More tales from the product frontline
Why the time has come to push harder on ticket pricing, Governance Bill battle lines become clear, and that Spurs brand revamp
Progress can come slowly, but it is important to recognise it when it comes. Just a few years ago the most common response to anyone raising the subject of the price of football tickets was a dismissive ‘more fool you for buying them’, or a call for everyone to boycott games that demonstrated a lack of understanding of the culture of football supporters.
That has started to change, and the recent actions staged across two Premier League weekends under the banner of the FSA’s Stop Exploiting Loyalty campaign show a growing strength of feeling. (The main image above shows protests at, from the top, Spurs, Liverpool and Fulham). What’s smart about the slogan is that it places the argument that football is a unique business with a special kind of customer loyalty centre stage.
Going to the match is what fans use to define themselves. Being able to get to see your team live is seen as the ultimate – even by fans with little chance of doing so. Clubs know that; they know fans will keep coming back because of football’s unique customer loyalty. That’s part of the reason why the argument that ‘if you don’t go there are thousands more who will take your place’ is phoney. Because not only do clubs know that the most dedicated fans will move heaven and earth to go to as many games as they can, they use the passion of those regular fans to market and sell their ‘product’ to TV and beyond.
That’s why, when Nick Harris and I wrote earlier this year about the real face of football ticket price inflation (and you can find some hard numbers to back up these arguments in that piece) we asked the question: “Should match-going fans be subsidised by the product they create?” Our conclusion was: “It is getting increasingly hard to argue they shouldn’t.”
That might seem a bold move for some, and it will certainly not be an idea embraced in club boardrooms. But remember, football usually has to be dragged kicking and screaming towards good ideas – and I don’t define good here as ‘beneficial only to the people that own clubs’. Along with growing discussion in the mainstream media about whether the driving up of prices has gone too far, there is an increasing realisation among fans that allowing ourselves to be blamed for our own exploitation is nonsense.
We make the game the spectacle it is. Of course the players are the most important element, but we learned during the pandemic that players on a pitch in front of empty stands creates a very different ‘product’. So while it’s not strictly true to say football without fans is nothing, we’ve seen that football without fans doesn’t amount to very much. Certainly football without the regular fans whose emotional investment creates such a unique and vibrant atmosphere, anyway.
It may be true that if those fans stopped going others would replace them. For a few games at least. But it requires a special dedication to negotiate the logistical and financial hurdles involved in following your team regularly, and how many of those replacement fans would stick at it for season after season? Once they saw you need your head examined to spend the time and money the regulars do, they would drift away. And who could blame them?
It's not hard to imagine getting to a stage at which regulars begin to drop out and, as those replacing them realise the cost of doing so, the ‘product’ inside the ground begins to deteriorate. Those turning up to sample the atmosphere will realise that they are supposed to create the atmosphere, not experience other people creating it. Spectating will begin to change from an active to a passive pursuit. And the spectacle will lose its allure.
There’s evidence this is starting to happen already. There is an increasing sense of weariness at the prices, the inconvenient kick-off times, the constant marketing, the prioritisation of almost anything apart from the football itself. And always, much to the annoyance of the Premier League’s self-styled masters of the universe, there is the example of Germany, where the value of supporter culture and recognition of what makes the football ‘product’ so special is deeply embedded. In Sweden too, there is not only recognition that another way besides the headlong pursuit of more and more money is possible, but that in England there is a danger of something very precious being lost.
So the game in England does need to Stop Exploiting Loyalty, and instead Start Valuing and Nurturing Loyalty. Treating the fans with respect, and giving them something back from the profits they create is good business sense, as well as The Right Thing To Do. So I’d like to see the argument for subsidising match-going fans be put more firmly as the conversation about ticket prices gathers pace.
The Football Governance Bill got its first reading in the House of Lords on 13 November, and the debate – which I’ve linked to in full – provided some indication of the battle lines over the coming months.
The Premier League finally managed to get the Conservative front bench to embrace its attack lines, although sadly for it this was the wrong side of the general election. But the Conservative benches give those lines a good airing. Expect the themes to be developed. In short, the Premier League is a huge success, legislation might be needed but not this legislation, watch out for mission creep and unintended consequences, this is state control by the back door, and do we really have to give the fans any say? Oh, and the EDI stuff is a bit woke, innit?
There was a revealing line in the opening contribution from the opposition, from Lord Parkinson of Whitley Bay. He was worried about all the things mentioned above, and particularly worried about the backstop power the Bill proposes to give to the regulator. This could, he said, “lead to a scenario where the regulator forces one business to give its money to another.” That phrase neatly encapsulates so many problems.
It's long been clear the people owning the clubs currently at the top of the pile either don’t get or don’t care about the game as a whole. That’s partly why there is a Premier League in the first place. The whole point of the Bill is to try to protect the men’s game in England as a whole, because that is at the heart of what makes football a business like no other. The owners of the top clubs seriously believe that people come to see just them – so why should the opponents get anything? Any money generated is “their” money. Not money generated by a game between two teams, or a competition between 20 or 124, or by a game that has existed for hundreds of years and which is deeply rooted in our culture and consciousness. No. It’s their money.
So we should be grateful to the Noble Lord for putting such arrogance and greed on public record. Lord Parkinson was one of a number of speakers to use the phrase “unintended consequences” – a phrase the Premier League and its mouthpieces have peppered the debate with without ever really articulating what those may be. The suspicion is that what they are really worried about are the intended consequences of the Bill.
