Wrexham's other odd couple; Endings matter; Other People's Money; Sport's pizza delivery obsession; Adidas' five year plan; Second guessing CVC and rugby
The newsletter of the podcast
Tl;Dr
NEW POD: Inside the Wrexham takeover story
When stories collide
Cynicism and Other People’s Money
Endings matter #1: How do Wryan and Wrob exit Wrexham?
Endings matter #2: Andrea Agnelli
Endings matter #3: Ralph Lauren
Spurs’ co-innovation partnership schmartnerschnip
There are no bad ideas in sports PR: Canterbury and women
CVC’s rugby plans unpicked
Sportsbiz Objects No.11: Pizza
Wrexham’s other odd couple
This week’s podcast guests are Humphrey Ker and Shaun Harvey, aka Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynold’s ‘people on earth’ in the pair’s takeover of Wrexham AFC.
Their relationship is an odd couple thing.
Ker is McElhenney’s mate, a comedy writer on Mythic Quest who first gave the actor the idea to own a football club by watching Liverpool games at lunchtime in the writer’s room.
Harvey is not a comedy writer. He’s the former CEO of EFL, Leeds Utd and Bradford City, who was given the consulting gig by Inner Circle Sports, the NY based boutique sports bank, who handled the purchase.
(Note this quote from the pod: “We're out in the market looking to appoint a full time CEO at the earliest opportunity”).
When stories collide: Hollywood fairytale v Stoke on a Tuesday night
Aka, overcoming scepticism and the disappointment that will come if this isn’t the real thing
Hear the podcast by searching ‘Unofficial Partner’ via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, usual podcast places etc. Or click the image to go direct.
The set up to buying the club has been brilliantly executed. We’ve all seen the social media campaign. The self aware tone, the piss take of ivory tower dwelling actors taking over a small club.
The general reception to the story probably says as much about us as it does them: this is a stunt, or this is a content play, or it’s about selling gin, or a pet project they’ll get bored of after a year or two, when they don’t get the Hollywood fairy tale and get stuck in the bracingly unlovely struggle that is lower league football, a build on the 'can they do it on a wet Tuesday night in Stoke’ trope, albeit that Stoke are three leagues above them at this point.
The perception that something bad lurks just below the surface is made worse by the prevalence of OPM in football and business generally
Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) was on to something. And he could have asked a couple of follow ups: Where is the money? And more specifically, whose is it?
The day to day reality of football club takeovers is the use of OPM (as Other People’s Money is known in the finance trade) leaving fans unsure who actually owns their club.
This is true at every price point, from the lower leagues to the Glazer’s hugely leveraged buy-out of Man Utd.
This is the baggage we bring to the Wrexham story.
NB: Humphrey Ker points out that in this case, the Wrob and Wryan money is in the club’s bank account: ‘Two million pounds has been deposited. It’s there’.
Shaun Harvey [00:16:40]: I'm with you. One of the first conversations I had with Humphrey was what we are going to deal with this, because the hardest part is going to be getting people to believe what we are saying is genuine….2020 has been pretty horrible. Then all of a sudden, you've got a shining light around a small area in North Wales. Two actors saying they genuinely want to make your football club better. We genuinely want to try and improve your outlook on life and feeling towards the club.
Humphrey Ker: There is nothing more precious to people than their football club. It is a primary source of passion, a kind of religious fervour. I said to Rob once, just so you know, this is like we're buying a church, this isn't like buying a business. It's not Disney purchasing Fox. It's a very different thing because the people that work at Fox don't tattoo the Fox logo on themselves just because they work at Fox.
Endings matter, pt 1
Storytelling is a new concept, developed by marketing people in 2014. So now my carton of oat milk wants to share its narrative arc. (I blame Seth Godin btw).
According to research, stories have a start, middle and end.
And as mentioned, when it comes to Wrexham, the start’s been great.
But what about the end?
Now Reynolds and McElhenney are in, they have to think about how they get out. High expectations can be a real bummer.
Humphrey Ker: [00:36:03] We’ve talked about the end from the very beginning, because we know that inevitably, we lack the geographical connection to the club, or you know, we’re not the local car dealer done good of yesteryear, where there was always an expectation that they could go on seemingly forever because they are living in the area. To be the owner of a club is a jewel in the crown of a life successfully led. Realistically for Rob and Ryan, that is unlikely to be the case. So our benchmark for when it's time to go is when we have done everything we can to build a club that will live long beyond our involvement.
We want to ensure the club is sufficiently buoyant, that there’s no danger of returning anywhere near where it was when we first found it.
The other option of course is to persuade Margot Robbie and Timothee Chalamet to buy the club from Rob and Ryan, so we just replace like with like, and just get two other very famous people with big social media followings to swap in for them.
Love that last quote.
The Unneccesary Science Bit
The peak–end rule is a psychological heuristic, or mental short-cut conceived by professors Kahneman & Tversky in 1999, in which people remember an experience, whether it’s negative or positive, largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, instead of judging the experience as a whole. This insight is used in screenwriting, novels and website UX.
Ok, that’s a Kahneman sized hammer with which to crack a pair of Wrexham nuts. But the point remains true. Leaving badly will be worse than never turning up at all. It’s what we’ll remember.
Endings matter, pt 2
Juve president Andrea Agnelli wants to commercialise endings.
