CorpComms Magazine

'Some people believe football is a matter of life and death,' said the late Liverpool management legend Bill Shankly. 'I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.'

Certainly for many of the millions who follow the beautiful game, football is a priority ranked alongside - and sometimes above - their families, friends and finances.

So how do communications professionals set about communicating to this fanatical audience and other stakeholders such as sponsors, shareholders and residential neighbours of football grounds who face disruption to their lives every other weekend?

It's a task that occupies a growing army of communications professionals - some top clubs now employ as many people in their press offices as leading FTSE 100 companies.

Many clubs also employ external public relations agencies and most people in football communications have a story about the extremes of the job. Whether it's mopping up messes after drink-induced actions of star footballers, dealing with Arab or Russian takeovers or liaising with relatives of fans after stadia tragedies, football PR can feel like a unique combination of business, politics and showbiz.

'The thing you have to remember about football clubs is that they're completely unlike any other kind of company,' says Mark Edwards, partner at financial PR agency Buchanan Communications, whose clients have included Premier League outfits Aston Villa and Sunderland.

Part of the difference is that there are so many voluble stakeholder groups, from supporter associations to unofficial independent fan groups and from autocratic owners to shareholders of clubs quoted on stock exchanges.

Then there are local authorities, planning departments, local residents, sponsors and communities at large. But football clubs are also different because of the unyielding loyalties they command.

'If you were manufacturing a tomato sauce and one week it tasted great but the next week thousands of people said it tasted awful, people wouldn't buy your brand any more because it would be damaged' says Donna Cullen, director in charge of communications at Tottenham Hotspur.

'Yet in football, this happens all the time and clubs still command this amazing loyalty. We operate in an absolute crucible and are under the spotlight all the time. It's up there with doing communications for royalty and in politics.'

DISPROPORTIONATE INFLUENCE

David Bick, director at Square One Consulting, who has acted for clubs including Manchester United, Leeds United, West Bromwich Albion and Southampton, believes that the importance of clubs in their immediate localities and also internationally is totally disproportionate to their financial size.

'Most clubs are very small companies,' he says. 'In stock market terms, they don't even get onto the Richter scale. The reason they're important is because of their fans. The fans have to come first. Without the fans, they are nothing. Most clubs just don't see that. There are more and more that do get it but it is still a minority view.'

Certainly, football is taking communications more seriously, though Bick makes the point that football clubs have largely not taken advantage of the internet, where many club websites look tired, clunky and long outdated.

Amanda Docherty, head of communications at Arsenal, says that while it was unusual for many clubs to have PR departments when she joined the club 12 years ago, all Premier League clubs and most in the Football League Championship now have one.

'The remit has changed tremendously,' she says. 'When I started, it was not really about managing perceptions. It was much more reactive than proactive. I think football clubs have now learned about many different aspects of public relations.'

Indeed, she says that the 15-strong communications department at The Emirates Stadium cover everything from investor relations with the club's private shareholders to community social inclusion, diversity and education projects, charity projects and writing, designing and producing the match programme.

'We have a huge number of stakeholders,' she says. 'There are 180,000 members of Arsenal. Then there are the Junior Gunners and our charity ambassadors and all the people who write into the club. Anyone who writes to us gets a response from us, whether they are writing from Highbury or Nigeria.

'In terms of the community side of things, football clubs are now like blue chip companies in that they recognise the need to be socially responsible. It's not just coaching and football schools. We do an enormous amount of social inclusion programmes and charity fundraising because football clubs have the ability to bring people together. Last year, we raised £500,000 for Teenage Cancer Trust.'

Similarly, Cullen at North London rivals Spurs, where there are nine staff in the press office, says community involvement has been a 'real growth area' at a lot of football clubs.

This clearly includes dealing with all those complaints of inconsiderate parking in front of nearby residents' houses and unruly behaviour near the ground but she says this is much less of a problem nowadays.

SIZE MATTERS

A growing number of clubs are building new stadia on the edges of cities or in former industrial areas, while in Tottenham's case, she says the White Hart Lane ground has now been there longer than most of its neighbours and people have got used to the disruption.

Of course, a feature of football is its sharp divisions, the biggest of which is the gulf between clubs in the Premier League and their smaller and much poorer relations in the Championship and Leagues One and Two.

Matt McCann, head of communications at the Championship's Derby County, has experienced both sides of the divide, joining newly-relegated Derby County last December from Wigan Athletic, where he worked as the club went up through three divisions into the Premier League in as many years.

'A lot does depend on what division you're in. At Wigan, when we were in League One, the media interest was quite small. We had two local newspapers, both owned by the same group, BBC Radio Manchester, which covers nine clubs in its area, a local independent station, the club's own website and a local agency covering us. That was it,' he says.

