All in podcast
Mads Davidsen is an experienced football consultant and title-winning Technical Director.
He is working with clubs to maximize their 20% - the proportion of an organization’s potential not pre-determined by economics or luck.
The football industry is famously fickle and short-term, with owners often throwing around desperate money in order to gain success.
Davidsen argues this must change.
It is now a tradition for Mario Leo and I to discuss digital sports trends at the start of each year. Mario runs RESULT Sports, a global digital sports media platform enabling mobile, social and web opportunities for rights-holders all over the world. Therefore his opinions are worth listening to.
This is the 50th edition of Sports Content Strategy and, quite fittingly, it is a long, deep conversation looking at all aspects of the business. We look at broadcasting, social media, sports business models, globalisation, streaming, data, the role of politics and much much more
Successfully rebranding their image is among the hardest tasks a sports organisation will ever seek to accomplish Fans, especially in football, are tribal, resistant change and lack a clear vision of what they want. But they will tell you, often straight in your face, what they don’t want. Bristol City seemed to have made a success of change in March 2019. So I travelled down to Ashton Gate to speak to chairman Jon Lansdown about the reinvention of the Robins.
These days, darts is now a sport of millionaires. It is well-marketed and winning top industry awards for the quality of its events. There are academies and challenger tours as the organisation builds for the future and competitions across the globe as it attempts to reach new markets.
Matt Porter has been CEO of the Professional Darts Corporation for more than a decade. He discussed the approach that has taken darts out of the pub, promoted it an entirely new way and pushed it onto the world stage.
Stijn Francis runs one of the biggest football agencies in Belgium with a client list including international stars such as Toby Alderweireld and Dries Martens.
Player representation is known as a difficult, precarious and unscrupulous industry. Regulation has been difficult to enforce and, as a result, many have been bitten when dipping their toes into these shark-infested waters.
That includes the players themselves, who often struggle to secure their financial future despite earning vast sums during a relatively short career.
This prompted Francis to write a book called The Bankrupt Footballer, a guide to financial management that outlines the potential pitfalls and how to avoid them.
In this podcast, we discuss his fiscal philosophy and how he helps his client stay solvent and satisfied.
Nick Callow is the Managing Director of HaytersTV, one of the most famous sports news agencies in the UK and breeding ground for a host of high-profile journalists.
A generation ago, they supplied ‘stringers’ and researchers, going to far-flung grounds on wet Wednesday nights to do whatever the newspapers required.
But that was when the FA Cup final was the only game on live television each season, readers poured over the reports of famous writers and the internet had not been invented.
Now Hayters trade in video more than words and are stepping out from the shadows to develop their own brands.
This is an exploration of how the UK sports media has changed since the start of the internet generation, how Hayters have adapted and where they are moving in the future.
The phrases ‘fan engagement’ and ‘fan experience’ were rarely used in sports before the turn of the millennium. Certainly, in the UK, a winning team was considered the key to supporter satisfaction.
That has changed in recent years and the Fan Experience Company have been at the vanguard of this movement. Director Mark Bradley has wide experience in challenging environments across England and Europe. His vision is not just Family Stands and face-painting, he argues that a coherent fan engagement strategy will reap a commercial return, especially for those clubs operating outside the upper echelons of the Champions League.
If data is the new oil then Customer Relationship Management is the process of mining and refining the information for business use.
Over the last few years, major clubs have spent millions of dollars on getting the right message to the right person at the right time on the right platform. But what if money is tight, you don’t have the scale and those who run the club would rather put their resources elsewhere.?
Bas Schnater is an international fan engagement consultant. He has just left Dutch football team AZ Alkmaar after two years running the marketing department.
He built a CRM ecosystem from the bottom up. Appointing a partner, dealing with internal stakeholders and the changes they must accept, managing the messaging, commercialisation v content.
There is a lot to consider but the improvements can be significant.
George Orwell once wrote that sport is “war minus the shooting”.
But that was in December 1945, just after the end of the second world war.
The use of sport as a political tool has evolved considerably since then.
Prof Simon Chadwick has studied the way football, F1 etc have been used as part of ’soft’ power plays by nations attempting to grow their ‘brand’ and authority.
While countries like China and Qatar, as well as clubs like PSG and Man City, spring to mind, the UK and the US are also adept at utilising their stars on the field to enhance their influence overseas.
Match of the Day is a British institution.
The BBC’s Saturday night football show started in 1964 and still sets the weekly agenda for the sport that dominates the UK and the League that enthralls the world.
So it is incredible to think that it took until 2007 to hear the voice of a female commentator for the first time.
In this podcast, Jacqui Oatley talks to me about the attention see received on the back of that appearance. We also discussed the state of play for women sports broadcasters and journalists in the UK. What is changing, what is not and, as usual, how the social media has changed the landscape.
