The socio path

Sometimes a bad idea is just a bad idea

If you’re a business wanting to build some profile, the favoured device these days is to present yourself as a disruptor. This has a number of advantages. 

It positions you as an edgy, innovative enterprise unhindered by the baggage of the past. You are the future. And so, by definition, anyone who stands in your way is the past. The route into the future is inexorable. So you are a natural force, and those who seek to challenge you are not only backward, but defying nature itself. Modern-day King Canutes.  

It also allows you to present yourself as an outsider, a rebel force cocking a snook at the established order. And you are offering your potential customers a slice of the rebel action. If they join you, they’re not just becoming customers of another business. They are sticking it to the man. And to the stupid people who don’t want to go into the future. 

We’ve been hearing about disruptors in football again recently, in the wake of the deal Manchester City has signed with a company called Socios. The disruptive innovative idea Socios brings to the table is… a membership scheme. Or, as the company would prefer, the world’s first fan token platform. Socios’ chief executive Alexandre Dreyfuss gave an interview to The Independent this week in which he outlined the company’s offer. The article is peppered with words and phrases such as emerging technology, engagement – a favourite here – and blockchain, which is always useful when trying to impress people who want to go into the future. 

The article itself has a noteworthy opening which in no way sets out a stance – “With pretty much any major innovation somebody’s nose is put out of joint” – and continues by listing Uber, Netflix and Amazon as examples of the kind of successful disruptors that some stupid people who didn’t want to go into the future got huffy about when they started out.

What Socios does is offer fans tokens in return for the right to have a say on decisions taken by the club. Those tokens can only be purchased by using a cryptocurrency called Chiliz. Happily enough, Chiliz can be bought, using actual money, from… Socios (for it is they).  

Among the many objections to the model is one that says fans should not have to pay to be consulted on important issues by their clubs. But Dreyfus’s response utilises another popular tactic – painting your critics as bigots. He says: “I understand sometimes historical local fans don’t want to acknowledge there is a global fanbase, but that’s the case today: you have to live with it. You have fans everywhere in the world and not recognising these fans is discrimination.”

So as well as being anti-progress establishment drones, critics of this business model are also narrow-minded bigots. It’s an argument as offensive as it is spurious, because it reduces the very real need to combat bigotry to a bargaining chip in the publicity war over a business idea, providing fuel for a multitude of poundshop Nigel Farages and Brendan O’Neills.

But that’s a significant array of arguments with which to counter criticism of a business. So can those expressing doubts or opposition to the scheme be any more than bigoted, stuck-in-the-past opponents of progress who have had their noses put out of joint? 

I’m not only saying yes, I’m saying that Socios is one of the worst ideas anyone has ever attempted to foist on the game. Because it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between fans and clubs. West Ham’s fans realised this when they saw off an attempt to introduce the scheme a few years ago, and fans of Manchester City need to assert themselves to do the same. 

Here are a few very good reasons why this is a journey we should not be going on. 

• The concept of selling the right to have a view strikes at the core of the basic relationship fans have with their club. As this newsletter argues, football clubs are different to other businesses because the strength of customer loyalty is based on the significant emotional investment fans have made over many years. Football clubs are depositories of accumulated emotion, and if they weren’t, they would not be the attractive business propositions they are.

• Monetising the right to have a view divides the fan base into those whose opinions count and those whose don’t. Socios’ own publicity talks of becoming “more than a fan”. So much for not discriminating.

• The views that fans can buy the right to have are still controlled by the Club’s owners. So you can vote on and succeed in changing the music played when a goal is scored (as fans of Juventus did through the Socios scheme) but it’s considerably less likely you’ll be able to vote on the price of a ticket. Or whether music should be played at all when goals are scored.

• The fundamental test for any fan engagement scheme should be how much it genuinely engages fans. The people engaged by the Socios scheme are defined solely by being people who have purchased Socios tokens. So that could be fans of another club trying to influence a decision (remember Manchester City almost having to name a new stand The Bell End after Manchester United fans hijacked a phone poll?), or it could be cryptocurrency speculators homing in on the latest hot prospect for quick returns. 

• The cryptocurrency angle is particularly troubling. These currencies are highly volatile, and the price fluctuations can rapidly change the relative as well as the actual value of the tokens fans buy. Put simply, owning one token in a club with 1,000 tokens in circulation gives you more influence than owning one token in a club with 10,000. This point, along with a forensic dissection of the whole idea pushed by Socios, is in this recommended read from Martin Calladine’s blog The Ugly Game. 

The bottom line here is that Socios is not a fan engagement business. It is a cryptocurrency business attempting to piggyback on the popularity of football. 

It’s important to recognise that fact because there are very real issues to get to grips with. The whole question of the different and sometimes conflicting interests of matchgoing fans and fans who will realistically never get to the live event but are nonetheless passionate in their support has to be thought through much more thoroughly than it has been by both clubs and fan organisations. And that is just one detail in a bigger picture of a growing disconnect between sections of the customer base and the business. 

Genuine, productive fan engagement is too important to be reduced to a transaction and hived off to a third party. 

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Great celebration this week as the announcement of a landmark £8m-a-season three-year deal to televise the FA Women’s Super League on the BBC and Sky was announced. Much has been made, rightly, of the boost in profile and income this will provide, and the deal is undoubtedly a good thing. 

Up to 44 matches are to be shown live, and broadcast slots will be Friday 18:30 GMT, Saturday 11:30 GMT, Sunday 12:30 GMT and Sunday 18:30 GMT. 

Over recent years, attendances at women’s games have been growing steadily, and along with it a vibrant culture of matchday support. For the fans that go to the games, those kick-off times could present some problems. Travelling back from London to Manchester after the game finishes at 20:15 on a Sunday night? Getting to Bristol from Liverpool for an 11:30 Saturday morning start? Having to take a half day off work to make a Friday 18:30 away game? Welcome to parity with the men’s game.

No doubt there will be some who dismiss this point as attempting to halt progress into that future we are all inexorably heading into. Maybe some will be as crass as the boss of Socios and attempt to play the discrimination card. But the truth is that a chance to learn from the failures of the men’s game’s TV deal seems to have been missed. The women’s game looks to be sleepwalking in to a situation that is a major bone of contention in the men’s game. 

But it’s early days, and there is still a chance to address the problem. What an example doing so would set. 

Post header photo by john crozier on Unsplash