Just occasionally I write about politics and football, and so it is that today I bring you a fascinating section in Tony Blair’s new memoir where he discusses agonising over whether or not to sack Gordon Brown and he recounts a conversation – actually, the implication is repeated conversations – with Sir Alex Ferguson:
…there is a crucial difference between political management and running, say, a company or a football team. A conversation I used to have with Alex Ferguson pinpointed this. ‘What would you do if you had a really difficult but brilliant player causing you problems?’ I would ask. ‘Get rid of them’ he would reply. ‘And supposing after you got rid of them they were still in the dressing room, and in the squad?’ I would say. ‘That would be a different matter’ he would reply, laughing.
Blair’s conclusion, of course, was that football and politics are different, and that it was better to keep Brown in the team rather than sacking him. And we all know what happened next: resignations, and relegation.
I can’t help but wonder what Sir Alex would have done if he’d been in Blair’s position.
I’m betting he’d have sacked Brown, let him stew in the reserves (ie back benches) and arranged for a transfer to the SNP.
Ask David Beckham, Jaap Stam, Ruud Van Nistelrooy, Andrei Kanchelskis, Paul Ince, Gordon Strachan and Mark Hughes – to name a few.
Tony Blair’s memoir, ‘A Journey’, is published by Hutchinson.
A new football season has kicked off and, for a moment at least, optimism is all around as every club and every fan starts the new campaign with dreams of glory. At the same time, a host of sponsors – some familiar, but many of them new to football this season – begin their journeys too. So, in the time-honoured manner of early season previews, let’s take a look at some of the sponsorships, sponsors and trends to look out for.
England – this space for sale.
The England team has of course started the season without a team sponsor, the FA having so far failed to find a replacement for Nationwide in the wake of England’s disastrous World Cup. It will be interesting to see how long it takes the FA to fill the gap and which company comes on board to partner a team, manager and organisation with, for the time being at least, a lot of on- and off- field baggage.
England 2018?
Everybody remembers where they were when London won the IOC vote to stage the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Will we all look back on 2 December 2010 in the same way? That is of course the day when we’ll find out whether the dream scenario of a 2018 World Cup in England will follow London 2012 and RWC 2015. Whichever way the FIFA vote goes, it will have a defining effect on the zeitgeist of this season – and many seasons to come if it goes the right way. Let’s hope it does.
Rise of the New Red Corporates
Manchester United and Liverpool start this season with new shirt sponsors, Aon and Standard Chartered respectively. Both are primarily corporate sponsorships focused on driving awareness, in particular among the clubs’ Far East fan bases. But both will need to do more than use the sponsorships as ‘walking billboards’ (as the CEO of one was quoted the other day) to drive credibility and relevance in the UK, particularly – being financial brands – against the background of the two clubs’ debt issues. To compare in parallel how Aon and Standard Chartered approach the challenge, particularly in the first, critical year, will be well worth watching.
This season will be Barclays’ seventh as Premiership title sponsors, and I’ll be interested to see how their positioning evolves. Against the background of the banking category’s image problems and the less desirable financial elements of the Premiership – debt and runaway wages – this is a tough job. But to me Barclays’ ‘bringing fans closer to football’ positioning looks increasingly generic and much in need of a more differentiating and resonant point of view.
Spurs – one becomes two
Spurs’ new strategy of having two shirt sponsors – one for Premiership matches, and one for Cup games – has been the big early season sponsorship story, with many observers hailing it as a positive move. I’m not so sure. Whilst there’s no doubt it’s worked for Spurs’ balance sheet – getting them to the financial number they needed, but couldn’t find, from one sponsor – for sponsors and sponsorship I believe it’s a backward step, because it takes sponsorship back to being all about media-led visibility rather than experience-led engagement. And the jury is still very much out as to how Spurs fans will react to another shirt with another sponsor. Watch this space.
Social Football
The 2009/10 domestic football season was the first in which social media really started to make an impact on the football brand landscape, and this trend continued around the World Cup, with even FIFA President Sepp Blatter getting into the act in person on Twitter. Although, sadly, I doubt that we’ll see other top figures from English football officialdom following suit anytime soon, the continuing and inexorable rise of social media to the top table of football marketing strategy is the trend to watch this season, and if you’re a brand in football without a social media strategy and presence, you need one – fast.
This article was first published in the July/August 2010 edition of Platform
As I’ve written here before, since sports marketing got serious twenty years ago, one of the industry’s most important trends has been NPD. Inspired by the Premier League and the UEFA Champions League, both launched in the early 90s, every sport has created new or re-packaged events and formats in search of the same success. Some work, some don’t, but the dynamic continually creates new opportunities for sponsors.
