The advent of social media has changed our lives over the past decade, but one of the biggest changes has come in how we consume sport.

Sports fans – particularly millennials – tend to have a second screen close to hand when watching a sporting event. People want to follow what other people are saying on social media; they want the best reaction, the best jokes and analysis, but they also don’t want to miss anything.

And so now that Twitter are buying up rights to sporting events left, right and centre, it looks like it’s time for Facebook to act. And their reaction seems to be to try to find well-known, well-followed companies and personalities to create bespoke video for their Facebook Live streaming feature. And, as the Wall Street Journal report, they’ve started to pay football clubs – like Barcelona and Manchester City – to create content for their club Facebook accounts.

Why, you might ask, are Facebook paying football clubs to do something any savvy sports team would be doing already? After all, if the last decade has taught the world of sport anything, it’s that digital revolutions are real and technological advancements should be jumped upon as a matter of importance. And it’s also a pittance compared to what top football clubs earn from most other ventures.

But whilst pretty much every football club has been using Facebook to connect with fans, they’ve been finding it difficult to adapt it to Facebook Live.

For one thing, the very careful and polished way in which football clubs present their players to the media these days is at odds with the idea of a live broadcast. Certainly, live broadcasts in any setting other than the ones they’re used to – live games, obviously, but also press conferences, post-match interviews etc.

But the world is changing again. Fans want to consume content around their club all the time, so what kind of content are the clubs creating with their newly found, Facebook bestowed riches?

Well there are two examples below of how Man City and Barcelona are using Facebook live in a way that ensures that there is some value to the content being live – rather than pre-recorded – but which will still be relevant afterwards to watch back again.

The first is Manchester City’s social media team presenting some reaction to the club’s pre-season tour of China and their match against Borussia Dortmund.

The second is Barcelona’s live stream of their team warming up to play Celtic in Dublin at the weekend.

In some ways, this shows that there are fans of a football club who will consume any content the club has to offer, especially when it comes to Barcelona’s unannotated, seven minute-long video of their players’ pre-game warm up on the pitch. One million people watched the stream, which seems to point more towards the novelty of Barcelona using Facebook live than the quality of the content.

Whilst live streaming and the fairly recent addition of the trending feature suggest that Facebook is moving towards a more real-time approach, when the novelty factor wears off, are many people really going to watch a live stream of players warming up? Or are they going to be happier to wait until the end of the match before logging onto Facebook to find the club’s official account live-streaming post-game analysis? Surely City’s approach adds more to a fan’s experience of the game than Barcelona’s?

There may come a point when Facebook has to accept that Twitter has created a platform where people react in real time, whilst Facebook has an audience that uses its platform in a completely different way.