Own goal: the true cost of getting it wrong

Diminishing the ‘brand’, fan trust, and their investment

Blog Andy Drake – Managing Consultant UK

The full impact of the failed European Super League has yet to play out, but enormous damage has already taken place, all of which would have been avoided with coherent strategy and insight.  Superficially, the idea of the continents’ biggest teams and the world’s best players playing each other regularly was a winner, on and off the pitch – right? Well, no. As a rabid football fan and an always very curious insight person, this week’s calamitous ‘soft launch’ of the European Super League has some salutary lessons for anyone involved in strategy and insight. We could discuss it for 90 minutes and might need extra time but at DVJ we see some obvious strategy and insight lessons.

1. Knowing your audience and how to communicate with them

Whilst the broadcast rights in football are vast and truly global, 6 of the 12 teams signed up were English. At DVJ, we think to understand your audience, you need to understand what drives them, and it’s often emotional and deep-rooted. Football is often described as ‘tribal’ and it certainly is. It’s not clear who commissioned the ESL members’ research, but leaked documents talked of simplistic notions of ‘legacy fans’ and ‘fans of the future’.  As a real ‘legacy fan’, it made me laugh, and it has already hatched a plethora of mini merchandise and hashtags. But the really serious point comes back to tribes. Many companies are passionate about the perspective of understanding tribes, I think immediately of people like Mark Adams at Vice Media.

Well, let me tell you about my tribe (a Premier League member outside the ESL tent) – it’s fiercely loyal, it’s smart, it’s complex with ‘prestigious influencers’ (world boxing champions, politicians, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and thousands of ‘ordinary’ fans). We have travelled all over Europe together, we meet for beers and talk as much of glorious failure and the odd dash of triumph, we don’t buy items that have our rivals colours in or buy brands that sponsor our fiercest rival and by the way, we hope to win a few games from time to time. We are defined by those connections and they go way beyond the event. And we all belong to a larger tribe, one that loves what remains of the ‘beautiful game’. You can see what happened when you rattled the collective tribe this week, six billionaires ‘melted’ in 24 hours and the dominos collapsed. They thought it was about ‘legacy’ and ‘future’, and about the perceived massive potential audiences in Asia and the US (who are important) but they were looking entirely through the wrong lens. Quite why and how nobody intervened is another issue, but billionaires often go unchallenged (another message was the failure to challenge the hierarchy).

“The damage to the brand, their personal reputation, and the value of their asset will inevitably take a hit.”

2. Context is key

All research and strategy need to understand the context of the ‘moment’ and its customer’s thinking. English football fans, like everyone else, have lived through fifteen months of a global pandemic, where their obsession has inevitably been a pale imitation of the real deal. As is often said, football without fans is nothing. The tribes already had heightened senses and if anything, needed understanding from their clubs. Interestingly, several of the clubs already had a reputation for being detached from their fan base. Brands ignore context at their peril.

3. Actively listen

At DVJ, we passionately believe in the power of storytelling and fundamentally, that translates to active listening rather than ‘prescriptive’ narrow questions. Bluntly, the lead protagonists in this escapade were tone deaf. They not only didn’t know their tribes but also failed to listen and arguably compounded with press releases that showed little humility or contrition. The damage to the brand, their personal reputation, and the value of their asset will inevitably take a hit.

4. Timing is everything

This one is simple. If you are going to do the research, do it early. We advocate early-stage testing of new concepts, the ability to highlight showstoppers, the opportunity to iterate and improve. We don’t know the full details of what happened here but what we do know is it had a 167-page legal agreement, senior leaders taking themselves out of the games’ existing governing bodies, and 12 of the leading European heavyweights going public and being humiliated within 24 hours. An extraordinary failure to do the basics upstream.

5. Use local knowledge

The ‘global’ research not only looked through the wrong lens but clearly failed to see the value of understanding what it meant at the local level, particularly in the key 3 European markets where the teams had their most ardent following. An American investment bank and three American owners, in particular, spectacularly failed to read their fans.

6. Have a clear strategy

The inside track suggests that the drivers of this launch were juggling what the objectives were as late as last Thursday. The media delivery of the concept by the Real Madrid owner, Florentino Perez, was hopeless, for example, a one-page after-thought on a woman’s parallel Super League that excluded leading European teams. It seems ‘revenue riches’ were the strategy, with little or no thought as to a joined-up strategy on how that might be achieved. Clarity of strategy and the business questions are a prerequisite for good insight.

Ultimately, no amount of outstanding insight would have made the basic strategy a good one, but it would have saved the brand’s reputation, the connection with its tribes, and protected its ‘assets’. Perhaps, the greatest own goal in the history of the game.