When I first heard about the football 4 Nations tournament a couple of years ago I really liked it, and I still do. In case you haven’t heard about the 4 Nations, it’s a new biennial football tournament, starting in 2011, to be contested by the national teams of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Carling were unveiled today as title sponsors.
Here are my 4 reasons why I welcome the 4 Nations and believe that it will be a success.
1. It’s based on a similar template to rugby’s RBS 6 Nations, which is one of the great events in the sporting calendar because it taps into the rivalry between the four home nations – as well, of course, as France and Italy.
2. It represents a welcome antidote to one of the curses of international football, and indeed modern sport, meaningless matches. The 4 Nations will have meaning.
3. All four countries will have a title to play for regularly on the international stage, something they don’t have right now – and will want to win it.
4. Because of all of the above, I believe the fans will embrace it.
Success isn’t guaranteed of course: there are challenges to be overcome. The tournament will take time to build its identity, profile and meaning, which will need skilful promotion by its stakeholders, particularly given the two month gap between rounds of matches. Most importantly, the teams will need to field the strongest players: nothing turns fans off more quickly than an inferior product.
But if those challenges can be overcome, I believe the 4 Nations will be a resounding success.
And if it is, maybe, just maybe, England will in time want to join in too, and (if the Irish, Scots and Welsh let them in!) we’ll see the return of the Home Internationals tournament, which fans of a slightly older vintage (such as myself) loved so much when we were kids in the 70s – because of moments like this…
With the Premier League season just a matter of days away, fans such as myself start to feel excited towards football again (no burn out here Galer!) After being let down as an England fan (again) this summer in South Africa, until Monday the thought of a good season for my club (Aston Villa) was an exciting prospect.
Last season I thoroughly enjoyed seeing Spurs pip Man City to fourth spot and it was hugely satisfying, as a Villa fan, to see Gareth Barry miss out on Champions League football. The 2010/2011 campaign should be another fantastic Premier League season as a host of clubs continue to close the gap on the so called “big four”, in fact I’d say with the depth of Man City’s pockets we really should be referring to it as a “big five” and, in fact, the odds at Betfair agree. For the first time in Premier League history five teams (Chelsea, Man Utd, Man City, Arsenal and Liverpool) are all 15/1 or shorter to win the Premier League title, suggesting that the title is most definitely a five horse race.
This Premier League first led to a fantastic Betfair event at Kempton Park on Thursday 5th August 2010 when five legends from the aforementioned clubs took part in the Betfair Five Horse Race. Yes, five ex-footballers agreed to jump on horses and race each other over one furlong and what a race it was! The ex-players vying to be first past the post were Ray Parlour, a Premier League and FA Cup winner with Arsenal, Chelsea’s second all-time leading goalscorer Kerry Dixon, ex-Liverpool hard-man Neil ‘Razor’ Ruddock, Steve Lomas, the combative midfielder formerly of Manchester City, and David May, a Champions League winner with Manchester United.
Prior to the event Neil Ruddock weighed in at a worrying weight and Ray Parlour was introduced to his horse, cheekily named after the current Gunners boss, Arsene Wenger. The Synergy and Betfair teams were met at Kempton Racecourse by glorious sunshine after a morning of training for the legends that saw David May flung to the floor and Steve Lomas emerge as the early favourite. Kitted out in club colours and full riding clobber the former stars took to riding like ducks to water and the race was eventually won by… well you can watch below.
Following a recent brainstorm here at Synergy, I asked myself a quick, but thought-provoking question:
Are the football fans of England suffering from ‘burnout’?
Burnout, for those who don’t know is: ‘a psychological term for the experience of long-term exhaustion and diminished interest.’ More common in younger sportsmen and women, burnout will occur if excessively high expectations are placed on an athlete by teammates or coaches and if the athlete in question is pushed too hard too quickly.
It was obvious, in my humble opinion, that this could well have been the case with the England Football team in South Africa. People can say what they like about their ridiculous salaries and the fact these young men are paid to train and play, but, ‘at the end of the day’ (sorry) these guys are only human and they need a break from work, just like the rest of us.
But is it now the football fans themselves who are starting to suffer from this physical, mental and emotional exhaustion?
So my question is; ‘Is the football-loving UK now suffering from ‘burnout’ following the sheer amount of football we’ve had to endure every day of the summer – and ultimately the depression that followed our hyped up World Cup campaign?’
