Betfair is constantly pushing the envelope to find innovative ways of using their sponsorship assets. Whether that is quirky player challenges to capitalise on the sporting agenda, a ten pin bowling viral showcasing Betfair’s mobile offering (see video below), or a pioneering deal to place QR codes on GB’s beach volleyball players’ bottoms at the London 2012 Test Event, the emphasis is on doing things differently.
Bringing a fresh approach to sponsorship activation comes naturally for a company founded and driven by innovation. Another pillar of Betfair’s marketing philosophy is to ‘live and breathe social’ – as outlined by Betfair’s Head of Online Marketing, Ben Carter (@bensaint). Social is not treated as an add-on to marketing activity, but is put at the heart of campaigns. As a sponsor of Manchester United, with their 21m+ Facebook likes, it makes sense for Betfair to engage the club’s fanbase through social channels.
So what did Synergy suggest when given a couple of hours’ access to some Manchester United players on an (inevitably) wet January afternoon in Manchester? Stage a live Q&A with United players on Betfair’s Facebook page, giving fans the chance to interact with their idols by submitting questions or posting comments during the live broadcast via Facebook and Twitter.
Working alongside Betfair’s in-house production team, real-time broadcast experts Livestream, and MUTV, we helped deliver Betfair presents Man Utd live - an exclusive 30 minute programme hosted by TV presenter Rachel Brookes and featuring Michael Carrick, Ashley Young and Nani. Supporters were able to watch the action by simply ‘liking’ the Betfair Facebook page, and could submit questions or comments by tweeting @BetfairSports with the #MUlive hashtag.
Once again, doing things differently paid off. Over 40,000 people tuned in to watch, close to 1,000 questions were received during the broadcast, and tweets of the #MULive hashtag reached over 3.8 million people (source: Tweetreach). Synergy’s PR team managed the external pre-promotion through football blogs and forums, and the post-event syndication of content and quotes to key media targets, resulting in over 100 pieces of online coverage. Quotes featured in three national print newspapers, and branded footage was included in ITV Granada Reports in the build up to the weekend’s game against Arsenal.
What else did we learn from our inaugural live interactive Facebook broadcast? For a start that Nani regularly gets the hairdryer treatment from Sir Alex. For more insights, you’ll have to watch the webcast for yourself….
The new adidas f50 miCoach is the first ‘boot with a brain’. The new boot integrates a miCoach Speed Cell into a cavity in the sole which captures and records 360 degree movements and key personal performance metrics.
The boots capture data including speed, average speed, maximum speed, number of sprints, distance, distance at high intensity levels and active training time, which it then transmits to tablets, PCs and Macs using a wireless link.
The miCoach internet platform allows players to upload, track, analyse and share their miCoach data. Once the sole preserve of sophisticated GPS systems, this allows any park player to monitor their performance, identify areas of improvement and compare their stats to those of their mates, teammates and the real professionals.
And as each player improves their performance on the real pitch, they reap the benefits on the virtual one. ‘Avatars’ (virtual personas) take part in a new social football video game – and the only way to build your avatar’s skills and level up is by doing the work in the real world. ‘Gamification‘ is a great way to engage this target audience and adidas have nailed it.
This is the biggest innovation in football boots since adidas launched the Predator. But, with its integrated digital and social elements, this will have a far broader and deeper impact.
For the first time, it gives every player the ability to analyse their own performance, track improvements and compare themselves to not only their mates, but also some of the greatest players on the planet. It is this integration of both professional and amateur players and an accessible, easy-to-use platform, which incorporates social media, that creates a truly unique and engaging brand experience for the consumer.
By putting ‘performance’ at the core, adidas enhances their positioning as the world’s leading performance brand. No matter what your ability level is from occasional 5-a-side player to Lionel Messi, there is always room for improvement and adi will help you get there.
This ‘boot with a brain’ creates engaging content and puts adidas at the centre of a global dialogue around performance. It has brought together football’s elite level with its grassroots in a way that pushes the thought that adidas enables you to be the best you can be.