As you’ll hear, everyone, including me, has a lot to learn.
Russian football is undergoing a makeover. It has just hosted a successful World Cup and its club sides are regulars in the latter stages of European competition. The Russian League revealed a radical rebranding last year and its leading club, Zenit St Petersburg, are thinking beyond the serious stereotype into which the country’s persona sometimes falls.
They are creating high polished content, translating it into 15 languages and are not afraid to take on the world’s big teams and major media outlets on social media.
New Media Director Egor Kretsan leads the club’s content strategy. He spoke to me about their approach.
The emerging football leagues around the world might consider the J.League as a model.
Since starting in 1993, it has formed the foundation upon which Japanese club teams have become a force in the AFC Champions League and their national side regulars in the latter stages of major international tournaments. They even co-hosted the World Cup in 2002.
Now, the J.League is looking to expand overseas using digital as a driver.
Kei Koyama, from their international development department, spoke to me about the past, present and future, including the J.League furoshiki (translated as 'wrapping cloth'). This is a digital asset hub which allows them to create better content quickly and efficiently.
We also discuss the competition’s very different demographics and the strategic importance of the 10-year broadcasting deal with DAZN.
Cricket, lovely cricket.
England's national sport has been under pressure for many years, with the four-day County Championship widely perceived as the domestic competition in the most precarious position.
However, there has been genuine hope in the blossoming audience for a relatively basic video streaming service synced with the traditional radio commentary.
It is a League-Wide scheme developed by the England and Wales Cricket Board but Somerset CCC have been at the forefront. Digital marketing & communications executive Ben Warren runs the service for the club.
With a controversial new franchise-based tournament starting next season and threatening to take attention from the longer-form game, the pressure is on.
But can digital media really help save county cricket?
In terms of digital and social media, Major League Baseball is perhaps the most enigmatic sport in the world.
We are constantly told that America’s pastime is past its prime. It is an ‘aging sport’ that is struggling to hold on to the coat-tails of the major players, NBA and NFL whilst coming under increasing pressure from up-and-coming sports like soccer.
However, MLB Advanced Media and incarnations were at the very forefront of innovation long before other sports started to plough resources into digital and continue to be a leading light.
The Colorado Rockies are not the most fashionable team in baseball but they have built a reputation for quirky interaction and content with personality.
Julian Valentin leads the strategy at Coors Field. With the 2019 baseball season fast approaching we discussed the past, present and future for the Rockies and how the hell his team covers 162 regular seasons games!
The Sunday Times described Alex Fynn as the ‘Spiritual Godfather of the Premier League’. He is uncomfortable with the label but, in many ways, it is an apt description. The marketer and author also had an influence on the inception of the Champions League and he is critical how both conceptions have developed.
Now, Fynn is outlining his proposal for a fully-fledged European League. The concept has been talked about a lot in recent months and, if you believe the revelations in Der Speigel last year, the Continent’s elite clubs are trying to hammer out a format right now. It is fraught with difficulties but, more importantly, is it dangerous to the future of the game?
Increasingly, football clubs come in groups. Wealthy owners have multiple teams in different leagues on different continents. Sometimes there is an obvious vision, sometimes not.
US-based soccer investor Jordan Gardner is taking a different approach. He is leading a consortium that hopes to take over a top-flight Danish club and change their business model. A major part of that is developing talented players from the overseas, primarily the fertile development area of the US, then selling them on to major clubs.
It is a twist on an established approach and the among the first to link the North American game and Europe in such a direct way.
Daniel Weston is a Germany international cricket players with a distinctly Aussie accent. But, having had considerable success growing the sport at home, his love for the sport has inspired him to start the Europe Cricket League. The inaugural event will see the best clubs in France, Romania, Russia, Denmark, Italy and Holland do battle at the La Manga resort in Spain this summer.
The focus will be to serve fans with a predominately digital and social media product, not only because it is cost-effective and modern but the ignorance of the sport by traditional media has forced fans to follow it that way.
Time to explore a new venture whose audience has been entirely overlooked until now.
This time last year sports social media analytics expert Mario Leo discussed his reflections on 2017 and his predictions for 2018.
We decided to repeat the feat this year with Mario picking out six major trends.
Given that his company, Result Sports, provides social media data on some of the world biggest football teams, Mario is in a perfect position to predict the next 12 months.
The Norwegian FA are trying a potentially revolutionary idea at their national team games.
Instead of merely branding matches, they are revealing the true meaning of them to their supporters.
Using a sociological approach to service design they have reimagined the experience at their games by concentrating on the symbols, rituals and stories of Norwegian football.