Well, I guess we’ll find out soon, when the new season starts on August 14th…
With the clock ticking ever closer to 14th August and the first day of the 2010/11 Premier League season, a scan through BBC Sport, then a quick glance at Sky Sports News and there’s still no transfer update for Spurs, or pretty much anyone else for that matter. I somewhat naively didn’t expect it to be as quiet as this; I’d envisaged my team Tottenham Hotspur, fresh from securing their place in the Top Four – along with the rest of the Premier League – to be pursuing anyone who managed a five-yard pass in South Africa, or any player whose name could be heard over the vuvuzela howl.
The reality has been much different. Manchester City, who have embarked on a spending spree a convention of WAGs would have been proud of, have been the exception. The remaining clubs (even Chelsea whose £17 million on Ramires is a comparable drop in the ocean versus summers gone) have exercised a lot more caution with the threat of the recession still ringing in their ears; and a look to the south coast at Portsmouth’s predicament leaves little room for imagination when it comes to the dangers of reckless spending.
The Manchester City piggy bank has been busy
From little Blackpool, preparing themselves to dine with English football’s elite for the very first time, arguably weaker now than when they first secured promotion on a sunny May afternoon at Wembley, right through to Manchester United whose acquisition of a couple of starlets (Smalling and Hernandez) will hardly send tremors around the football world. Reality has well and truly hit home and things are very different. Where once heart ruled the mind in pursuit of “living the dream” (the words of former Leeds chairman Peter Risdale), nearly bankrupting many a club, now it is first and foremost a case of thrift and caution.
Whilst the new squad rules (25 players must be named, including eight home-grown players) mean clubs like Manchester City will have to offload players the calibre of Craig Bellamy, or risk them not even being granted a squad number, and in spite of James Milner’s possible transfer to City pumping £20+ million back into the market, the carefree cheque-signing culture for the vast majority is a distant memory.
Never realised I was such a fan of the common cephalopod mollusc before this week. Turns out I, like half the population and every red-top news editor in the land, love a good octopus – especially one with psychic powers. If there’s one nimble-legged genius seizing all the headlines this week, it ain’t the expected superstars (sic) we might all have predicted in the run-up to this year’s tournament. Not Wayne Rooney (currently sunning it up with Coleen in Barbados), Frank Ribery (dissolved mid-mutiny with the rest of the French team) or Gilardino (you’re only as good as your last World Cup win Alberto).
Nope, clearly our powers of prediction are not world-beating.
Eight arms. Eight predictions. Coincidence? I think not. Paul is good, damn good for a suckered seer, and given the level of attention on him right now, I imagine he’s praying to the bottom of his mussel filled tank that his powers haven’t deserted him at this crucial stage of the tournament.
Paul is definitely ‘da man’, albeit a hard beaked, blue blooded, eight-armed one (technically six arms and two legs but who really cares?), and even better news for us English folk – embarrassed by our team’s recent knock-out 4-1 defeat to Germany – is learning that Paul is not actually German at all. He was born in Weymouth, back in 2006, where he was apparently much more shy on the predicting front. Paul joins other fellow famous Weymoutharians such as painter Sir James Thornhill (big in the 1600s), Strictly Come Dancing’s Karen Hardy and…urmmmm…not all that many other people it turns out.
So that’s two genuine English stars who have emerged late in the day in South Africa’s World Cup:
1. Paul
2. And Yorkshire’s very own Howard Webb who will referee Sunday’s Final; the first Englishman to referee a World Cup Final since Jack Taylor in 1974. Interestingly Holland lost that game 2-1 to West Germany (the signs are not looking all that good for the Dutchies).
Our much-hyped Premiership players may have failed lamentably to emulate the heroes of 1966 but all is clearly not lost.
Paul now resides in Germany’s Oberhausen’s Sea Life Aquarium whom I applaud for their quite brilliant PR campaign. Paul has put the city of Oberhausen (twinned with Middlesbrough) on the map which, as well as the aquarium, also boasts Germany’s biggest shopping centre and Europe’s largest disc-type gasometer. Yep.
Back to Paul. The Times of India reports, “He has eight legs but has never kicked a ball. That, however, hasn’t stopped Paul the octopus from becoming the world’s finest football forecaster.” Spain’s celebrity chef José Andrés has taken octopus off the menu at all of his restaurants until further notice. Brilliant, it’s not just me who loves the little fella. He has well over 70,000 fans on his official Facebook page. He has become an online phenomenon and one of the most talked about topics on the web. The phrases “Paul the Octopus” and “Pulpo”, the Spanish word for octopus, are both currently in the top 10 global trends on Twitter.
