Football keeps talking when it should be listening
How the most misunderstood term in sport can help change the future of football.
I thought I’d do something a little different with this newsletter. Rather than writing another rambling jeremiad about all the ways in which football is broken, I thought I’d actually look at some solutions(!).
So I caught up with Kevin Rye—an advisor to football clubs around the world on the importance of creating a structured dialogue with their supporters—to work out how this all happened.
Turns out the answer was staring us in the face the whole fucking time. Who knew?
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A quick note before we kick off:
Thanks to everyone for the support and kind words about the newsletter. I’ll be aiming to get a newsletter in your inbox twice a month from here on out.
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All the very best,
Sam
Fan engagement might be one of the most misunderstood subjects in football.
Usually seen through the fucked-up prism of an analytics window on social media, fan engagement has been conflated with marketing at its most caliginous:
Middle managers nodding sagely at lists of vanity metrics bloated by disposable content, spreadsheets pumped with paid advertising steroids. Supporters have become just another number in a column.
I wanted some perspective on the matter; to try and find out why fan engagement has found itself so far down the pecking order and, crucially, what we can do to counter the slide.
“It’s a term hijacked by people who want to sell you things,” says Kevin Rye, lecturer at University Campus of Football Business. “But really it refers to the relationship between the institution and those interested in it. It goes beyond just being simply a customer.”
Kev knows this all too well. He has, in his own words, “been at the centre of a unique network of fans, clubs and decision-makers in football and sport for nearly 20 years”. In that time, his refreshing blend of scepticism and optimism, public relations and hardscrabble experience as a fan of a ‘proper’ football club has become highly sought-after1.
His career in football began as an activist/fan of Wimbledon FC and its phoenix club AFC Wimbledon: an experience which, combined with his background in public relations, has informed his work ever since. Now he’s director of The Don’s Trust—the supporters’ trust that owns AFC Wimbledon—and advises football clubs around the world—from Liverpool FC to Aris Thessaloniki—on creating a structured dialogue with fans and works regularly with supporters’ groups intent on saving their clubs from financial ruination.
It’s the sort of roll-up-your-sleeves stuff that harks back to the less-glamorous idea of working in football as grassroots community building, but this back-to-basics approach is one which could prove vital for clubs up and down the food chain.
“Maybe it’s a bit bold to say it,” he says, being bold, “but I’ve tried to claim back the term ‘fan engagement’ for people who believe that engagement should be two-way. It should be about co-creation between fans and their clubs.”
The cognitive dissonance is obvious. Football might be the industry that respects least the axiom that “the customer is always right” while assuring us, in the next breath, that “football is nothing without fans”.
And, obviously, there needs to be a commercial imperative to finding comity with its community. You can’t just sell a utopian society with no economic strategy to a club which has to sustain hundreds, sometimes thousands of jobs.
But how do we start to unpack that—decades of essentially ignoring fan opinions in favour of the bottom line—in a way that’s actionable for clubs?
For Kevin, the issue begins with a distinct misunderstanding of what a football club actually is. “I have no problem with the idea that football clubs make money and are businesses,” he says. “The problem I have is when people come in and don’t understand what type of business a football club is. Sometimes they think they’re something else.”
“They are not an NFL or MLB franchise,” he adds, “as much as they might like to be. If you keep trying to follow that line, you’ll confuse yourself, confuse your business, and end up doing the wrong things.”
With the constant need to explore, expand, and break new markets, clubs risk overlooking the richness of their own stories and the spectrum of human experience that lies within their localised fanbase.
The ‘co-creation’ between fans and clubs that Kev mentioned earlier is usually presented as denuded UGC—“Send us a video of you cheering on your team! ⚽”—to repurpose as a sloppy hype-package on social. But, when approached from a more naturalistic mode—going out into the world and being across the table from fans, investing time and effort into understanding them as people and not just data—that co-creation can start to unfurl what a club truly means to people and the place it represents.
“You can lose touch with your roots,” says Kevin. “If you don’t learn from your history, you’re doomed to repeat it and all that. I think it really matters that we understand where we come from. Stories are the way we do that. And football is so full of those stories.”
Like it or not, he adds, “you’re dealing with people’s lives here: these clubs are their histories, their communities and formative experiences.”