What the brand says
The adidas vice president of global football, Markus Baumann, says ‘We have been working to develop a boot with a brain for some time and what we have produced will revolutionise the football industry.’ He goes on to say ‘What makes the boot unique is that for the first time you will be able to compare yourself to some of the best players in the world.’
However, this summer I made a new, and even more exciting, discovery – @Joey7Barton. With Barton’s tweet that “somewhere in those high echelons of NUFC, they have decided, I am persona non grata” attracting significant media coverage (in fairness, more for the revelation that Newcastle United were letting him go, than the flowery language), I was lured into his Twitter world. There I found Joseph Barton, the footballer philosopher, offering up daily quotes from Nietzsche, lyrical poetry from The Smiths, and reviews of his trips to London museums.
Surely this wasn’t the same player I’d seen drag Gervinho off the floor by the scruff of his neck during the first game of the Premier League season at Newcastle? And yet, whilst the red mist is still prone to descend, the rehabilitation of Joey Barton is in full swing, helped in no small part by his ability to create his own brand on Twitter. Yes, many remain if not unconvinced then at least a bit confused by his culture vulture social media persona, but there’s no doubt that without Twitter, he wouldn’t have been able to convey it to the world as he has done.
Of course, the phenomenon of sports, and in particular football, stars as brands in their own right is by no means a feature borne of the Twitter age. Remember, Twitter is only five years old, younger than brand Beckham and younger still than Gazza, Kevin Keegan and George Best. Indeed, footballers have been commercial entities in their own right for years (and see this amusing history of their attempts to cash in on this).
George Best lends his name to Best Potato Crisps
And yet I do believe that Twitter has brought something new to the party. It gives footballers a way to convey to the world who they want to be, no longer restricting their public image to that carefully defined by their club and publicist, or by the tabloid headlines. Whilst these were the channels through which a footballer’s brand would be built in the past, players are now able, in at least some small way, to bypass them, possibly defying an image crafted by a PR, or using Twitter to defend the on and off the field transgressions reported in the papers.
But whilst I may love the fact that Twitter allows footballers and famous individuals to talk directly to me (and, I accept, their thousands, or indeed millions, of other followers), the interesting question is whether using Twitter can significantly build a commercially successful personal brand. Will it impact upon the value and nature of sponsorship deals and endorsements? At the moment, not really. Nike terminated its boot contract with Joey Barton in 2008 after he was imprisoned for assault, and the deals have not exactly been forthcoming since then.
Twitter might be a good place to start building your brand (and a forum for – declared – advertising by celebrities), but it is most definitely not where it ends. A Twitter personality is still only one small element of a footballer’s commercial arsenal; the money follows skills on the pitch, good looks, big clubs and to a certain extent, the ability to stay out of trouble (though brands have shown themselves willing to stick by big names even when scandal has descended in the past).
However, that is certainly not to say that footballers should stop tweeting – mainly because without Joey Barton’s philosophical gems my days would most definitely be that little bit worse! Click here for a fun infographic of sports stars on Twitter, and try the following for some insights/hilarity from some of our favourite footballers:
It’s 20 years since the Premier League was launched and to mark the occasion, we’ve put together an infographic suitably laced with factoids illustrating the League’s journey from domestic breakaway to global superpower.
Having worked on sponsorships in and around the League since its inception, it’s been an extraordinary journey both to have witnessed and to have been part of. The incredible transformation on and, above all, off the field is what I hope we’ve captured.
Off the field, my personal favourite factoids are the League having no title sponsor in its first season (owing to disagreements between the clubs) and the staggering 9900% rise in Manchester United’s annual shirt sponsorship income, from Sharp’s £200k endorsement in 1992 to today’s £20m Aon deal.
On the field, it has to be United’s dominance of the title (which of course has driven their off-field success), the proliferation of overseas players, from a mere 11 in 1992 to 337 last season, and the perfect symmetry of the 11 current and 11 former clubs who featured in the inaugural 22-club Premier League (great quiz question by the way).