However, celebrity fame has come at a price. Paul has made enemies along the way as a result of his predictions and is now enduring death threats on an hourly basis. Most recently he has become the target of bitter Argentinian fans, angry that he predicted their footballing demise, who have been sending seafood recipes to his aquarium. The Spanish government is reportedly ready to step in with Spain’s Prime Minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez stating “I am thinking of sending him a protection team“. Too right. Spain’s World Cup success may depend on it.
Will Paul be right for the eighth time? Are his days really numbered? Roll on Sunday night’s big showdown to find out…
Since FIFA announced its 2007-2014 sponsorship programme, many industry commentators have made much of FIFA’s new, so-called ‘less is more’ approach. It is a Very Good Thing, they say, that whereas the 2006 World Cup had 15 global partners and thus too much clutter, the 2010 edition has only 6 global partners and thus much less clutter. I’ve never been persuaded by this argument, because I don’t think this is how it plays with consumers during the World Cup itself.
Consider, for example, what consumers see on the TV interview backdrops behind players and officials during the World Cup right now – illustrated in the still below (from the halcyon days before England played Germany on June 27). Call me old-fashioned, but I count 20 different brand logos.
Yes, I know that the logos of the 6 global ‘FIFA Partners’ are bigger than those of the 8 second-tier ‘World Cup Sponsors’, whose logos are in turn bigger than those of the 6 ‘National Supporters’. I know that the rights packages vary widely between tiers too. But I still count 20 logos. And that’s what the consumer sees. Not too different, then, from the 2006 World Cup, where there were 15 global partners and 6 ‘National Partners’. A difference, to be precise, of one less sponsor.
Consider too, Frank Lampard’s disallowed goal in the England v Germany match, surely destined to be one of the most replayed football moments of all time around the world. Brilliant news for the 6 FIFA global partners then. Except it wasn’t. Because the brands whose logos were on display at that moment on the perimeter ads behind the goal, and who’ll be in shot forever, were MTN and Seara – as you see below.
Contrast this with the UEFA Champions League, which in the modern era remains the examplar of ‘less is more’. Only six brands are official Champions League partners, and that’s what you see when it comes to the TV interview backdrops – again, as illustrated in the screen grab below of Sir Alex Ferguson in post-match interview mode last season – and on the main televised perimeter ad positions.
One of the many things I love about social media is the way it enables us to re-imagine how we use old media. This year I’ve seen Nike do this brilliantly twice – first in Vancouver during the Olympics, and now in Johannesburg for the World Cup – using the same technique of integrating social media with giant outdoor spectacular ads to create ’socialised spectaculars’.
In Vancouver, as part of its ‘Force Fate’ campaign, Nike leveraged Canadian hockey fervour and its sponsorship of the Canadian hockey team, by inviting fans through Facebook to create their own inspirational ads featuring their favourite player , and then running giant projections of them onto the Sears Building on Robson Street in downtown Vancouver throughout the Olympics. Here are a couple of pictures I took of the executions.
They became a must-show for Canadian TV and a must-see, must-photograph and a must-share for fans – Nike took pictures of the projections and sent them to the people who created them so that they could share with their friends. Does it get any more social than that?
Four months later and 10,000 miles away in Johannesburg, Nike has repeated the trick at the World Cup as part of their ‘Write The Future’ campaign, but made it bigger in every way.
‘Write The Headline’ has global appeal by featuring Nike’s stable of football icons from around the world. The social media element is much broader too – fans can get involved through Twitter (#writethefuture), QQ (a Chinese chat programme) and Mxit (a South African IM app) as well as Facebook. And the ad is state-of-the-art – a dynamic LED installation that dominates the Southern Life building which towers over Johannesburg and can be seen for miles. Up to 100 headlines are selected each night and transformed into player animations, and when a fan’s message is used Nike sends them the animation.
The Vancouver Olympics and the 2010 World Cup have been watershed events in the evolution of sports and entertainment marketing strategy in the digital era, as new technologies enable increasingly compelling ways for brands to engage fans following these events, and living their lives, simultaneously online and off line. A fascinating feature of this has been the rise of the iPhone app that, out of nowhere, becomes a cult phenomenon around mega events.
But I’m betting that the World Cup’s left-field equivalent of the Vancouver cowbell app phenomenon will be the vuvuzela. Unknown to the wider world unfamiliar with South African football, the sound of the vuvuzela will be a defining feature of this World Cup, and one I’m sure fans around the world will want to download and share. There are already six vuvuzuela apps out there, each backed by some smart marketing, in particular by Aculocity, developers of the Virtual Vuvuzela app. Try Tweeting ‘vuvuzela’ and you’ll see what I mean.
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