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The second day of the Soccerex Global Convention began with some of the biggest stories in the game unfolding elsewhere.
In the Indian city of Goa, members of the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) had voted to close their congress, which had been called to elect the body’s members to the newly formed Fifa Congress. There had been an objection to Fifa barring Qatar’s Saoud Al-Mohannadi from standing after its ethics committee had recommended a two and a half year ban for his failure to cooperate with a corruption investigation. Fifa president Gianni Infantino had made the trip to the subcontinent for the occasion; the session lasted around 20 minutes.
In England, meanwhile, national team manager Sam Allardyce – appointed only 67 days earlier – had been implicated overnight in a Daily Telegraph sting. He was allegedly caught offering to help a group of ‘Far East businessmen’ – actually investigative reporters – to circumvent Football Association (FA) rules on third-party ownership of player registrations. Embarrassingly, Allardyce was also filmed mocking predecessor Roy Hodgson and former England coach Gary Neville.
Allardyce’s future was the subject of minute-to-minute speculation throughout the day but, understandably, those in English soccer with an opinion to share were reluctant to do so on such a delicate matter – despite the best efforts of moderators and the assembled press.
Elsewhere at Manchester Central, nevertheless, it was a day of richly varied discussion, with a range of perspectives on the state of the game and on things to come.
Striking partnerships
With the main conference hall – The Studio – not in use for the opening hour or so of the day, it was standing room only in The Academy for the early sessions on sponsorship.
Soccer United Marketing’s Kathy Carter was reunited with Adolfo Bara of Spain’s La Liga in the first panel, on ‘Driving Sponsorship Value Through Football Events’. They were joined by Andrew Curley, the head of sponsorship and events at Vauxhall, and by Felipe Martin, the marketing director for new La Liga title sponsor Santander Spain.
La Liga and Major League Soccer (MLS) are effectively making alternate pitches to fans and are taking sponsors with them in that endeavour. In the US, which Carter now describes as “a soccer nation without question”, the task at hand involves convincing fans of international soccer and international leagues to engage with local clubs, and to persuade sponsors in turn to court those local communities.
Spain’s top flight is attempting to bring in fans from international markets, and is using Santander’s reach to help achieve that – by trying to connect with its 30 million customers in Brazil, for example. But La Liga has also created a digital hub for Santander, and the content it generates through its players and clubs is intended to help the bank reach new potential customers.
The changing landscape of professional soccer is creating new opportunities and for Curley, the women’s game is opening up different angles to key demographics. “If you go to a women’s game in the UK,” he noted, “it’s mostly families.”
Women’s soccer in the US, particularly at international level, has been a more mature commercial proposition for some time and Carter said: “We don’t have to sell the idea of a Women’s World Cup at all.”
What may complicate matters for international partners in the US, particularly given the importance of Mexico to the domestic soccer culture, is the result of the upcoming presidential election. With the country’s most prominent female politician having debated its most prominent misogynist windbag overnight, some discussion of the topic was inevitable. Carter, however, was entirely diplomatic.
“Sport is sport is sport,” she said, “and politics in some respects is sport, but I don’t think it’s an issue.”
Following the first panel in The Academy was another with sponsorship in mind, albeit this time with a slant on the appropriate means of activating partnerships in soccer.
Results on the field emerged as a topic to be negotiated with caution by partners of individual teams in particular. William Hill’s Tony Kenny warned of the need for brands to be “careful in tonality of communication to the fans” when factoring in performances”.
For John Gasloli, senior manager for global marketing at Manchester United sponsor Chevrolet, the most productive approach is to “stay out of the performance fray” and concentrate instead on the relationship between fans and clubs.
Peter Draper is the commercial marketing director at Valencia, a big club but one struggling badly in La Liga. “It’s horrible being a football fan,” he said, “because there’s more lows than highs.”
The trick for sponsors, he noted, is in recognising that and acting accordingly. “Good brands engaging in team sports know that that’s the game – there are lows and there are highs,” he said.
He added: “They wave their white handkerchiefs if they’re unhappy – but they’re engaged.”
To the streets
In the Love Football Zone, there was an opportunity in the late morning to talk about ‘Football’s Global Responsibility’. For disadvantaged young people in communities around the globe, soccer can be a means of developing a sense of self-worth. For those involved in the Street Children United project, it can be a way of developing an identity of a more literal sense.
As the organisation’s co-founder and chief executive John Wroe explained, participants in its programmes typically want for three things. One is protection – the captain of one under-14 team was murdered three weeks before the final of of a Street Children United tournament. The other is access to education. The other is a formal legal identity – many of these children have not been registered; effectively, they would not legally exist without that point of contact with football.
