Football's listening problem: Fan Engagement isn’t just marketing

Professor Jim Macnamara’s important 2015 report ‘Creating an ‘architecture of listening’ in organizations: The basis of engagement, trust, healthy democracy, social equity, and business sustainability’ laid out how government, industry and other institutions in Australia, the UK and US struggled with ‘organisational listening.’

Both Listening and Organisational Listening are defined in the report as follows: ‘Listening, in short, is the capacity to discern the underlying habitual character and attitudes of people with whom we communicate, including ourselves, in such a way that, at its best, brings about a sense of shared experience and mutual understanding….Organizational listening is comprised of the culture, policies, structure, processes, resources, skills, technologies and practices applied by an organization to give recognition, acknowledgement, attention, interpretation, understanding, consideration, and response to its stakeholders and publics.’ (P19)

The final project in my Diploma in Public Relations specialised in exactly this area, using Macnamara as the framework, but focusing solely on English football clubs. Titled ‘Why do English football clubs have trouble adhering to a two-way, symmetrical model of communication with their supporters?’ the premise was a simple one: the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrated that clubs overwhelmingly failed the listening test, and instead took a transactional, one-way approach to communications.

All those involved in the study – ranging from supporter activists to CEOs and industry leaders – agreed with the premise. Some were actively trying to do it differently, some were exasperated at the unwillingness of clubs to change, all of those interviewed agreed it should become a priority.

Ever since then, through my work I have set about trying to alter the balance of talking versus listening in football, and have searched for and collaborated with those who think the same, and tried to persuade those who don’t or think otherwise.

The first Fan Engagement Index in 2019 helped to sketch out a basic way to measure whether this is happening, looking at the listening itself (Dialogue), how it should be guaranteed or ‘underpinned’ in some way (Governance), and how it should work its way around the system, ensuring that people could see the impact of it (Transparency). Since my 2017 study and the six Fan Engagement Indexes (the most recent two published this Summer), clubs have demonstrated themselves willing to adopt more progressive models of listening.  The sector is definitely improving, structurally speaking.

League rules have also changed to quite some extent to the point where ‘dialogue’ at least as a method now sits at least as a pretty uncontested expectation for every club. And in terms of the Fan Engagement Index as the primary industry measure, it’s pretty clear that most clubs take it seriously enough and are improving across the board in the structural sense, but structure is only one part of the puzzle. 

Beyond some of the frontline roles or within silos at clubs, football still overwhelmingly pumps out marketing messages to a customer, focusing on the sale.

The problem is that far too many clubs still don’t really know how to incorporate listening into the way they actually operate and make decisions. Beyond some of the frontline roles or within silos at clubs, football still overwhelmingly pump out marketing messages to a customer, focusing on the sale. What’s wrong with that I hear the massed battalions of sports marketing cry? In respect of the business model, it has to, yes, but as I made the point last week in my article about the idea that clubs are now ‘content companies’ (spoiler: they’re not), football clubs are rooted sporting organisations who need to put matches on regularly to a unique group, and that means they need to promote those matches, but also to fund all the infrastructure – including the most expensive, people – to make that possible. That must include listening.

This is where we come up against marketing being the dominant communications function within football and amongst clubs and the industry. My point is about means and ends and how they get mixed up. You need marketing to get interest and sell tickets, streaming passes, develop good commercial partnerships and all that jazz, and you need to be able to get ‘customers’ to buy what you’re selling. But if you forget that at the heart of it are monopoly concerns acting as cartels (leagues and competitions) – football clubs that sit in a geographically and culturally specific place and sector playing in competitions where entry is severely limited – you end up with the conflict that we see regularly with all sorts of things that happen in football, most of all with ticket prices, but in lots of other areas.

I do think that if football clubs & the industry across the board truly understood listening as a fundamental concept, a symptom would be a reduction in price (of tickets).

I’ve always studiously avoided wading into debates about ticket prices, mainly because if I did I’d open up a can of worms that I just don’t have the expertise to spend too much time discussing. However, I do think that if football clubs & the industry across the board truly understood listening as a fundamental concept, a symptom would be a reduction in price.

It’s also worth making the point that there are lots of clubs trying to change things. You only have to look at the Fan Engagement Index and some of the clubs who achieved their awards this year. But they’re often trying to swim against the tide, operating in a very imperfect industry, where too many others prefer the shortcuts. For example apps that promise to make you money from your fans, versus one that helps you listen to fans and that will improve sentiment over time and in all probability, improve the bottom line; or where the dopamine rush of cash up front now is a better option than biding your time in anticipation for a deeper, possibly richer and more lucrative partnership in the future. All of this just because the fullback needs a new contract, the manager wants a bigger budget, or the board has targeted promotion this year. It’s often this short termist thinking that drives things and hinders real change.

If the leadership of football clubs really want to do organisational listening properly, and reduce the conflict that is frequently at the heart of so much that they do (and which often just gets waved away as just being part of how things are, which it’s not), they’re going to have to start investing more – and I mean money, and not putting it on the shoulders of already overstretched staff – into listening functions. They’re going to have to explain why it’s important and valuable, and why it won’t always result in immediate ROI. They are going to have to change how they do things, and that’s going to take all of us – not just the ones who swim against the tide – to want to do it. It’s going to take less on the marketing spend, and more on genuine listening and fan engagement. Is football up for it?  

Download or read a copy of Macnamara’s report Organizational-Listening-Research-Report-16-1

Catch up with the Fan Engagement Index from 2019-2024