Bayern Munich opens store on China's biggest e-com platform

BEIJING - Newly crowned German champion Bayern Munich will open a store on China's largest online retail platform when the club announced the cooperation with e-commerce giant Alibaba on Wednesday.

The club, believed to have about 90 million fans in China, will sell jerseys and other products in men's, women's and children's categories in the store that is set up on Tmall, the business-to-customer platform of Alibaba.

As one of the most prestigious clubs in the world, Bayern has sped up its pace to mine China's large soccer market.

In July, the team will also play three friendlies against Inter Milan, Valencia and Chinese champions Guangzhou Evergrande.

Bayern was just one of the top clubs who started to shift their focus to China, a country with 1.3 billion population.

According to a study by Shay Digital Sports in September 2014, 32 European football clubs have established a presence on Sina Weibo, China's equivalent to Twitter. Among these clubs, 10 from the Italian Serie A, seven each from the Bundesliga, Spanish La Liga and English Premier League.

Bayern is the leader in Germany while Schalke has more than 950,000 followers and Borussia Dortmund more than 715,000 for the top three.

And four of the 18 Bundesliga clubs - Bayern Munich, Wolfsburg, Schalke and SV Hamburg - have Chinese language versions of their main websites.

Like Bayern, these clubs don't just make themselves available online. They actually travel to China for pre-season training camps and friendly matches.

Last summer, SV Hamburg and Werder Bremen both spent about a week in China with schedules full of sponsorship meetings, pre-season training, friendly matches against Chinese Super League teams and chances for Chinese fans to see their favorite players live and in person.