Football Fever

Football is snake oil; a cure-all for dull lives and ailing brands alike. It injects a healthy dose of excitement into our otherwise need-driven lives and allows awkward geeky brands to associate themselves with the guys who are apparently having all the fun.

According to FIFA, football is now estimated to be played, watched and generally enjoyed by 3.2 billion people globally. By any measure its following is huge and, naturally, the game provides an almost irresistible pull for advertisers and marketers since they are paid to follow the crowd. It’s a perfect sponsorship opportunity.

Almost half of the world population has now been hooked on the heroin of soccer. And where there’s addiction there’s an opportunity to make money – obscene amounts of it. Business loves football and consequently the business of football has become titanic. But are the fans and game being overlooked in this vortex of deals, transactions and commercial expansion and what does this mean for sponsorship on TV?

Like the City of London, English football is at the forefront of globalisation. There appears to be a virtuous circle: it's here that cash flows most freely; talent follows the money; so from Milan to Yucatan, televisions are tuning in to our best games, guaranteeing yet more riches.
But not everyone approves. While most season-ticket holders welcome their teams' expensively purchased newcomers and dream of glory, gainsayers are saddened by the arrival of funny money - roubles, dollars, euros, bahts and kroner - which, they claim, will kill the game's community roots.

Last year, the Premier League paid out a record-breaking £531m on transfer fees, about half of which went abroad. Sir Trevor Brooking, the FA's director of football development, fears that foreign imports damage England's international prospects, because they squeeze out domestic talent. You can see his point, but do we care? I mean really care? How many fans would sell their 20-goals-a-season African striker in order for a kid from the local sink estate to see his name on the team-sheet? Others fret that top-flight football's ruthless commercialisation, combined with saturation media coverage, will destroy supporters' appetite for going to matches. But there has been little sign of that either. Yet.

Football fans are club junkies - very little will stop them getting their fix. But they know when they’re being ripped off. Indeed, the hairline cracks of broadcaster greed are beginning to show and it would seem that the limits of affordability are being reached. As I write three Scottish Premier League clubs are on the brink of administration and Setanta are struggling to find the cash to pay the £3 million they owe them and the £30 million they owe the English Premier league. They simply don’t have enough subscribers to make their ambitions pay.

Television audiences are definitely not what they were. The FA Cup Final this year achieved a TV audience of around 5 million compared to previous year’s audiences on the BBC which regularly pulled in excess of 10 million. The Setanta Sports (despite the return of Saint and Greavsie) and ITV broadcasts didn’t do anything for the appeal of the match even though Setanta pluckily made it free to air.

And the governing bodies still have the chutzpah to be upping the ante in the sponsor market. Although it’s early days, the FA is reportedly looking to secure £10 million for the FA Cup when it comes up for renewal in a year’s time which looks decidedly expensive for a sponsorship that was regarded as overpriced four years ago.

It would appear that businesses associated with football – the NGBs, the broadcasters, advertisers and sponsors - are beginning to lose sight of the needs of football. Moreover, if they and the clubs continue to short change the fans then the whole house of cards is likely to be blown apart by the winds of recession and stimulate utter rebellion in the serried ranks of supporters.

For sponsors, the fans are the ultimate objective. It is they who need to be nurtured, connected with and engaged. Everything else in football is a proxy; pay-TV, web sites, the club TV are all a means to an end. If we lose sight of the fans we lose sight of the goal. And if the fans walk so will the sponsors. Football will survive but the parasitic businesses that depend upon it will suffer.

If we try to take football away from the fans and force them to watch their club matches via overly restrictive and expensive TV channels, if we try to cage them into pricey pay-per-view pens for internationals, if we abuse their mobile phone numbers by blasting them with unwanted messages, if we overcharge for tickets, if we steal every opportunity to milk the audience without giving anything back we are in danger of turning football into an over-bred, steroid driven monster of a game that can only function when the veins on its muscle-bound body are pumped and swollen with cash. It’ll be ugly; it will get an audience of sorts but it won’t be football as we know it.

TV broadcasters beware. The fans will be the final arbiters of what works in football. They will find their game and they will choose to watch it where it best suits them to do so. And as they move, so the caravan of sponsors will follow.