The online world is increasingly the real world. Whether consumption of information or online engagement, it’s a critical part of any club’s activity. We can reach so many people who only used to be reachable via a letter, a programme article or a scratchy tannoy announcement. Yet it’s really only been between ten and fifteen years that digital and social channels have been a thing that clubs have been expected or indeed obliged to have, and there are lots of uses for them, but lots of potential misuse – or mores the point, overuse.
It’s hard to believe that platforms which are now so ubiquitous as tools for communication were once a place where people did little more than post updates about their dinner.
It’s hard to believe that platforms which are now so ubiquitous as tools for communication were once a place where people did little more than post updates about their dinner. Twitter/X arrived in 2007, and Facebook only became a completely open social network from late 2006, three years after MySpace was launched – now a byword for failure that Rupert Murdoch would rather forget. YouTube commenced in 2005, TikTok and Instagram have arrived, and then we have web and other social tools clubs use to broadcast, communicate, engage. And it’s barely ten years since they became fundamental drivers of political and social discourse. Twitter has become ‘X’, helped to fuel Russian disinformation, Facebook has been at the centre of a scandal of epic proportions with Cambridge Analytica, and TikTok and Instagram have been embroiled in their own bullying and mental health related scandals.
All the while, football clubs have gone from a few programme notes once a fortnight to posting structured and frequent video content across multiple channels. It’s got to the stage where some people are referring to clubs as ‘content machines’. Some, including the Financial Times ‘FT Strategies’ arm, state that where Fan Engagement is concerned, ‘…football clubs consider themselves content providers. (And) They need to start acting like it.’ And it’s not the only mention of this. It’s everywhere – ‘clubs are shifting towards becoming media companies’, ‘soccer clubs as media organisations’, and ‘teams have become media companies’.
I’m sceptical about these breathless claims. The reason is that this is to miss the point of a football club, and secondly, also ignores and potentially stores up problems that are only resolvable by human contact and the acknowledgement that football fans are more than just consumers on the other end of the screen. I’m not discounting the much venerated international fan, but ask yourself why those people will spend thousands of pounds travelling to 90 minutes of football when they can? I do understand that if it’s easier to reach millions of ‘fans’ via a viral post and daily updates, bringing the players direct to fans, why wouldn’t you do it? For all fans, though it’s not exactly sharing the no.77 bus to the ground like it used to be, it can be an important tool to break down barriers.
In the past it was a programme (now well on their way out) and the local press and media (or national if you were big enough). Now clubs have their hands on the levers and through their own channels can broadcast what they want, the reliance on others to tell your story has flipped: now the local/external media is more like the programme used to be, and owned social and digital channels more like the media were.
It’s one thing for larger clubs with bigger budgets to pursue digital growth strategies to an international audience that is calling out for it, and we can have an interesting conversation about the conversion rate of these audiences into the kind of ‘fan-customer’ that will actually spend in any meaningful way. But for clubs without the resources aiming to emulate that approach there’s a risk of drawing focus and resources away from other areas just to jump on a trend. After all, those trends are the driver for platforms like TikTok and other content platforms.
The key to any form of communication, whether it’s monetisable or simply communication for its own ends, is to ask who you are communicating with, what message or information and by what means. If you can’t justify it on that basis and it’s just about jumping on a trend, then it’s probably not central, and though not necessarily superfluous, should be seen as optional not a fundamental.
Using a means to tell a group or audience about something doesn’t make you a media company, any more than it makes anyone or anything a content company if that’s not their primary purpose. Ultimately, the primary purpose of every football club on the planet is to put matches on, and if you’re big enough, matches that people come to watch, and which you encourage people to get excited about, along with all the associated paraphernalia.
At a Birkbeck Sports Business lecture I gave recently, I referred to the habit of clubs seeking to ‘defy gravity’; that many of the avoidable problems they have in respect of fans and fan engagement are often the result of a sense of denial of that reality and a focus on the superfluous. We can no less deny the centrality of fans in the importance of a football club than we can gravity itself, and that proper communication, human contact, ‘dialogue’ or whatever you want to call it is – should be – a major focus for every executive and owner. By chasing trends, or producing content because we can, we aren’t necessarily focusing on what’s needed.
We’re still in the midst of an industrial revolution on steroids. What we are living through is the creation of the printing press, the agricultural revolution, plus the industrial revolution, all rolled into one, and happening before our eyes, often behind a screen, and at hyperspeed. To ensure we don’t completely lose sight of reality, it might be worth keeping that in mind.
Picture of a programme seller by the gates at the Memorial Stadium by Steve Daniels, CC BY-SA 2.0