'We got into the Championship and the interest increased but not phenomenally. Then we got into the Premier League and things really took off. Every national newspaper started following everything we did, as well as Sky Sports and other people who had no interest at all when we were lower down.

'But at Derby, it's a one club city and the local media is very powerful. That's the biggest change. You've got to control issues with highly-powerful local media after them and then you've got the fanzines and the supporters groups to deal with.'

Colin Wood, communications manager at Sheffield Wednesday, another traditionally big club presently languishing in the Championship, has also experienced a much smaller club at Colchester United.

'Everything we say gets lapped up by the media. When you're further down the league, that's not the case,' he says. 'It depends on what the local rivalries are and what sort of environment you find yourself in. With Colchester United we had to pitch things a lot more to get media attention.'

Another divide is that between the sports press and the financial journalist community, who became interested in football in the mid 1990s when a cluster of clubs floated on the London Stock Exchange.

'You cannot treat a sports reporter like you would treat a financial journalist,' says Edwards. 'They don't look the same or behave the same. You have to have a completely different approach to them.'

DIFFERENT INTERESTS

Many sports reporters, he says, have a poor grasp of financial or business matters. In any case, they are much more interested in who might be bought or sold than in the flow of money into and, more frequently, out of football clubs.

The pre-eminence of football matters can also pose problems when communicators are addressing shareholders, he adds.

'At many clubs, a lot of the shareholders are fans who have a few shares each. They're much more interested in who's going to be the next centre forward or centre half than in what kind of profit or loss the club has made and the supporter associations can became quite aggressive.'

Edwards also says that agency PRs can end up taking hands-on roles at the clubs that retain them. At Arsenal in the early 1990s, he recalls going along to Islington council meetings and taking complaints from agitated local residents when the club was trying to get planning consent for converting its famous North Bank of its old Highbury ground to an all-seater.

David Bick was acting for Leeds United in 2004 when the club was rapidly disintegrating and found himself dealing with a rape allegation against one of the players and separately having to front a press conference to announce the sacking of manager Peter Reid because there was no-one else to do it.

'I tend to get involved more in transactions and takeovers,' says Bick, a financial PR man who has a close relationship with Keith Harris, the investment banker and former Football League chairman who has brokered takeovers of Chelsea, Manchester City, Aston Villa and West Ham 'But we can take on that sort of job when we are asked to do it.'

McCann, meanwhile, once found himself thrust into the centre of a row between Wigan and the Greater Manchester Police over payment for match policing.

ALL ASPECTS OF LIFE

The police force at one stage threatened to withdraw policing for the first game of the season - against newly-crowned Premier League champions Chelsea - and therefore causing its abandonment unless payment was made but McCann and Wigan stood firm and the Premier League ended up intervening.

At Derby, he says his most remarkable moment came in January on the appointment of Nigel Clough as manager at the club where his late father Brian became a legend.

The appointment coincided with a full house for a cup match with Manchester United where Clough was given a rousing welcome. Soon afterwards, the film The Damned United about Brian Clough was released to the dismay of the Clough family, who disagreed with its portrayal of the man they loved.

At the request of the family, Derby decided not to publicly discuss the film. 'We got a lot of media attention but we chose to respect the family's wishes,' says McCann.

According to John Bick, who advised Manchester United whilst at City PR agency Financial Dynamics and now represents Spurs as a director of Hansard Public Relations, such instances show the range of stakeholder involvement that football communications now involves.

'There are different groups of stakeholders and at the end of the day you have to have respect for them and their individual needs and aspirations,' he says. 'You shouldn't ignore them just because they don't all own the club.'

Of course, such a popular force as football has enormous potential to be harnessed for positive public relations, as witnessed by the successful Kick Racism Out of Football campaign.

Next year, The Gates Foundation's efforts to largely eradicate malaria from Africa will fund a major campaign at the World Cup in South Africa where the organisers hope that football's reach will enable an educational PR initiative of a scale never before attempted.

But, as well as seeking to enhance and prolong life, football still has to deal with its darkest days.

DARK TIMES

Wood at Sheffield Wednesday says the club found itself in a strange situation in April at the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool supporters were crushed to death at the club's ground.

'In some ways the people of Sheffield are forgotten victims of Hillsborough. All the people who lost their lives were from Liverpool but it also affected Sheffield,' he says.

'The Liverpool families wanted the memorial service to be held in Liverpool so we were asked not to hold one. It was a difficult position but we felt we had to respect the families' wishes.' Football always knew that Shankly was wrong all along. 

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