Those words make me think of a quote by the composer Philip Glass, from an interview with NPR’s Terry Gross:
“The important thing is how you are connected to the past. Does it represent not only continuity but bringing us closer to something that’s richer, that’s more interesting? What have we brought to the world and what do we leave behind us and what does the future have for us? The future… is in our children. It’s in our friends. It’s in our work. It’s all around us.”
As I’ve written about previously, it’s easy to see through lazy nostalgia.
But a more patient, ethnographic approach to fan engagement builds authentic relationships with supporters, consolidates legacies, and defines pathways to stories that will organically grow your base without resorting to cheap tricks (Reels! More Reels!) and demeaning trends (“Can we get that YouTuber who barks like a dog involved, for some reason?”).
That sort of investment keeps the wind to your back in good times, but it also creates an environment for supporters to really support their team through bad times, too.
Kev tells this story about Tim Crow, another marketer, who advised Man United on its approach to a Gillette commercial partnership in the early 2000s. Faced with a meeting room of marketing execs, he brought a fan in to meet them. The fan spoke of his father, a man who couldn’t go back to football again after the Busby Babes died. What happened on that snowy Munich runway2 in 1958… The event destroyed him. The fan broke down in tears talking about his dad. It was not what the execs were expecting. They sat wide-eyed: They had an idea of what football was but didn’t understand what it really meant.
“Then Tim took all the new execs to a match and he didn’t let them go into a corporate box,” says Kevin with a wry smile. “He took them into the Stretford End and gave them twenty quid to spend on concessions. And it meant they began to understand things a little bit better…”
Walking the concourse sounds simple, but you’d be amazed how few clubs try it. I can’t tell you the amount of lessons a club exec could learn by spending a few hours in the pub before games or chatting with fans after the final whistle. They tuck themselves away in boardrooms and boxes, but running a football club is as much about social science as business.
If we approach football marketing—all marketing, really— as ethnographers, we should immerse ourselves in fan culture, observe fan behaviour in its natural environment, identify areas of insight, and—most of all—when sitting with fans, we should listen.
“Clubs forget that they’ve essentially got one giant focus group—or any number of groups— to consult with in their fanbase,” says Kevin. “If you ever want to understand anything that's going on, you can get a temperature check right there.”
You might not always like what they’ve got to say, but it’s important you hear it.
Football has an obsession with talkers—content creators, social media soothsayers, and communications specialists whose speciality, it seems, extends one way. But it also has a dearth of listeners. Execs seem to think they know what fans want better than fans do.
“Don’t be a stick in the mud,” they say, trying to effect change without consent. “You need to move with the times.”
It’s a strategy which has seen an erosion of trust between supporters and clubs as localised fans feel actively deprioritised in favour of global expansion.
“I see that tension constantly,” says Kevin. “For me, global fans are very often pretty early on in the sales funnel3. I think that sales and marketing people see that, but I don't think they necessarily say it… I think what they say is ‘they're all fans’”—stacking the numbers—“but everyone knows that it’s easier to maintain an existing customer base than it is to acquire a new one. It’s cheaper, too. But marketing teams within clubs are constantly advised to chase after new fans because we’ve been told that growth is all-important.”
“But it’s okay to have boundaries,” he adds. “At some point, you have to admit to yourself what you are. A football club can be many things: it should be exciting, innovative, refreshing, and open, but it needs to be rooted, rooted in something. It's a cross between a temple, a museum, a cinema, a nightclub, and a local shop.
“But at the end of the day, it’s a football club. We can’t pretend that it’s anything else.”
His long-term project the Fan Engagement Index has given supporters a league table of England’s 92 professional clubs, ranked by the quality of their communication. Now when fans are dissatisfied with how things are going at their club, they can look at the Index, run their finger down the table, and see how their team stacks up. Some are doing great (Exeter City, currently sat at the top of League One, are owned by fans through the Exeter City Supporters' Trust, and so, as you’d imagine, they’re pretty good at talking to their own) and some are… very much not.
Referring to the Munich air disaster in 1958, where a plane carrying Manchester United players, staff, and assorted journalists crashed in snowy conditions. 44 of the plane’s occupants were killed, including 8 players.
The ‘sales funnel’ is the customer pipeline that runs from Awareness to Action, from the moment an audience member is first introduced to the brand or product to the minute they decide to buy. The funnel starts wide at the top and gets narrower as it goes down, as audiences are filtered through until only a few remain ready to take the plunge.