Like the vast majority of sports fans watching the events unfold at Royal St George’s, I found myself willing a Darren Clarke victory – this despite a fairly uneducated £5 pre-tournament punt on Phil Mickelson. The emotional pull of seeing a people’s champion claim the Claret Jug was stronger than the rational tug of reversing my losing streak on Betfair. Sport has a particular ability to evoke strong emotions through its personal stories of courage, inspiration and determination, through its inherent unpredictability, excitement and drama.
Those emotions are an essential component of successful sponsorship – and are as relevant across other sponsorship platforms (music, film, fashion, art) as they are in sport. How often do we hear rights holders, brands and sponsorship agencies (guilty as charged) talk of ‘engaging consumers through their passion points’ to justify sponsorship investments? It has become the de facto rationale. But what substantiates that principle, and are sponsors embracing it to make a genuine connection with consumers?
Shared Passions
The stated ambition of many sponsors is to create that emotional connection with their target audience through a shared passion. The theory goes that an emotionally engaged audience – whether they are football fanatics, art lovers, bog snorkelling aficionados, or Gaga’s ‘little monsters’ – is an audience that will be more receptive to brand messages, and more likely to think positively about a brand associated with their passion.
Sound thinking or codswallop? Well, there is plenty of research supporting the notion that the higher a consumer’s emotional engagement with an event, the more effective their recall of sponsors. If you want proof, just read Bal, Pascale and Plewa’s research study in the Sept 2009 Journal of Sponsorship (Volume 2, Number 4). Or take my word for it. Their analysis of the emotional response elicited by a sponsorship event confirmed what we would probably all take as read – that ‘positive sport-related emotions contribute to sponsorship efficiency, favouring the recognition of sponsors’. Which makes sense – an emotional experience is more likely to crystallise into memory than an experience without emotion. I remember where I was when Wilkinson dropped THAT goal in 2003 with patriotic emotions riding high, but have no recollection where I watched the 2010 World Cup Final as an impartial observer.
Sponsor Engagement
But how do sponsors get in on the act, and stake a claim to those memories? Being visible within a passion point might increase the chances of being in a consumer’s mind, but it doesn’t win a place in their hearts. There has to be active emotional involvement, not just proximity or visibility. Engagement not impressions. Too many sponsors assume that an increased awareness of their sponsorship, and that magical associative power alone, will alter consumer perceptions. Perimeter boards, media backdrops, shirt sponsorships and the like certainly have a reinforcing role to play, but I’m yet to hear a sponsor say “that perimeter board really helped me emotionally connect with my target audience”. The abundance of advertising we are seeing in the run up to 2012 that says ‘I’m an Olympic sponsor’ is failing to tap into the rich emotional tapestry of the Olympics.
So what should sponsors do to capitalise on their consumers’ emotions beyond just ‘being at the party’? To start with there needs to be some sense of brand relevance to the passion point. How else can a brand claim to ‘share’ that passion? Authenticity could be driven by brand characteristics, product relevance, company heritage, or geography. Lack relevance, and brands risk looking as incongruous as Budweiser’s relationship with that king of soccer competitions, the FA Cup. The central thought in Neill Duffy’s book Passion Brandingis another worthwhile principle: leverage the relationship between a brand and its consumers around a consumer passion to create value for all involved in the relationship. Sponsors need to think beyond their brand to deliver a benefit for consumers – be that entertaining content, a unique experience or simply a memorable emotional pay-off.
Many brands are successfully engaging consumers on an emotional level, in a relevant passion point, and contributing to their enjoyment of that passion. Some capitalise on a moment of high emotion, some tap into the core emotional sensibility of the passion point. Whether anchored in anticipation, pride, patriotism or celebration, they all exhibit genuine empathy and understanding. A few examples below…
In the build up to the 2006 FIFA World Cup, Carlsberg’s Old Lions campaign tapped into England fans’ anticipation of the tournament through a nostalgic lens and a pitch perfect creation of pub football camaraderie.
Fast forward four years to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, and Coca-Cola’s activation single-mindedly focused on football’s moment of greatest emotion – celebrating a goal. From reliving the greatest celebrations in World Cup history, recording a World Cup celebration song, to touring the FIFA World Cup around the globe, they fuelled fan emotion with the ‘What’s your Celebration’ campaign.
