English football seeks Asian payday When Arsenal walk on to the field at Jakarta's Gelora Bung Karno stadium on Sunday to play the Indonesian national team, it will be a lifetime highlight for Rawindraditya, who like many Indonesians uses just one name. The president of Arsenal's Indonesian Supporters" Association has been lobbying the top flight English club for years to visit this football-crazy nation of 240m people. I kept telling them: you have a lot of supporters in Indonesia. Why don't you come here?" says the 32-year-old. We've already sold 15,000 tickets just to Arsenal fans and I'm so excited. But the tour to Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam is more significant for the club and football's new breed of business-focused executives than for the fans. Several top English Premier League sides are embarking on their biggest ever preseason tours of Asia as they seek alternative revenue streams and commercial deals in what many believe is an under-exploited market. Arsenal last visited Indonesia in 1983. Fellow Premier League sides Chelsea and Liverpool are playing exhibition matches in the country for the first time during this summer's off-season, while Manchester United - a pioneer in organising tours of Asia - is visiting Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand. These extensive club tours highlight a renewed focus on tapping into Asia, which has been accompanied by a spate of new country-based sponsorship agreements with some of the best-known companies in China, Indonesia and beyond. For more than a decade, English football clubs have talked up the potential of the vast Asian market, where incomes are rising rapidly and hundreds of millions support European teams. But it is only in the last couple of years that they have started to take the market seriously and begun to reap the potentially rich rewards, as their managements have become more commercially professional and new European financial rules have increased the pressure to diversify their income streams. "Up until five years ago, the interest in Asia was fairly superficial," says Simon Chadwick, a professor of sports business at Coventry University. Management structures were not well developed and clubs didn't have the market intelligence or the cultural awareness. But much has changed since then and now we're approaching a tipping point. Summer tours will only generate cash from a small section of the English clubs" large Asian fan base. Manchester United, for instance, claims more than 50m followers in Indonesia alone. So clubs are focusing on building their social media presence with local language websites and Twitter feeds and, crucially, signing lucrative sponsorship deals with local brands. "There's a convergence of interest between clubs and commercial partners, like Manchester United and [the Chinese beverage group] Wahaha," says Mr Chadwick. And there's much more of a sense of a value-added partnership than a short-term transaction. In January, Wahaha paid for the right to use Manchester United's name and images in its soft-drink advertising in China. "Chinese people love football, but the quality of Chinese football itself is very poor, so the deal made sense," Zong Qinghou, Wahaha chairman, told the FT. Dessy Masri, who heads the credit card business for Indonesia's Bank Danamon, has seen the transformation first hand. Until 2010, the bank issued Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester United-branded credit cards. But none of the clubs expended much energy on the enterprise, using third-party agents and engaging only sparingly with Danamon, and the business did not take off. Manchester United then took its credit card business in house and since signing a new, exclusive deal with Danamon in 2011, the bank has issued 175,000 branded bank cards and is targeting 200,000 by the end of the year. "The club is really trying to engage with fans in Indonesia and they need us," says Ms Masri, adding that Manchester United card holders are five times more likely to use their debit card than ordinary customers. China Construction Bank, the country's second-largest bank, also announced the launch of a Manchester United credit card this year, the first such sponsorship in China. Other clubs from Everton - which has the Thai beer company Chang as its shirt sponsor - to Tottenham are also vying to break into the vaunted Chinese market. They are creating fan clubs and even scouting for local talent. But Emil Wong, a director with sports marketing group Helios in Shanghai, says that Manchester United, Spain's Barcelona, Italy's AC Milan and, more recently, the European club champions Bayern Munich all have one big thing working in their favour. You have to have on-pitch success. That's universal for any sport," he says. China is definitely a country where most fans are casual, they just go with whoever is winning. The English clubs" professionalism when it comes to business is painfully apparent to Rawindraditya. In his day job, he is a business development manager for Pelita Bandung Raya, a local team in Indonesia's scandal-hit football system, which has been threatened with sanctions by Fifa, the game's global governing body. Arsenal have provided him with an official guidebook on how to develop the supporters" club. And he is helping Nike boost sales of Arsenal's official replica jerseys in a country where the vast majority of people still buy cheap, knock-off versions. "Arsenal are coming for financial reasons, and for the fans," he says, in that order. Additional reporting Simon Rabinovitch in Beijing and Roger Blitz in London