Third time lucky for The FA's digital plan; did football really win Christmas for Amazon; And the life and times of Norway's greatest export
The newsletter of the podcast
TL;DR
Alex Horne on The FA’s digital plan
24 books on strategy you should read if you have strategy in your job title or want strategy in your job title.
Attribution error and Amazon’s pre-Christmas subs bump
The Bundle on MediaPro
Listener of the week: Steven Gould
Personal Best: Emily Ormond, Matta
Links: Trump’s sportbiz legacy
Sportsbiz Objects: No.4 The Football Pitch
UP Coming: The view from Jan Age Fjortoft’s cabin
The FA’s digital dream, third time lucky?
We talked this week with Alex Horne and Matt Rogan about The FA’s strategic plan - UP Pod #123. The introduction of a new digital platform for the grassroots game is the second of six primary objectives set out for the next four years (click the image to read the whole report).
Alex Horne spent 11 years in senior roles at The FA, including stints as CEO, COO and General Secretary between 2004 to 2015.
Listen to what he had to say on this topic, from 26m:50sec:
What is the ambition for The FA’s new digital platform and what are going to be the challenges?
The challenge when I was there was understanding what roles people play in football. Whether they’re coaches, or visitors to Club Wembley, England team supporters, parents of kids, club volunteers in the game…we had fifteen segments.
There was a criticism, which I think was real, that The FA was sitting in an ivory tower at Wembley and wasn’t very close to what it took to running a Level 7 grassroots club…increasingly you’d see edicts and demands, more and more admin coming out of the FA, lots of paperwork with forms you must fill out in triplicate, and not much in the way of practical support as to how to do it.
Versus here’s a really cool app which will help you.
So the real challenge is people’s behaviour and adoption, rather than the tech itself?
Yes. It’s hard (for The FA) to mandate that you must do it, you must download and use the app. So it’s persuasion. And it’s a competitive market, with quite a few vendors supplying tools in this space. The FA can’t sit there and mandate as the monopoly regulator because that’s just not right.
The other way to do it is to be much more open source, to create a platform that enables other apps to be built on top and there’s data sharing for everyone. That would be a brave thing to do.
My view was always that this is not about creating a data pyramid solely owned by The FA and more but about creating data pyramids for everyone in the game, so the individual leagues and county FA’s around the country can access data about their players, their age and gender etc etc.
This is beginning to ring alarm bells, it’s all beginning to sound a bit like ‘Track and Trace’. You could spend a lot of money on this type of digital project and it not work.
You really could. Before I started in 2005 they had spent a lot of money on a system that they then chucked in the bin.
We built another system which is now the Whole Game System, which is still alive, and they’re now replacing again.
So yes, you can spend a lot of money on these things if you’re not careful.
The 24 books on strategy you should read if you have strategy in your job title, or want strategy in your job title
So basically, imho, it’s like this:
Good Strategy, Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
And then the other twenty three in no particular order.
Attribution error and Amazon’s pre-Christmas subs bump
Rights holders love it when Amazon and live sport appear in the same sentence.
And on the face of it, the retail monolith’s pre-Christmas live sport programming seems to make the argument for live sports rights.
Certainly, it’s clear that Amazon’s Premier League coverage coincided with a bump in Prime subscriptions, according to Kantar. The research refers to a period when Amazon showed 20 live Premier League games, the second of three seasons under its current deal, as well as the Autumn Nations Cup rugby competition involving the home nations and teams from Fiji, France, Italy and Georgia. Non sport programming on Prime included the global hit TV series The Boys and the Borat film sequel.
“In the fourth quarter 1.3 million British households took out a new video streaming subscription, and Amazon’s Prime Video captured almost half of these,” said Dominic Sunnebo, senior vice-president at Kantar’s Worldpanel operation.
My question is an old one: is what we’re seeing cause or correlation?
Did Amazon’s numbers jump BECAUSE of live sport, or did they stream live sport AND Prime subscribers went up, perhaps because of the prospect of a Covid-Christmas, and the appeal of ‘free’ deliveries?
Fwiw, I think Kantar’s analyst is in no position to make the following claim, and has made a classic attribution error.
“Amazon’s increasing focus on live sports continues to pay big dividends.”
The same question lies beneath this graph in The Guardian, where the accompanying story suggests sport is the reason for the success, given Netflix and Disney+ have no live rights.
