It’s been said before that football would be a really well functioning industry if you could just remove the football from the equation. I’ve said it myself. I don’t think it is always appreciated how much the nature of football’s cycle – matches 90 minutes twice a week, transfer windows, breathlessly telling us how everything’s changed, moving from managerial or player changes and gossip – means that panic can emerge at sometimes breakneck speed.
One of the key lessons for me was about knowing when to pay attention to the ‘noise’.
I’ve written about my experiences as a director on the board of the Dons Trust, owners of AFC Wimbledon, and one of factors which was reinforced for me was about knowing when to pay attention to the ‘noise’. The constant stream of comment and content from fans and others about a club is a challenge to everyone, directors, owners, FABs. Football is like a giant goldfish bowl, and it’s always going to be a challenge to know how to deal with that.
Read: Lessons from the front-line of fan engagement: Insights from AFC Wimbledon
https://fanengagement.net/insights-from-afc-wimbledon
One of the more interesting ideas in Public Relations theory and practice is that of ‘Strategic Silence’. In this context, ‘silence’ is defined as “a lack of communication from an organization or its failure to provide clear and adequate responses to questions or concerns raised”, which if you think about it is in itself is something of a problem when questioning whether a response should be the default position.
In this context, responding to a story or issue – whether rumour or fact – is frequently regarded as showing ‘transparency’ (something I’ll come back to), whereas failing to respond means you’re covering something up. Yet acting too quickly – or even at all in some cases – can be a mistake too, risking the disclosure or communication of something misleading or inaccurate (as discussed in the paper, ‘When is silence golden? The use of strategic silence in crisis communication’, by Phuong D. Le and Hui Xun Teo et al.)
This word ‘transparency’ is a hugely loaded and in football, a much misunderstood word. In the Fan Engagement Index transparency is measured, but that’s about the act of publishing the minutes and agendas of meetings taking place, not the facts within them. It is perfectly normal to redact and reserve information from the wider public or particular groups, provided it is in-line with accepted practice or the understanding or if necessary, agreement of those affected. That is why trust matters. It’s also worth pointing out that trust is something that has to be earned and built between groups of people, and why when trust breaks down – as it arguably has more widely in society in recent years – it should concern us all.
The problem now is that we have multiple channels through which to hear what fans think. They can be actual formal processes such as Fans Forums or Fans Parliaments, channels controlled by the club such as social media, the independent media itself, or the various forms of fan-media ranging from very professionalised outfits such as the Anfield Wrap or AFTV, to the fan driven YouTube or TikTok channels that every club now has. On top of that there are still plenty of messageboards, and of course, individual social accounts, and that’s before we even begin to consider the now ubiquitous WhatsApp groups. Setting aside any other channels or forms of noise that I might have missed here, that’s a huge number of places that noise can come from. If you compare that to the pre-internet era where we had in-person or media, with the most immediate being live TV or radio, that’s a huge shift in how we communicate, but moreover, a lifetime away in terms of how much noise is generated.
We only have to look at events involving politics WhatsApp groups that get MPs and officials in serious trouble. But these apps and the hyperspeed of communication that they enable is not going to go away.
As I said previously, when it comes to fan engagement, in an age of interconnectedness at the touch of a button, it’s quite easy to claim that it’s obvious that something is a problem because it exists in our small corner of the world, but the real challenge has to be to know when to pay attention, and when to ignore it, especially when you’re in a position to respond.
One thing that we have to begin to wean ourselves off, or find a way to filter, is the now ubiquitous: ‘All my WhatsApp groups are saying it’ or ‘they’re saying it on social media’. The same applies to the people we sit or stand with, or the media we consume. My advice is always to look beyond it. Are the same talking points springing up elsewhere? Is it isolated in one group, one demographic, your own head? Casting the net wide is more and more difficult in the era we’re in, but for those in football, particularly in fan engagement roles, it is absolutely critical.