180 Int. J. Sport Management and Marketing, Vol. 10, Nos. 3/4, 2011 Copyright © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Set the agenda like Beckham: a professional sports league’s use of YouTube to disseminate messages to its users Matthew H. Zimmerman*, Galen E. Clavio and Choong Hoon Lim Indiana University, Indiana University Sport Management, 1025 E. 7th Street, HPER 112, Bloomington, IN 47405-7109, USA E-mail: mahzimme@indiana.edu E-mail: gclavio2@indiana.edu E-mail: limc@indiana.edu *Corresponding author Abstract: The popularity of the video aggregation website YouTube has led some sporting organisations to establish a presence on the site. These can come in the form of channels, web pages that host all of a user’s video clips. Other YouTube users can subscribe to these channels, meaning a channel’s updates appear on a user’s YouTube home page. Among the entities utilising this inexpensive way of disseminating video messages is 16-year-old professional soccer league Major League Soccer (MLS). Researchers examined whether a sport organisation (i.e., MLS) can use such a website to practice agenda-setting through the posting of certain kinds of videos. Results showed that agenda-setting is being accomplished on a small scale, but can potentially be accomplished on a larger scale by using YouTube as if it were a traditional mass medium. Keywords: YouTube; Major League Soccer; MLS; agenda-setting; online video; David Beckham; sport management; marketing. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Zimmerman, M.H., Clavio, G.E. and Lim, C.H. (2011) ‘Set the agenda like Beckham: a professional sports league’s use of YouTube to disseminate messages to its users’, Int. J. Sport Management and Marketing, Vol. 10, Nos. 3/4, pp.180–195. Biographical notes: Matthew H. Zimmerman received his MA at the University of Missouri in 2008. He is currently a PhD student in the Sport Management Program within the Kinesiology Department at Indiana University-Bloomington. His main research interests regard new media effects on fan and sport organisation interactions. He is currently an Associate Instructor and has taught courses in sport marketing, sport finance and sport media production. Galen E. Clavio received his PhD at the Indiana University in 2008. He is an Assistant Professor in the Kinesiology Department at Indiana University-Bloomington. His research focuses on the influence of electronic and new media on the interactions between sport organisations and sport