The Hate Flywheel; Money + Grievance = Avid Fandom; Other People's Money; Good and Bad Sponsors; Oil is the New Oil; The Damned Utd; UP Town; Pub chat
Overthinking the sports business, for money
The Hate Flywheel
Never underestimate the power of a misplaced sense of victimhood, it’s the secret to sports marketing success in 2024.
Tyranny of the majority is everyone’s quote of the week.
And for a few weeks after our Too Big To Fail podcast (below), we were given a sneak peak in to Man City World.
The language used by the fans is fascinating.
There’s talk of ‘the red cartel’, code for Man Utd, Liverpool and to an extent, Arsenal - the clubs that were dominant in the pre-petrol era.
The red cartel is the establishment, City are the maverick outsiders.
There are obvious Brexit and Trump parallels, but my head went to the 1970s and Leeds.
Years ago I played golf with Johnny Giles.
I’d pitched an Irish magazine a regular feature: A Round With Gillis, taking my lead from A Round With Allis, a BBC2 show from the 80s, where the legendary commentator escorted celebrities around Surrey while talking.
(On reflection, this was an early iteration of what is now a popular podcast format - see this lovely piece by Kevin Kelly, How to walk and talk)
To my astonishment the mag bought it.
So, me and Johnny went off to play his local Dublin course.
He was much nicer than I expected him to be given his public profile as both player and pundit.
Giles talked insightfully about grievance.
His generation of Leeds players bear a big grudge, as do fans, that they never got the credit they were due.
Cheated by Beckenbauer and a dodgy ref in the 1975 European Cup final.
This sense of victimhood was exacerbated by the subsequent success of the Damned Utd book and film (incidentally, Giles sued David Peace and won).
As with City today, the red cartel were the enemy.
Leeds found then, as City do today, that winning isn’t enough.
The toughest competitor is history.
Man Utd and Liverpool have more compelling backstories than Leeds: Shankly and Busby, Best and Dalglish, European Cup success and terrible tragedy.
History as competitor
Man City fans, Little Mix and Pat Perez: This story contains something for everyone.
It was leadership gurus Little Mix who once wrote: ‘It's funny 'cause at times it feels like us against the world’.
As a notable Little Mixter, Greg Norman no doubt took the wisdom of that song and applied it to the Saudi Shitshow known colloquially as LIV Golf, using Pat Perez, a hugely wealthy everyman, as voice piece.
From previous: Why Ayn Rand is the most influential person in the sports business today
The Lessons Bit
A regular UP trope is that building team brands is the hardest job in the sports business today.
It’s the bit that the Sport by McKinsey lobby leave to others, assuming its easy.
This is a mistake, borne of a skewed and patronising view held of both marketing and of the general public, who it is assumed, can be turned in to tribal fans by the sale of colourful team branded hats.
LIV teams, cricket franchises, WSL teams, NFL London away days; the reality is that it’s really hard to get people to care in sufficient numbers to make it commercially valuable.
Tribes are what keep teams going beyond the big event.
Getting a sports marketing agency in to help won’t help much.
They’re too nice.
They talk of brand purpose and create imaginary fan personas that look and sound a lot like themselves and their friends.
The world they want, as opposed to the world.
The Man City formula is different.
Money + Grievance = Avid Fandom
To get people to care at scale, teams need to win (money) and to be defined against a common enemy.
That enemy can be real - another actual team - or it can be an intangible idea, like the tyranny of the majority, the establishment, immigrants, ‘Brussels’ or red cartels.
It’s not enough to say what your for.
You have to hate something.
That’s what gets the algorithm swinging your way.
The Hate Flywheel…
Bit bleak, but you get the point.
UP Thread: The Bad Sponsor Story
The UN calls for a ban on oil advertising.
Politically, this is much easier than a ban on actual oil.
UN Secretary General António Guterres called coal, oil and gas corporations the “godfathers of climate chaos” who had distorted the truth and deceived the public for decades.
Just as tobacco advertising was banned because of the threat to health, the same should now apply to fossil fuels, he said.
The story quickly became about sport sponsorship.
So we’re in oil is the new tobacco territory.
British Cycling ran in to this problem with its deal with Shell.
See previous: What’s the point of British Cycling?
Since then the NGB has secured another big brand deal, with Lloyds Bank.
This was the cue for my favourite NGB CEO freudian slip of 2024:
"It takes the pressure off the whole of the organisation, but it doesn't mean to say we are taking our foot off the gas - far from it," added Jon Dutton.
Brilliant.
Other People’s Money
Sport is awash with OPM.
It’s flowing through the system, from top to bottom.
Two Circles co-founder Matt Rogan is our guide for a new podcast series that kicked off this week.
More episodes soon.
Good quote on the sports agency sector’s build-to-sell mentality.
FFS, will someone just buy Matt Cutler a drink?
UP’s production guru is finishing off our series on football’s relationship with the pub.
If you’ve got something to contribute, get in touch.
(Click here or on the screenshot).
UP Towns
Big in Japan, and many other places too.
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