Talking of celebration, O2’s Rugby World Cup victory parade in 2003 gave rugby fans the opportunity to express their support, their joy and their pride to the returning heroes. Not only that, O2 armed all England players with mobile cameras to record the experience and share it with consumers, and gave some lucky fans the chance to win a place on the parade bus.
But not all emotional engagement is grounded in joy and positivity. Bupa’s activation of their Great North Run focuses on the participants’ moments of greatest physical and emotional need. The Bupa Boost Zone at the typical ‘low’ point for runners 80% through the race, and at the finish, provides massages, sustenance and music to inspire and re-energise runners.
What next?
Social media is making the emotional engagement opportunities around sponsorship that much more immediate, and much more of a dialogue opportunity. The response to celebratory moments in particular is now fairly instantaneous, and can propel brands to the heart of the emotional moment. Harness the emotions correctly, and your consumers will add the catalyst of conversation. After all, people are more likely to talk about things that illicit an emotional response. As a final plea to sponsors, I defer to Mark Harrison, Chair of the Canadian Sponsorship Forum:
‘You can’t manufacture emotion. It’s already there. When you find it – just find a way to trigger it; tap into it; fuel it; and watch it grow into something remarkable.’
“Same pool rules, same soccer fantasies” says Budweiser as they turned a normally reserved game of pool into a passionate, social nightlife experience for both players and spectators. The concept saw the beer brand setting up 7×3 metre pool tables in various pubs across Buenos Aires inviting teams to go head-to-head as they attempted to kick 15 soccer balls into billiard holes resembling goals.
The various games were also broadcast live via ESPN and Fox Sports, turning the alternative spin on pub football into a viable sporting event.
Why we like it?
Who on earth wouldn’t like this? Bang in the heart of a fun loving, football mad city this is a brilliant fit that knocks straight on the door of the casual sports enthusiast.
Flying it’s way around the viral world, this has caused a big stir with 510,000 views and counting on youtube and like all good campaigns, it has got people talking.
Budweiser’s recent football activity (I will not succumb to calling it “soccer” despite their best attempts) has seen the brand create some really humorous content, playing on the USA “soccer” stereotype. In doing so they’ve taken a playful and different approach, take a look at the video below to see a great example of the tongue in cheek style in action.
Moving away from the traditional route of advertising the physicality of elite sport, this goes straight to the Average Joe who enjoys nothing more than heading down the pub with his mates or spending a night in front of the television watching the football with a few beers. It is an interesting route to take and something that Puma and their “After Hours” promotion has headed along. With London 2012 around the corner, this could be a really clever area for them to call their own.
Although this appears cool and trendy in Buenos Aires, I do have my concerns as to how this game would go down in the “Coach and Horses” on a Saturday night in Scunthorpe but maybe, just maybe we will find out.
Recently I’ve spent a lot of time recalling the history of sports marketing and sponsorship. To start 2011, we ran our poll on the greatest sports marketing innovation of modern times. A few weeks ago the Sport Industry Group asked Dom Curran and I to contribute our memories of the last ten years of sport to help celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Sport Industry Awards, which took place last Wednesday night. And also last Wednesday, I attended Sportcal’s 20 Years of Sport conference, the highlight of which was a tour de force presentation by my old friend Patrick Nally on the origins of the modern sponsorship template which he created, and his view of the future.
Listening to Patrick talk of those early days and his work with Horst Dassler reminded me of one of the most remarkable incidents in the history of sports marketing to date, which took place in those early days, and which I only came across for the first time recently.
Back in 1974, adidas was the kit sponsor of the legendary Dutch national football team led by maestro Johann Cruyff. Leading into the 1974 World Cup, which was marked by financial disputes between players and their federations, Cruyff, who had a personal sponsorship with adidas’ bitter rivals Puma, refused to wear a Dutch shirt with the now-legendary adidas three stripes. Incredibly, the Dutch FA backed down and alowed Cruyff to play in a specially-made kit with only two stripes. Here’s the proof, from Holland’s 1974 World Cup match versus Argentina:
adidas launched what its calling its ‘largest ever brand marketing campaign’ and the first to feature adidas Sport Performance, adidas Originals and adidas Sport Style sub-brands together.