“We could imagine a subscription for the last 15 minutes of a specific game…the attention span of today’s kids and tomorrow’s spenders is completely different to the one I had when I was their age. If you take golf, if it’s interesting at all, it’s only the last six holes on the final day. You are not going to watch the whole thing on the TV unless you are a hardcore fan.”
*Insert joke re Jose Mourinho undermining Agnelli’s strategy by seeking to shut down games after 20 minutes.
Endings matter, pt 3
Ralph Lauren, Philip Roth and ‘The ecstasy of sanctimony’
How sponsors behave at the end is revealing. When an endorsee does something wrong, (aka, ‘Ambassador, actually you really are spoiling us’) there’s often a rush to the ethical high ground as the comms team attempts to use the publicity to emphasise the brand’s moral purpose. This is tricky territory however and it’s easy to overplay your hand.
For example, the only thing I remember about Ralph Lauren’s endorsement deal with Justin Thomas is how it ended.
Thomas missed a putt and called himself a faggot under his breath. The camera mic picked it up, followed swiftly by claims of unconscious homophobia for which the player has been apologising at every pre event press conference for the last three months or so.
Eamonn Lynch quoted Philip Roth in Golfweek:
Thomas’s recent performances say less about his form than about the bruising impact of being confronted by a social media mob imbued with what the author Philip Roth memorably described as “the ecstasy of sanctimony.”
In that maelstrom, Thomas was dumped by one of his sponsors, Ralph Lauren. Another sponsor, Citi, publicly scolded him with a statement that veered closer to condescension than compassion. Easy to see why his mind might still be lingering on those self-inflicted distractions.
Now re-read Ralph Lauren’s PR statement at the time.
"In reflecting on the responsibility we have to all of our stakeholders, we have decided to discontinue our sponsorship of Mr Thomas at this time.
"As we make this decision, our hope is that Mr. Thomas does the hard and necessary work in order to partner with us again - truly examining this incident, learning, growing and ultimately using his platform to promote inclusion."
‘Our hope is that Mr. Thomas does the hard and necessary work in order to partner with us again’…blimey.
There’s more than a whiff of Roth‘s ‘ecstasy of sanctimony’ about that line. Let’s hope they keep their own house in order, lest we judge them too harshly.
Other trousers are available.
UP Yours
Stories from the Unofficial Partner guest blog
Spurs announced a ‘co-innovation partnership with Ticketmaster’. And hilarity ensues.
Martin Cloake is the writer of The Football Fan newsletter and many football books, as well as the Co-Chair of Tottenham Hotspur Supporters' Trust.
There are no bad ideas in sports PR
To commemorate the week of International Women’s Day we recall when Canterbury launched its Ireland kit with male players and female models.
Second guessing CVC and rugby
Terry Blake made a good point in the Channel 4 cricket podcast last week, UP Pod #145. He said the ECB has been on the back foot since the Clarke/Collier regime sold the entire Test match inventory to Sky in 2005/6.
‘I’d strongly advise rugby from following cricket’s example’ said Blake, the former ECB commercial and marketing director, who said The Hundred was created in part to rebuild public interest in the game that has deteriorated by the lack of free to air tv exposure.
How then to view the recent CVC buy-in of Six Nations? What needs to happen to ensure a return on that valuation?
The view from the WhatsUP Group was mixed. Some suggesting the valuation pointed toward a private equity driven short term rush to pay tv exclusivity, while others, and some very senior media and industry execs included, thought otherwise, saying this was a long term play: “CVC are incentivised to grow the value of the business (before they sell it again) rather than just support the highest bidder price for short term rights. If you look at Bridgepoint with Moto GP or CVC with Formula 1, the rights strategy has not been all about a flight to pay tv”.
Time will tell.
Sportsbiz Objects
No.11 Pizza delivery
#D2C #Digital #Adidas
‘It should be…as easy as ordering a pizza’.
There’s a lot in that phrase, which gets used to articulate the sunny uplands of sport’s digital transformation journey.
At various times, the pizza analogy has been referenced across the sports sector, from booking tennis courts (…should be as easy as…etc), six a side football cages and exercise classes to selling club merchandise and tickets.
Ex Sky Sports boss Barney Francis to made a similar point to Eoin Connolly of SportsPro when asked about the inconsistent relationship between sports viewers and the various OTT streaming services:
“If you are a business or the restaurant at the end of the street, what did you do to retain your customers when you were in lockdown? You offered some sort of takeaway service. If you weren’t providing takeaway, then you lost your customers because they were going elsewhere. When you pop up again as a restaurant and say: ‘Hey, we’re open!’ people have moved on. That’s where the OTTs have struggled.”
And it seems that Adidas have got the memo too. Their five year plan, announced this week, put digital at the core.
Some interesting numbers in there too, both in terms of demand across geographies and by sport.
More than 95% of sales growth is expected to come from the five strategic categories: Football, Running, Training, Outdoor, and Lifestyle. As building direct relationships with its target audience plays an increasingly important role, adidas will evolve its operating model to address consumers more directly. As a result, the company’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) business is projected to account for around half of the company's total net sales by 2025 and to generate more than 80% of the targeted top-line growth. The company's e-commerce business is forecast to double to between € 8 billion and € 9 billion. From a market perspective, the company will focus on Greater China, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa) and North America. Overall, these three strategic markets are expected to account for around 90% of sales growth until 2025.
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