Wroe was joined by Brazilian World Cup winner and former Arsenal star Gilberto Silva, and by Arsenal PR and communications manager Kate Laurens. She explained how clubs had developed a more international focus in their community projects. “As the game has got bigger,” she said, “our responsibility has got more global.”
Nevertheless, projects in the local environment still make a massive impact. Laurens recounted a story of how current Gunners Alexis Sanchez and Santi Cazorla had visited a food preparation course in London for vulnerable young people, whose counselor had said the time the pair spent talking and eating had been “so important” to those self-esteem of those involved. And while such stellar appearances are invaluable, more important is the “continuity” provided by coaches, staff and volunteers on a regular basis.
A woman’s worth
Manchester mayoral candidate Andy Burnham had made much of the city’s footballing heritage on the opening day of the convention but he had overlooked one significant recent success. Shelley Alexander, the editorial lead for women’s sport at the BBC, used her Twitter account to remind Burnham of Manchester City Women’s first Women’s Super League title win on Sunday – and the England women’s third-place finish at the Fifa Women’s World Cup last year.
With appropriate timing, the Love Football Zone played host to a session on social media an women’s soccer on Tuesday. Twitter’s UK head of sport Alex Trickett noted the enormous success of the Women’s World Cup on the platform – tweets about the tournament got more views in 2015 than those about the NBA Finals and Wimbledon – but he also suggested that female players were culturally more predisposed to making good use of it. On Twitter, he said, “access and authenticity” make a strong impression; women’s players are likelier to be warm and natural on their accounts, rather than being led by a “marketing agenda” like some of their higher-profile male peers.
Liverpool goalkeeper Siobhan Chamberlain, a ‘digital ambassador’ for women’s soccer in England, also explained how social media was helping to get female players closer to their fans. She showed a video she had shared ahead of the third-placed match in Canada last year, where her teammates danced to some deeply questionable 90s pop in their downtime before the game.
Beyond simply offering personality, the social media profiles of women in the sport creates a commercial point of difference. As Bayern Munich’s Bianca Rech explained on a later panel in the same venue, ‘Why Invest in Women’s Teams?’, the more open nature of women’s soccer is giving sponsors like Allianz an opportunity to distinguish themselves from others in the same space.
And, as Manchester City’s head of women’s football Gavin Makel added, social media also creates a direct route to a burgeoning community of supporters. City’s game against Arsenal earlier this month was broadcast on Facebook Live, with half a million fans tuning in.
Virtually assured
Just before lunch in The Studio came a discussion on ‘The Changing Landscape of Football’. Jonty Whitehead, the executive producer for soccer at Fox Sports, was reflecting on a virtual reality broadcast the US network had put out at the start of Germany’s Bundesliga season.
“That experience is different,” he said, “it’s unique, but is it the way football is going? Who knows?”
Who knows, indeed. As ITV director of sport Niall Sloane pointed out on the same panel, the uptake for technological TV innovations is surprisingly narrow. Even with high-definition coverage long considered part of the mainstream, only “six or seven per cent of broadcasts in the UK” are enjoyed with that crisper picture – in no small part because standard definition channels are easier to locate on the dial.
VR, however, may need to be considered differently from other broadcast innovations. In the words of Mike Moffo, a digital strategist for Barack Obama’s successful US presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012 who now advises VR company Laduma, the technology is “not a game changer, but a new game”.
For Jason Lovell, the product manager for Gear VR headsets at Samsung and a fellow panellist of Moffo’s on ‘Virtual Reality & Sport: Gimmick or Game-Changer’ in The Academy, virtual reality’s uniqueness is an asset, but is also something that will make its breakthrough more difficult to manage.
“The big challenge for VR,” he said, “is that it’s very difficult to explain to people what VR is without showing them.”
The key to unlocking the potential of this new facility, then, is to draw on its strengths. “The content that I’ve seen so far that is good,” Lovell added, “is an experience that you get that you wouldn’t normally get sitting on your sofa.”
From there, it becomes a question of understanding what the purpose of any VR content created might be.
For Moffo, monetisation is a question in VR’s future. Today, the technology has a role in deepening relationships with existing fans and courting more overseas; offering experiences that might not otherwise be possible.
Moffo is a Liverpool fan of long standing, and recalls an era in which US coverage of the Premier League had to be actively sought out. He argued that many in soccer in Europe do not appreciate that “fan loyalties are completely up for grabs” in new markets.
If VR can bring those prospective supporters closer to their clubs, it might have a real and lasting effect.
Quote of the day
“I’d give Sam Allardyce another five-year contract, for obvious reasons,” said AFC Bournemouth chairman Jeff Mostyn reacts “in a jocular fashion” to speculation that the England head coach might lose his job and that the south coast club’s own Eddie Howe will be favourite to replace him.