By using a number of their most popular personalities from across sports and culture adidas has created an impressive campaign which leads off with this ad featuring David Beckham, Lionel Messi, Katy Perry, basketball player Derrick Rose, gymnast Louis Smith, the All Blacks, musician B.o.B and top skateboarders including Silas Baxter-Neal. The spot aims to promote the idea that when you love your game, whatever that game may be, you put your all into it.
On top of this they have delivered an integrated campaign using ground breaking 3D projection mapping at the launch and including different TV and online versions of the film.
adidas have used their YouTube channel and Facebook page to seed engaging digital content including some individual films of their ambassadors including Messi and the musician B.o.B. The video was seeded on Messi’s new Facebook page which launched on 7th April and achieved a remarkable 7 million likes in 7 hours. On their campaign website www.adidas.com/areyouin fans of football, skating and music can win prizes and in the US win the chance to feature in their next version of the ad to air during the MTV Movie Awards.
Why we like it?
Rather than a sport specific campaign that we often see from brands such as adidas they have utilised so many of their assets in this campaign and across a wide spectrum of sports and culture from football to skateboarding to Russell Brand‘s missus. The campaign therefore appeals to a huge audience across many different markets. By using the impressive 3D projection at launch and using their various digital channels adidas are showing they are at the forefront of technology, are maximising their assets and are taking their (obviously pricey) ATL campaign many steps further.
What the brand says:
From the campaign press release:
The brand’s largest marketing campaign in history showcases adidas’ distinctive presence across different cultures and lifestyles fusing the world of sports, music and fashion and is the first time the company features adidas Sport Performance, adidas Originals and adidas Sport Style sub-brands in a single campaign.
“Today’s consumers are not one-dimensional,” said Patrik Nilsson, president of adidas America. “They live across the cultural spectrum and that’s where adidas has its edge. The adidas brand extends beyond sports and ‘all adidas’ celebrates this breadth of passion from athletes, musicians, artists and beyond. The new campaign allows us to create stronger, truer connections with the consumer by encouraging and celebrating a mix of interests and passions central to their lives.”
The Twittersphere was buzzing yesterday, and the question everyone was asking was: how can Andy Carroll be worth £35m? The general consensus was that he wasn’t worth that amount of money and that the footballing world had gone crazy.
Maybe the conventional wisdom is correct. But one thing “Moneyball” (in my opinion the best Sports Business book ever written) taught us is to ignore conventional wisdom. Moneyball is about the Oakland A’s baseball team and their General Manager Billy Beane and is currently being turned into a Brad Pitt/Philip Seymour Hoffman movie, due for release later this year:
The basic premise is this: In 2002, the Oakland A’s had the second smallest budget in baseball (around $40m) – less than a quarter of the New York Yankees ($126m). But for the previous 3 years, they had consistently been one of the top four teams (though they hadn’t won a World Series). That is the equivalent of Wolves qualifying for the Champions League for 3 years in a row on their current budget (the A’s didn’t increase their relative budget as a result of their success in the first two years).
The secret to the A’s success was to completely re-think the way they evaluated players. Using a new set of statistical analyses (called Sabermetrics) and throwing out all conventional wisdom, they were able to see that the market for players was hugely inefficient. Some player attributes were highly overrated in terms of their correlation with success, while others were highly undervalued. So the key to running a successful team on a budget was simple:
sell those players who have overrated attributes (for lots of money) and buy players who have the underrated attributes (for much less)
Well first and foremost, John W Henry, the new owner of Liverpool is a convert to Sabermetrics. Many of the techniques used in Sabermetrics came from the financial markets, which is Henry’s background. And when Henry bought the Boston Red Sox in 2003, his first move was to offer Billy Beane a job for a guaranteed $12.5m over 5 years (which he turned down). Nevertheless, he installed Sabermetrics at the Red Sox, who then went on to win multiple World Series.
