BCL) is a fast-growing European competition run by FIBA. With fans spanning dozens of countries, the BCL needed a content strategy that could scale and bring clubs along with it.

BCL aimed to enhance its digital presence across the league, not just centrally, but in collaboration with participating clubs. With growing competition for fan attention, BCL wanted to create more compelling, always-on content that could engage fans at both the league and team level.

Enter Rytas Vilnius. The Lithuanian powerhouse embraced WSC Sports’ platform early, turning a league partnership into a club-level content engine. The result: millions of new video views and engagement, proving what’s possible when leagues and clubs share the same playbook.

KEY RESULTS

  • 8M views in 2024–25 vs. 4.2M in 2023–24
  • 91% increase in video views YoY
  • 970K engagements in 2024–25 vs. 741K in 2023–24
  • 31% increase in engagement YoY

These results from Rytas Vilnius are a testament to the success BCL teams have had using the WSC Sports platform. They represent new opportunities for audience growth, sponsor value, and autonomy at the club level.

The Challenge

Ahead of the 2024/25 season, the BCL had two key goals regarding its approach to content strategy:

  1. Elevate its digital presence across platforms. Put simply, they wanted more BCL content in more places, with improved discoverability and availability.
  2. Empower clubs to do the same, but without increasing headcount or workload.

The old way of working made this nearly impossible. Both the league and its clubs lacked the tools to create quality content at scale. Timely storylines were hard to execute and sponsored formats were underutilized.

The Solution

The BCL is a long-term WSC Sports partner, utilizing its AI content technology since 2016. In recent years, the scope has expanded to include new capabilities on the WSC Sports platform and teams within the league. Rather than centralizing content creation and distributing it to the clubs themselves, the BCL chose to equip its clubs with the same suite of content tools that enable faster, smarter, and fully automated creation.

For Rytas Vilnius, that meant:

  • Instant access to searchable game footage and automated highlight creation.
  • Quickly publish tailored content by action, player, team, or storyline, across platforms in any format
  • Custom content formats like “MVP of the Game” and “Play of the Week” — purposely built for sponsor integration

This didn’t just help clubs like Rytas become more efficient; it helped them improve their storytelling, reach their own audiences, and contribute to a stronger league-wide identity.

To hit another core content goal, BCL used WSC Sports to create vertical video highlights for Google Web Stories. This places BCL content front and center in Google Search, so whenever a user searches for a game, a navigable video story appears showing action from live games, and plays directly within Google. This was key to improving the discovery and accessibility of BCL content.

Takeaways

  • League-Club Collaboration = Win-Win

    Providing clubs with the same content tools and playbook as the league fosters collaboration and shared growth. Teams create in their own voice while the BCL amplifies through sharing and collaborative posts, so reach compounds without cannibalization.

    During the 2023/24 season, Rytas published 70 posts using a shared #BCLHighlights tag that generated 500K views and 25K engagements, proving the model.

    The success is already leading BCL to work with additional clubs so they can join the same approach and benefit together, leveraging the power of each brand to grow fandom across the ecosystem.

  • Scale and Monetize Through Automation

    Automation creates inventory and, when used correctly, can have a significant impact. With WSC Sports, sponsor-ready formats in any ratio or duration, complete with branding and graphics, are generated in real-time, enabling teams to scale at speed.

    Rytas produced 84 sponsored posts in 2023/24, utilizing formats such as Player of the Game, Play of the Week, and Top Plays. They were able to tailor it for multiple platforms and deliver it quickly for maximum impact. Other clubs can easily replicate this simple template for sponsored posts and drive revenue growth from content they already own but haven’t optimized.

  • Forget Clipping, Start Creating

    Thanks to WSC Sports, editors no longer spend hours cutting footage. Every on‑court moment is indexed and ready within seconds, so that content teams can focus on ideas, packaging, and distribution.

    This freedom allowed the Rytas content team to try something new. They paired on-court highlights with the stories their audience loves, including pre-game features, behind-the-scenes moments, and fan culture and community posts. The synergy between these post types keeps the Rytas feeds fresh, fun, and relevant, and it all happens without adding headcount.

What we’re trying to achieve at the BCL is growth on many fronts. Of course, we’re focused on the League itself, but where we saw an opportunity is empowering the clubs within, and a key part of this strategy was to attract fans from outside our regular channels. This shared vision and strategy for content has seen both our numbers and those of our teams flourish.

Pierre Raczynski, Communication Lead Basketball Champions League, BCL

Knowing that the league you belong to is also your partner in growth is crucial. Thanks to BCL’s close collaboration with Rytas, and for introducing us early on to game-changing tools like the WSC Sports platform, we’re now able to scale our content operations massively together, without fear of cannibalization. We’re working side-by-side to make sure we all grow together.”

Tomas Kukta, Head of Communications BC Rytas Vilnius