Stories live from Madrid; Billion Euro Club Football Brainstorm; Centralised services; Be a football club vs Club as Amazon; Nike's German problem; Farage kills Gazelles; Man Utd are past it
Overthinking the sports business, for money
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Brain dump from Madrid
This week we’re at the inaugural ECA Club Connect event in Madrid.
So I’m writing this from a very nice hotel in the city centre, the venue of the event.
THE BILLION EURO CLUB FOOTBALL BRAINSTORM
Conceit: 2030 rang, the TV rights money tap has been turned off.Â
Result: A billion euro black hole in the football economy impacting every club at every level.
What decisions will we make today to build a robust and sustainable football club of the future?
Is it a hundred small, incremental moves, or is there a big transformational leap forward?
Hilarity ensues - Podcast will be out next week.
The Brainstorm Listicle
Pooling is the new local council
There’s much talk of centralised services to European clubs.
This is a new idea. But really, it’s an old one.
In the early 90s, I was a teacher in a state comprehensive.
The local council did the payroll, the legals, the HR stuff and a few other centralised services.
It made obvious good sense, because each school in the area had the same needs, and cost could be removed from their accounts that could be put in to buying books.
Then the clever talk was of devolvement.
Give individual schools autonomy to make decisions.
Control over their budgets.
The council education department was gutted and the schools took on the cost and the hassle.
Guess what?
It was a shit idea.
Each school became top heavy, money drawn away from the classroom to general management types who were paid over the odds - to reflect the marketplace etc - to do what the council did.
NFL behind the scenes, European madness on the field.
The pooling analogy is part of a bigger discussion.
What if, we broke the US v Europe sports model binary?
Take the best bits of both models.
Centralise services without jeopardising the tribalism that underpins the European product - promotion, relegation, season long narrative, fantastically entertaining mayhem.
Avoid the American franchised closed league bollocks.
Why don’t all police forces drive the same car?
To get to the best of both worlds scenario of 2), there’s a problem to be overcome.
There’s a line between stuff to be share that’s useful and builds the greater whole and stuff that is part of a single club’s competitive advantage - player analytics black boxes, sponsor specific customer data etc.
But what if, the sheer buying power of EVERY EUROPEAN CLUB was maximised for the greater good.
This is a version of the NHS question: drugs would be cheaper for every hospital if they bought them together from a small number of competing suppliers.
Likewise, your police force drives a different car than my police car.
Why don’t they all buy from one supplier? Nationally?
Why? The twisted political dogma of privatisation and its variants.
Instead, every hospital is in competition with each other. Every school is competing against the other.
Football clubs are the same.
What if, they decided where to compete and where not?
The Obvious Barrier
Real world problems undermine my centralised utopia: Big v Small.
The sheer selfishness of club owners and the short memories of small clubs who think they’ve become big because they’ve been promoted to the Premier League.
Be a football club
The brainstorm invited the question, what is a football club in 2024.
Club as Netflix. Invest in Storytelling with a capital S, Ryan Reynolds, Disaporas and Long Tail audiences, Digital content as sponsorship asset, risk mitigation against falling central media rights income.
Club as Amazon. Invest in customer data, personalisation at scale, knock down CRM silos, one customer view, 21st century service of local and global audiences.
Club as Football Club. Win. Win again. Get to the top of the league and stay in Europe, access UEFA media money which kickstarts the performance flywheel.
Heineken’s strat slide
Why does Heineken sponsor sport?
Brand equity that drives a premium price.
Three pillars:
Differentiation
Meaningfulness
Salience
This slide from Roselan Danoekoesoemo’s presentation shows the skew towards salience.
What people were talking about
The German Shirt Ripple.
Much talk in the corridors of Adidas and Nike.
This week Liverpool announced they were going back to adidas after years of Nike.
Barcelona to follow shortly.
Who’s next? Brazil?
What’s happening?
Every club wants to know.
Is it strategy - Nike going after fewer, bigger shirts.
Or.
Was buying the German shirt a really massive mistake, driven by corporate ego that’s left Nike unable to compete for other high end shirts?
Nike and Germany is a really weird culture clash.
It still feels wrong.
See also: UP Conspiracy theory - Nike paid Farage to wear Gazelles
Farage just killed Adidas Gazelles. It’s really bad. Up there with when George W Bush wore Crocs.
The Man United doc I’d actually watch
Man Utd and Disney announced a documentary.
Two builds.
The United doc fans want is the real one,
A film that takes us behind the scenes this season.
For real. Everything. No PR bullshit.
Proper Four Year Plan territory (look up Four Year Plan, the doc of QPR. It’s incredible).
But that’s the very last piece of content the club will create.
There’s a bit of me that thinks the sports documentary boom we’ve talked about for 18 months is already over. Killed by comms.
When does history run out?
What is the value of the Man United brand, really?
Has the brand evolved at all since Ferguson left?
How much more is there to learn about 1999, or ’92 or ‘68 or ‘58?
At what point does a club DNA become a problem to overcome rather than something of value?
Till next time.