Larry Ryan: What is football trying to sell us next?
Paul Pogba has linked up with Cryptodragons, a digital collectible company that promises ‘10k limited collection of one-of-a-kind NFT Eggs’.
One of these days, I will work out what exactly an NFT is and how to acquire one. It will be too late, of course. I will be Joe Kennedy’s shoeshine boy, putting every penny in ethereum just as the chain gets blocked or whatever.
It’s doubtless already too late, now the crypto world has set its sights on the people traditionally most easily parted from their money — football fans.
Things seem to have escalated on this digital collectible front while the Premier League was away for a few days, taking stock.
Man City signed a mysterious deal, then suspended it when they appeared to struggle to find out who they’d signed it with. And Paul Pogba, keen to convince Graeme Souness he is focused on a return to fitness, is touting something called crypto dragons. We look forward to Keano’s analysis of that market. Do me a favour!
There’s plenty of other examples. So it’s probably fair to say that football is gearing up to give punters another ‘opportunity’ to show their support. Has settled on another way to ‘drive engagement’ with the brands.
And it comes at a good time, for football, this new means of selling air, with a small bit more regulation likely some day soon on the betting industries it has done pretty well out of.
Some of us are still processing, as they say, the frank lesson in how football now works delivered lately by Manchester United chief executive of media Phil Lynch.
The interview, with the podcast, drew particular attention for Phil’s revelation that United “pull twice a day fan sentiment graphs for every one of our players”.
He elaborated: “We have certain thresholds that alert us when we see fan sentiment going one way. When that happens we start to work with the player and his team individually to try to start to counter that narrative a little bit.”
We could picture Harry Maguire, after another shocker, going full Kendall Roy from to his personal ‘team’: “I might need you to take my cultural temperature. Stick the sociopolitical thermometer up the nation’s ass. Just feed me the metadata.”
And after counting the down thumbs and crunching the hashtags, maybe Harry’s people came up with the idea of cupping his ears after scoring against Albania.
I suppose we knew, deep down, this was going on. But it was an eye-opener all the same, having it confirmed that there are algorithms out there, combing social, ready to trigger an alarm when Fred misplaces one pass too many and the punters get upset about it.
In one way, it could fill us all with an enormous sense of empowerment, that we are being seen, as they say. And heard.
No wonder, in this environment where every voice matters, exiled thought leader Richard Keys can’t be sure whether he was responsible for Norwich firing their gaffer. He certainly couldn’t rule it out, in a wide-ranging blog this week, which also urged Marcus Rashford to ‘leave it there’ with the helping hungry children.
“I’m glad I had a go at them a fortnight ago…,” Keysy wrote. “I’m not suggesting I’m the reason they fired Danial (sic) Farke, but isn’t it funny how the sporting director and owners have a panic-up when they find themselves under pressure?”
We are all Keysys now. And football is presumably monitoring the fan sentiment index 24/7/365 whether they are hiring Stevie G, or bringing back Dani Alves, or telling us that ketchup is now off the menu in the canteen.
And yet, on another level, there would appear to be a fundamental lack of respect for fan sentiment in the notion that these are just figarys that can be turned around by a little massaging of the narrative.
While we can all feel for Fred or Harry Maguire in these scenarios, I suppose we assumed the priority might be that they try to stop misplacing the passes or making the gaffes, if at all possible, rather than embark on a campaign to persuade the punters their opinions are all wrong.
“In a lot of cases it’s just emotion,” is how Phil Lynch put it, of the fans’ views. And emotion is something the professionals know how to manipulate. With ‘content’.
Unfortunately, people have now started to question the authenticity of some of this content, especially the constant stream of social media apologies coming out of United after each fresh catastrophe. And that can’t be ideal for Phil and his Premier League brethren, who specialise in ‘building reach via authentic storytelling’.
But there was lots more interesting stuff from Phil, including a key detail which possibly opened his eyes early in life to the true potential to change people’s opinions.
“I grew up an Arsenal fan but mid-90s like a lot of other people globally I became a Manchester United fan.”
He now says United’s mammoth fanbase is divided, in the databases, into “seven cohorts” — from the “diehard fans to the casual neutral fan that might support three or four other clubs”. Whichever cohort you belong to, the colour of your money is the same. And emotion sometimes has its place.
“You got to warm the audience up. You gotta build the emotional connection with them. They gotta understand the history. And then over time there will be opportunities to sell. But it’s not about that.”
No, it is not about that. And United are one of the few clubs that don’t ‘monetise’ their social media accounts. But then there’s a longer game to be played too.
“As we start to have that relationship we get more and more data from it and we can start serving you specific content you like and it becomes that self-fulfilling loop.”
And so you get the impression we might be giving away more than we are getting back from football, in filling up the fan sentiment indexes. We are putting the thermometer in our own ass and no doubt our metadata will soon be put to good use in this brave new arena of digital collectibles.