Lady Brady spoke bravely. One might think that having sold a club she ran to someone who was convicted of money-laundering may have made her reticent about speaking on governance matters, but Brady was uncowed. She wanted to “regulate our clubs without suffocating them” and save football “without removing its aspiration and ambition”. Of course.
There are worries, too, about beefed up fan engagement. A number of speakers asked “which fans are to be consulted?’ and “how are we to define a fan?” These are stale lines long since discredited. Most fan organisations are far more democratic, representative and accountable than the people who buy football clubs, and those people have traditionally not been held to the standards it is apparently so important to hold fans to. This objection, along with some of the frankly bonkers contributions from fringe libertarians late in the debate, can safely be dismissed.
There was a worrying lack of detail being grasped at times. Those trumpeting the enormous success of English football appeared not to recognise how many Premier League clubs were making losses and how more than half the 92 clubs in the top four divisions are technically insolvent. The way the regulator would work and how much it would cost was also beyond some, as was a thorough understanding of how the backstop and financial redistribution would work.
There were attempts to argue for the women’s game to be brought into the regulator’s remit, and while I have some sympathy for the thinking behind that from a principled point of view, I don’t think it would be a good idea. It would do a disservice to a game that is at a very different stage of development to the men’s and needs its own solutions.
Surprisingly little was made of how poor regulation has been when left in the hands of the Premier League and Football League. The case for independent regulation is almost entirely made by looking at what the result of self-regulation is. That’s a connection that Sunday Times columnist Martin Samuel seems unable to make. He is against the introduction of a regulator, but frequently rails against the incompetence of self regulation. It doesn’t add up.
Expect the arguments outlined above to be propagated as the Bill progresses. We’re into the trench warfare bit and the Premier League will try to take as many lumps out of the reform process as possible. But reform is coming, and we need to make sure what passes into law is the best it can be.
I’ve worked in the media long enough to know a thing or two about brand redesigns. But most of all, I know how vital knowing your audience is to effective communication. Which brings us neatly to the latest from Tottenham Hotspur, the club I support and which just keeps providing material – sadly not in a good way.
The club has, depending on what you zero in on, redesigned, remastered, or reimagined its “brand identity”. There’s a dynamic evocation interface – sorry, a story on the club’s website – here by way of explanation. And a more traditional announcement here.
Now, stay with me, as this is not going to turn into one of those situations familiar to anyone who has taken a guided boat tour of the Thames in London where the guide says: “Over there is the Museum of Modern Art. Well, they call it art …” I get the need for clear visual identities and branding messages and versatility in deployment. Really, I do. But the main problem with the way the Club has communicated this is that it has given a message to its fans that reads like a marketing industry internal brief. And that’s something the Spurs supporting marketing professionals I know think too.
Check the language. “Remastered brand identity”; “rolled out across all the club’s physical and digital touchpoints”; “supported by a silhouette version that allows for a more playful expression of the brand”; “refreshed assets enable a more playful, daring approach for the Club’s brand across the multitude of platforms on which it now features, with a particular focus on clarity in digital environments.” And so it goes on. And on.
As I said, there is a place for all this. But fans of a football club are not overly fussed about whether or not their club’s brand identity can be playfully deployed going forward with more clarity in digital environments while being run up the flagpole in a blue sky environment to see if anyone salutes it. Because the “brand identity” either works or it doesn’t. If you have to tell people what your identity is doing that usually means it’s not doing it very well.
The announcement itself is poorly pitched. Everyone I’ve spoken to about it thought at first that the badge was being changed – something that would have exercised fans very much indeed. Dig deeper and in fact the badge stays the same but now it can be used in different colours and with a silhouette. There’s also a new font and the reintroduction of a monogram in the new font.
There will be good reasons for all of this, but the announcement does a terrible job of communicating them. The language is suitable for Campaign or PR Week, but when used for a football audience it comes across as word salad and it invites ridicule. Although ridicule is the only solution to the set of slogans that come with this redesigned imaginamastering. There’s clearly been some focus group brainstorming in which the participants have been hopped up on a Haribo sugar rush. White Hart Lane – White HOT Lane – hot – fire – ignite the goal – ignite the soul … It certainly makes for a long night of the soul, I’ll give it that.
All of this culminates in The Cauldron Awaits – a phrase utterly devoid of meaning when deployed in this context and which, used in the proximity of a cockerel, makes it seem like an advert for stock cubes.
The Club also can’t get out of the habit of claiming it is innovative when it isn’t. The announcement on the club website claims Spurs were the first club to “modernise its identity” in 2006. That will be news to Leeds United, for example, whose identity was famously modernised in 1973 when Don Revie called in a design consultant to work with kit manufacturer Admiral. The result was the famous Leeds ‘smiley’ badge, and the PR consultant who created it was Paul Trevillion, an industry legend and Spurs fan who has worked on a number of projects with Spurs. If the current Spurs board were capable of recognising that anyone other than themselves was worth listening to they might have discovered this before making themselves look ridiculous with inflated claims.
The garnish on the word salad is provided by a cringe-inducing three-paragraph quote attributed to one of the club’s directors. I won’t reproduce it here as it might break my hard drive, but it is difficult to decide whether the quote is produced by artificial intelligence or simple lack of intelligence.
The big unanswered questions are how much did all this cost, and was it really a priority? Pretty much anyone in football knows the biggest brand projection issue Spurs have is that it is a club that was once one of the most trophied in football that has won just one minor trophy in 24 years. Imagine the marketing benefits of actually winning something. But winning, as we learned when the club’s chairman rated losing a big final above winning a small final in his list of achievements, and from the tale of the Champions League Final watches, is not a priority.
Marketing can be very effective. But it needs something to work with.
Main image courtesy of the FSA.