Professor Xiong featured in 'The London Standard' on transforming fan economy

Professor Xiong has been featured in The London Standard, one of the UK's most influential newspapers with a strong presence across London's business, culture and political spheres, in a major article examining the radical transformation of how fans engage with entertainment, sports and culture.

Published in the Business section on 12 February, 2026, the piece titled 'How the fan economy is making everyone a winner' explores a fundamental shift reshaping industries from football to music: the evolution from transactional consumption to participation-based value creation.

At the heart of the feature is Professor Xiong's central thesis that the future of fandom is not exposure-driven, but participation-driven. The article examines how social media platforms have historically captured the lion's share of value in the creator economy, algorithmically controlling visibility and treating fans largely as traffic. That model, Professor Xiong argues, is giving way to something far more significant.

The emerging paradigm centres on what Professor Xiong terms 'interoperable engagement infrastructure', systems where clubs and creators interact directly with their communities, rewarding sustained participation rather than one-off transactions. This represents a structural shift where loyalty becomes measurable, participation unlockable, access programmable, and fan identity mapped to real economic value.

The evidence of this transformation spans multiple sectors. In football, commercial revenue has emerged as the dominant growth engine. Major music labels are investing heavily in 'superfan' platforms. Across industries, organisations are prioritizing long-term cumulative behaviour over short-term hype cycles, recognizing that sustained engagement generates more value than viral moments.

Professor Xiong characterises this new era with three defining principles: fans are members, not metrics; engagement is capital; and participation is value. This framework challenges conventional approaches to audience development and points toward a future where digital communities function as economic ecosystems in their own right.

The feature positions Professor Xiong at the forefront of thinking about digital communities and the creator economy, highlighting ongoing work with leading clubs, platforms and institutions to build scalable, data-driven frameworks for the next generation of digital trust and community economics. The article underscores growing recognition among industry leaders that understanding and harnessing participation-based engagement will be critical to success in an increasingly competitive attention economy.