Meet the Kilkenny man helping Sheffield United connect with fans

The man behind that John Egan-Sunday Game clip hurls for Lancashire in between pit stops at Old Trafford, Anfield, The Emirates, and, this Saturday, Stamford Bridge

MOVING ON UP: Eoin Doyle and John Egan celebrate Sheffield United’s promotion to the Premier League in 2019.

Turns out Sheffield United’s YouTube channel is more popular in Myanmar than the Moors, their TikTok account is a major hit here in Ireland, and both Facebook and Twitter are online spaces to be enjoyed as well as feared.

It says it all about their start to this Premier League season that a 12-second viral clip of John Egan kicking the ball from his hands when it had gone out of play at Anfield, with The Sunday Game theme tune as a backing track, is one of the highlights so far.

Six defeats and a draw from their opening seven games means the Blades sit second bottom in the Premier League heading into today’s meeting with Chelsea at Stamford Bridge.

After finishing ninth last term, following promotion from the Championship in 2019, Chris Wilder’s side are suffering from a dose of second season syndrome in the top flight.

Of course, with Covid-19 still raging and both Ireland and England now enduring national lockdowns for the second time, this is a season like no other.

With no supporters in the stadiums, the voice of the match-going fan is no longer the one which sets the agenda and can be used to judge the mood.

That has now moved online, and to the various social media platforms which clubs operate on. More than ever, it is crucial for clubs to get the tone right on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

In online terms, those are the key players and all have completely different challenges and demands.

And for Sheffield United, their strategy has been mapped out by a 25-year-old who grew up hurling for Cloneen, playing football for Railyard, and soccer for Deen Celtic in his native Kilkenny.

Eoin Doyle now hurls for Lancashire in Division 3B of the National League as well as in the Lory Meagher Cup, while his local Sheffield club is Fullen Gaels.

His day job, though, takes him to Bramall Lane every other week, with pit stops at Old Trafford, Anfield, The Emirates, and, on Saturday, Stamford Bridge.

“I was honoured and privileged to play for Ireland and the memories will last me a lifetime.”

Didzy ☘️👏pic.twitter.com/aypa489wVi

— Sheffield United (@SheffieldUnited) November 4, 2020

Doyle is the club’s social media manager who, after studying business in Waterford IT, wrote to every club below the Premier League looking for an internship.

Huddersfield Town gave him his chance in 2016 and he then joined Sheffield United two years ago.

With the tidal wave of interest that comes from being in the Premier League, their digital audience increased from 400,000 to 1.6 million in 2019/20.

More significantly, they topped the fan engagement table last season, edging out Wolves in second, champions Liverpool in third, and leaving Manchester United (sixth), Arsenal (eighth), Chelsea (10th), and Manchester City (19th) for dust when it came to their online activity.

“Our strategy is simple, we don’t want to be fake and pulling the wool over fans’ eyes,” Doyle explains. “How players interact together, how they get on are is what we are trying to capture.

“We don’t want them looking down the barrel at a camera and it feeling manufactured. We want the fans to feel like they at least know the players and the relationships they have with each other can hopefully come through.”

That much shone through at the end of their promotion-winning season in 2018/19, when Egan took the microphone at a player awards do and recited his own version of ‘Allez, Allez, Allez’.

“It was a late one but my gut instinct was that it was the kind of video that our fans would love to see straight away, and also bring through the personalities of the players,” Doyle explained.

He was right. The song became the soundtrack for supporters and transferred from a function room to the terraces. They are empty now but in Wilder they have a local manager who understands exactly what those fans want.

Chris Wilder - 2024 ✍️ pic.twitter.com/OqdDLum3S1

— Sheffield United (@SheffieldUnited) January 10, 2020

After all, he has the club crest tattooed on his leg and — when the pubs were still open — would drink with the same group of friends he attended matches with as a fan, even after becoming manager.

“Chris is very in tune with it all and some of the benefits of social media. You build a relationship with him so that he trusts you,” Doyle added.

“We did a piece to camera for when he signed a new contract last year and a script had been written for him. He was straight up and said it didn’t sound like him or how wanted to come across, so he changed it.” 

The club also doesn’t want players coming through the academy or in the Under-23s made out to become YouTube players, who only do things in games to make it into a compilation, so part of the strategy is to steer clear of that.

Egan has been one of the social media stars for Sheffield United, mostly because his performances on the pitch have provided such positive material.

At the back end of last season, for example, Doyle decided to intertwine footage of Egan scoring against Burnley with some of his later father, John Snr, doing the same for Kerry along with Michael O’Hehir’s commentary.

John Egan - 2024 ✍️ pic.twitter.com/ohPCbYVL75

— Sheffield United (@SheffieldUnited) August 21, 2020

It went down a treat, just like this season’s TikTok clip of Egan kicking the ball from his hands at Anfield. “I actually didn’t see it but one of the lads who was there with me saw it and said ‘I think John just kicked the ball like in Gaelic football’. That shows how much I talk about it with them over here!

“So I looked at the monitor and he was right, so we marked the time of it down and made sure to have it ready for the Monday. We were able to use The Sunday Game music because it was one of the trending sounds on the app that had already been used by a different creative.”

Just like journalists who are there to report on matches, Doyle and his colleagues will often spend much of the 90 minutes with their heads buried in laptops preparing their own copy and content.

For instance, if we see a trend with a player doing well we will make sure to have a clip of every one of his touches that we could put out. Ethan Ampadu had a very good game at Liverpool and even though we lost, the mood was still positive, so we knew it was okay to release that.

“On the flip side, after Man City, it wasn’t right for us to put out a clip of Sander Berge doing a nutmeg. We will keep it and use it another time, hopefully, but it’s not right to put out on Twitter because that is where our core base would be and if they aren’t happy you have to know that.”

YouTube is a bit different and that is where the club focus their attention on lengthier highlights packages, as well as on Facebook whose algorithm now rewards videos longer than three minutes that are capable of selling ad space.

There is a 10pm embargo for Premier League clips when a game kicks off at 3pm, while they must wait two hours after full-time on night matches.

“You have to be clever, we played Wolves recently and made sure to have Raul Jimenez in the thumbnail because we knew there would be Mexican fans at that time who would be interested in it.”

There is interest in everything, and it will not be long before the arrival videos of the players at the stadium will be sponsored and worked into contracts. The team sheets posted on Twitter are also sponsored, so too the classic game highlights posted every other day, and all of it adds to the annual pot of income which, while significant, would still not be enough to pay a week’s wages for most Manchester United players.

Doyle is part of the Covid-19 bubble at the club that allows him to continue to travel to each game. He is tested once a week and has a place on one of the two team buses. He will be in situ at Stamford Bridge three hours before the 5.30pm kick off and, along with one other colleague, will have his head buried in a laptop on the way home to make sure they hit the right note with their output.

“I was 12 when my local club Kilkenny City folded in 2007 and only really had Ireland games to go to. Waterford was an hour and a half away. So, when you come here, you realise football is a way of life for people in Sheffield.

“You have to understand that and know it means everything to them.”