Maybe.
But I’m with Nassim Taleb on this sort of thing (from Black Swans).
‘Be suspicious of the “because”, and handle it with care’
The Bundle
Yannick Ramcke ran the numbers on MediaPro’s Ligue 1 debacle, so you don’t have to. Hear Ep9 of The Bundle here.
Listener of the Week - Steven Gould
Steven posted our 100th Apple Podcast rating.
It’s incumbent on all of us to start every day by asking, how can I be more like Steven?
Personal Best
Sports business types list their favourite things
This week, Emily Ormond from Matta takes the PB Questionnaire.
If you want to join in, get in touch via the site by clicking the image below.
Trumping Links
Listen: Trump’s sport biz legacy
Read: The outgoing POTUS may face post-White House legal challenges, and quite a few involve sport.
Watch: On Channel 4 news, Jon Snow talked to US diplomat Lewis Lukens about the presidential pressure exerted on the R&A to host The Open at Trump Turnberry, via the US Ambassador to the UK Woody Johnson.
Now he’s gone, and according to Sports Illustrated, the new guy is a soccer fan: Biden and The Beautiful Game.
SportBiz Objects
4. The Football Pitch
#Design #Innovation #Culture
The design of the football pitch was an English invention.
When The FA was formed in 1863, there were no lines on the pitch, just four flags marking the corners. The pitch could measure up to 200 yards long (180 metres) and up to 100 yards wide (90 metres). The goal posts were set 8 yards apart (7.32 metres), a measurement which has remained the same ever since. Thirty years later new rules were brought in requiring goal lines and touch lines to be marked for the first time, in addition to a centre circle, the goalkeepers' areas, and a 12 yard line from the goal. A penalty kick could be taken from anywhere along that 12 yard line. An optional 18 yard line across the full width of the pitch was also introduced, to denote the penalty area. The penalty kick was an idea suggested by the Irish Football Association in 1890.
The modern pitch markings we know today were created in 1902, with an added halfway line, goal areas, penalty areas and a penalty spot. The penalty arc was added in 1937 after suggestions from various European Football Associations, and that’s where we are today.
And it’s within these lines we reveal ourselves.
To generations of English coaches, the questions posed by the football pitch have been tackled not by individual creativity but by team systems and tactical dogma, adherence to 4-4-2 and a big number 9.
“The English are creatures of habit: tea at five,” said Barcelona’s coach Helenio Herrera in 1960 after beating Wolves 5-2 at Molineux, picking a sore that remains open today.
Herrera was goading a British footballing establishment that was already showing signs of conservatism in the face of innovation by their Continental counterparts.
The interpretation of what’s possible has differed from country to country. The Ajax team of the 1970s were devotees of the Coerver method, the basis of Total Football, while styles in Spain (tiki-taka), Italy (catenaccio), France (carré magique) and Germany (gegenpressing) are all variations on a theme that utilise tactics requiring technically sound players with the ability to interchange positions on the pitch.
All the while, the voice of Helenio Herrera hangs over the English game. Jonathan Wilson captured the divide in his book on football tactics, Inverting the Pyramid: “In the coffee houses of Vienna, Budapest and Prague, for example, where intellectuals and their acolytes would discuss the great affairs of the day: art, literature, drama and, increasingly in the 1920s, football”.
UP Coming - The view from Jan Age Fjortoft’s cabin…
New pod out tomorrow, and it might just be my favourite to date. Norway’s greatest export reveals the funny and often mundane reality of playing in the Premier League, taking a sauna with Fabrizio Ravanelli and why Norwegians have better sex than we do.
A big HT to Adrian Bevington for putting us together. The pair have been mates since Middlesbrough in the mid ‘90s.
According to Bevington, Fjortoft’s greatest moment was not 249 goals in 548 professional games, nor 20 international goals and 71 caps for Norway, or playing at the 1994 FIFA World Cup or his second career as popular TV host, interviewer and analyst for ESPN and SKY Germany, nor managing the Norway national team, working as an adviser to the Norwegian government, WADA or building his own strategic consultancy.
No, the best bit was this.
Look out for the Fjortoft conversation in your favourite podcast app, or search ‘Unofficial Partner’ in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Podcasts and all good audio platforms.
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