So Liverpool is now a Sabermetric club with the best brains in the business analysing players’ value. Would they really pay £35m for a player if they didn’t see the value?
And what did that analysis look like?
Success in football is defined by winning points. Given the financial rewards at stake (eg. qualifying for the Champions League), it is relatively easy to calculate the value of each Premier League point. And if points are the asset, then goals are the currency. To quote from Moneyball:
“Before the 2002 season, Paul DePodesta (the A’s sabermatrician) had reduced the coming six months to a maths problem. He judged how many wins it would take to get into the play-offs: 95. He then calculated how many more runs the Oakland A’s would need to score than they allowed to win 95 games: 135. (the idea that there was a stable relationship between season run totals and season wins was another Jamesean (the father of Sabermetrics) discovery)”
It is possible to determine how many goals you need to score in order to acquire your targeted number of points. And therefore, each goal has a value. Before we have any Ossie Ardiles and Kevin Keegan arguments about teams who score lots of goals but don’t necessarily win points, here are the facts:
1) Currently, the top 4 teams in the table are the four teams who have scored the most goals
2) In the seasons 2006/2007, 2007/2008 and 2008/2009 the top four teams in the table were also the teams who scored the most goals
3) The only exception to this rule in the recent past is last season, where Manchester City, who finished 5th, scored more goals than Tottenham, who finished 4th
So, each goal that Carroll contributes can be valued in terms of ‘acquiring’ points.
But how do we determine how many goals he is likely to contribute?
One of the cleverest bits of analysis discussed in Moneyball is the disentangling of the link between what actuallyhappens on the pitch and what is expected to happen. To quote again:
“Any ball hit any place on a baseball field had been hit just that way thousands of times before: the average of all those hits was the Platonic Idea (of an average run value). Call it a line drive that is hit at x trajectory and y speed to point #968. From 10 years worth of data, you can see that there have been 8,642 practically identical hits. You can see that 92% of the time the hit went for a double, 4% for a single and 4% it was caught. Suppose the average value of that event is .50 of a run scored. No matter what actually happened, the system credits the hitter with having generated .50 of a run…”
So let’s apply that to football and Andy Carroll.
The first thing we do is to forget the number of goals he scores and the number of assists he makes (what actually happened) and concentrate on the expected value of his actions on the pitch.
Here are a few examples (by the way, these are all completely made up assumptions but it wouldn’t be too difficult to calculate them):
1) A penalty is scored 79% of the time. Every penalty he wins is worth .79 of a goal (regardless of whether he takes it or even whether it is scored)
2) A goal results from a corner kick 4% of the time. Every corner kick he wins is worth .04 of a goal
3) Divide the pitch up into sectors and calculate the percentage of time a goal is scored from a free kick taken from that sector. If a goal is scored 7% of the time a free kick is taken from sector 4, then every free kick Carroll wins in sector 4 is worth .07 of a goal (and the same for all the other sectors on the pitch)
4) Divide up the goal into 6 sectors (top left, top middle, top right, bottom left, bottom middle and bottom right) and calculate the expected goal value of a shot on target in each of those sectors. If 46% of shots into the top left sector are goals, then award him .46 of a goal for every shot he hits into that sector
5) A successful pass within the opponent’s penalty area results in a goal 8% of the time. Every successful pass he makes in the penalty area gets .08 of a goal
6) Winning a header in the opponents penalty area results in a goal 5% of the time. He is awarded .05 of a goal whenever he wins a header in the opponents area
…and so on
From this type of analysis, we can calculate the expected number of goals Carroll will contribute to Liverpool and we will also know the value of each goal. If that is more than £35m over the course of his contract, then it could represent great value.
Of course, this has been simplified a little bit. The real analysis is the ‘marginal’ impact of Carroll compared to another striker. In other words, how many more goals would he be responsible for than another striker?
And this is where the idea of undervalued attributes comes into play. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that “winning headers in the opponent’s penalty area” is worth more in terms of expected goals than people give it credit for. If Carroll is the “Greek God” of winning headers in the opponent’s penalty area, then he is worth much more than people think he is.
