Copa90 capture the zeitgeist. They are a melting pot of contributors and creatives who live and breathe football on social media and the breadth of content they create shows they get the varied types of media modern fans want to consume.

Digital media is a fast moving space with new trends and fads appearing all the time, but throughout it all there’s a theme – and that’s the fact that while football fans have never been further removed from the huge celebrity stars that make up the sport, they have also never been closer to the game thanks to social media platforms.

That doesn’t just mean closer to the players themselves, many of whom are getting very savvy when it comes to their use of social. It also means other fans, commentators and personalities who add colour to live games and create exciting, interesting or entertaining content which can be consumed at any other time.

This week, Copa90 released a report into ‘The Modern Football Fan’, providing everyone with some of the insight they’ve gleaned from creating content for this very group of avid sports fans and obsessive social media users.

The 83-page PDF (available for download here) goes into great detail about the makeup of this demographic, their impulses and desires and what sets this generation of fans apart from the older generation, who didn’t grow up with smartphones, the internet and – quite crucially according to Copa – games consoles. The publisher surveyed 515 UK fans between the ages of 16-24 for the report, allowing them to understand how attitudes to live games, social media and ‘dark social’ platforms like WhatsApp have changed over the years.

“Modern Football Fans’ virtual and physical football worlds weave back and forth,” say Copa, pointing out that the breadth of knowledge modern fans have of the game of football would simply stun even the most cultured fan of the 1980s. Video games like FIFA and Football Manager gave – and continue to give – young fans growing up a glimpse of the exoticism and romance of the global game, allowing anyone to play as a team from the Spanish second division and lead them to European glory or sign players from anywhere in the world. That creates a network of knowledge around the game: the product of a modern misspent youth.

It gives modern fans an appetite for statistics and for a deeper understanding of football, and that insatiable appetite leads them to look for more and more content to add insight and colour to the game they wish to know more about.

‘Modern Football Fans’ as Copa term them might be what many brands and organisations would term ‘Millennials’ – that cringe-inducing phrase which belies the fact that older generations see younger fans as a foreign breed they are unable to understand. But for anyone reading who simply can’t tell the difference between Instagram and Snapchat, it’s worth paying attention to what creators like Copa90 are saying in order to better understand this new phenomenon.

Today’s football media landscape (because there’s no point calling it a ‘digital’ media landscape anymore) is saturated with content, most of it indistinguishable and adding no real insight. But the modern audience of fans around the world crave original content, interesting points of view and insights that actually bring value and add to their knowledge pool. And when it comes to brands and other organisations who are trying to get involved, they need to understand this, too.

Keeping up with the trends is hard for any organisation or publisher, but staying on your toes is important and that’s never been truer. The makeup of today’s football fans is too complex to simply lump everyone in under the same term, ‘Millennial’. Instead of taking the easy way out, we should be trying to understand and create football coverage that chimes with what a younger audience is expecting from their content.