Would we really be surprised if John W Henry’s Sabermatricians have been doing this type of analysis since they bought Liverpool? Maybe they have just sold a player for £50m who has ‘overrated attributes’ and bought one who, even at £35m, is undervalued.
The decision on the future of London’s Olympic Stadium is imminent, with uproar at Tottenham Hotspur’s proposal to demonlish the stadium and build a new one. But London is not the only cosmopolitan metropolis, hungry to host major international events and build a lasting legacy for sport in the community, with a purpose built stadium that might get knocked down after one event. Take Abu Dhabi, and the 5,000-seater stadium in the grounds of the Emirates Palace Hotel, constructed for the sole purpose of staging the first UK domestic rugby fixture ever played overseas. OK, so Wasps v Harlequins in the LV= Cup isn’t quite the Olympics, but the two are linked by club growth ambitions.
While Spurs seek their equivalent of Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium to bring in more matchday revenue, Wasps’ trip to the U.A.E. was apparently all about building the brand. According to former skipper and now Wasps Director Lawrence Dallagio, the idea was to ‘strengthen the club and develop a global brand…while engaging with local schools and rugby clubs in the region’. Hats off Lawrence, and Wasps owner Steve Hayes, for persuading tournament organisers, the Rugby Football Union, Premiership Rugby, Sky Sports, and the IRB to support the iniative. Tournament title sponsors LV= presumably took little persuasion. Anything that brings a bit of attention to an overlooked Carling Cup-esque ‘development tournament’ is a good thing for the title sponsor. For opponents Harlequins – sponsored by Abu Dhabi airline Etihad – agreeing to play ball would have been a no brainer.
So, can the idea be deemed a brand building success? All pre-match billing insisted that the game was far from a mid-season jolly for sun, sea and a seven star hotel, but a serious competitive fixture. The 38-13 scoreline suggested otherwise. Despite a bowling green standard pitch (imported from Panama), both teams badly missed their internationals on RBS 6 Nations duty, meaning the standard was, well, LV= Cup standard. Unsurprising without the likes of Flutey, Worsley, Shaw, or Simpson. Not the ‘Manchester United of Rugby’ image that Lol would have wanted Wasps to project en route to developing a global brand.
What about engaging a new rugby audience? Abu Dhabi isn’t the most obvious target for a Wasps outreach programme, especially with Quins making moves in the region through the Abu Dhabi Harlequins Rugby Club. Based on the stated brand and development criteria, a victory for Quins on and off the pitch. Only a cynic would suggest Hayes and Dallaglio staged the match to bring Wasps to the attention of potential investors and sponsors, but you can imagine their envious glances in the direction of Quin’s Etihad sponsorship.
And amid all this commercialism, what about the fans who missed out on a trip to Adams Park? Wasps season ticket holders were provided with a match ticket and subsidised travel packages. Those that decided Abu Dhabi was a tad too far to travel were offered a match refund AND an invitation to an exclusive open day with the squad at Adams Park later in the season. Given that the match was live on SKY, and of dubious quality, that sounds like a result for the armchair army.
English club rugby has proved adept at borrowing good ideas. Following Stade Francais’s lead of staging key matches at bigger venues – for Stade de France read Twickenham or Wembley – Wasps have now aped American sports in hosting competitve matches overseas. With the NFL staging regular-season games at Wembley Stadium for the last three years and the NBA following suit at The O2 this March, the definition of a ‘home’ fixture is stretching. Where football failed with their proposals for a 39th game in overseas markets, rugby has delivered the goods. But if the intention really is building a the brand and encouraging grassroots rugby, let’s see an Aviva Premiership match, with full strength squads, in a truly developing rugby nation like Russia or Portugal. Oh, and make sure the stadium has a clock and scoreboard.
As for the future prosperity of Wasps, the performance of 18 year old Billy Vunipola, a 20 stone Harrow schoolboy wearing the No. 8 shirt made famous by Dallaglio, suggests that their prospecting closer to home has hit a rich vein.
Find us on Google maps
