Football's search for meaning
As TV revenue plateaus, clubs need creative direction to save alienated fanbases.
Thanks to everyone who sent kind words about my last essay, ‘Nostalgia in the age of loneliness’. That was a piece I’d had in my head for a really long time and I was pretty relieved to see it finally out there in the world.
It helped made space for this piece. So, for that, I guess I’m doubly grateful. This one is a distillation of conversations I’ve had with football clubs and brands over the years, helping to (hopefully) guide them to more thoughtful connection with fans through storytelling.
Anyway, I hope you like it and get something out of it—I really enjoyed writing it. If it sparks an idea in you, please let me know: I’m a freelance consultant and always down to chat. And, if you do happen to like it, please smash that Like button on the Substack app or, on email, share it with some of your pals. I’d appreciate that.
All the best,
Sam
I.
Capitalism frantically merging with extant football culture is nothing new. For at least three decades, it’s pretty much been the whole point of the game’s existence: padding its craven bottom line with ever-thicker insulation of consumerism masquerading as community, marketing masquerading as memory.
One thing that brings me a little relief is that the whole ‘football = fashion’ thing is finally on the wane. It still exists, of course—mostly off on its own zombified trajectory, sludging its turgid way from lookbook to lookbook, feasting on the festering remnants of a streetwear economy built on class tourism and the pocket money of spoilt teens from the Home Counties—but, thankfully, the virus has been contained. A football shirt worn with jeans is no longer vaunted as revolution.
For at least half a decade, it was a trend the game was all-too-happy to welcome and fans came along for the ride. In retrospect the late-2010s glee over the crossover between football and fashion was fun-if-naive at best. At worst it was wilful gullibility; desperation to see this stupid hobby we obsess over—a game! it’s a game!—culturally legitimised as ‘art’ once and for all.
But the true benefit of all this optimistic, aesthetic bollocks was, thank god, never about the clothing.
It was never about ‘fashion’ at all. It was a desire for world-building.
Take Venezia FC, a team often dismissed as ‘just a fashion club’. Venezia’s success has been a masterclass in creative direction. A small Italian team whose kits (and accompanying launches) have helped them punch far above their weight culturally, the way they have been reduced to ‘style over substance’ by some is reductive. It wasn’t just handsome shirts on beautiful women lounging on a gondola (although I’m sure that didn’t hurt). It all served to create a larger story.
Unable to provide the funds necessary to help the club compete in Serie A, Venezia nonetheless capitalised on the groundswell of goodwill provided by fans enticed by those lovely shirts to produce a base for a football club to survive. Where many teams face constant threat of liquidation1, Venezia thrives.
Its ace card was in selling fans not just a jersey—not fashion—but a fantasy of what football could be: football as a romantic, aesthetic, artistic pursuit. It’s not a story that will work for every club, but for Venezia, it allowed them to reflect the fantasy vision of Venice that it projects to the world. Every element of its social-first storytelling—from its art deco-inflected match day graphics to its highly-polished photography and kit design—sought to work towards the “idea” of this impossibly classy city on the water.
The message was clear: Buy their shirt and enter their world.
II.
Job titles are fucking meaningless and the nebulous nomenclature of the employment structure is for wankers, but no title attracts quite as much ire as ‘creative director’.
The role has become a meme unto itself: a shorthand for privileged bros with a nice laptop, those plissé Issey Miyake trousers, and the words of Rick Rubin ringing in their AirPod Pros. The sort of guy who parrots “Everything kind of happens the way it's supposed to happen, we just watch it unfold” while you’re trying to get them to just write their assigned slides on the pitch deck so we can all pack up and go home.
But, annoying as it may be, I believe the role of ‘creative director’ is one that can be of great benefit to a lot of brands, especially in football. While the fashion world has not always been renowned for its depth, it is a market that has added increasing importance to the CD, tasking them with helping communicate a brand’s wholesale strategy for speaking to the world. In football, too, they can act as a kind of emotional detectorist in the sport’s search for meaning, using storytelling to combine the economic imperatives of business with the kind of community-building which has undoubtedly been lost in recent decades.
The ability to apply a brand’s vision to the world—to help create, codify, or crystallise its shape and scope—is central to the importance I place on the role.
A great creative director combines aesthetic vision with brand strategy to produce a coherent, overarching story, ideally allowing for synergy between values social, artistic, and economic within the confines of a commercial entity.
You might’ve seen Crystal Palace’s hiring of marketer Kenny Annan-Jonathan as the club’s ‘creative director’ last week. Publications across fashion and sport have been quick to laud the appointment as ‘the Premier League’s first creative director’. And, while I choose to remain hopeful about Crystal Palace’s plans, the fact that the title is not ‘creative director’ but ‘creative lead for retail products’ still gives me a twinge of concern.
While job titles are (as mentioned) mostly nonsense, and the true shape of the role remains to be seen, Palace’s choice to omit the precise wording of ‘creative director’ in the announcement still feels significant. I worry that a business as inherently fearful as a football club2 will relegate the role of creative director to something akin to giving the club shop a quick lick of paint.
Last year when the New York Knicks announced it was hiring its first creative director in Kith founder Ronnie Fieg—a lifelong Knicks fan and the tastefully-corny streetwear precursor for Teddy Santis’ more-refined Aimé Leon Dore—it felt like a step forward for basketball. It was an overdue reclamation of basketball’s cultural importance with a renewed effort from the Knicks to consolidate its position in a sport that threatens to leave it behind, helmed by a local boy come good.
As per a profile of Fieg that dropped alongside basketball magazine Slam’s exclusive announcement of the move last November:
The immediate work, however, doesn’t call for an immediate jersey overhaul or redesign of the hallowed Madison Square Garden hardwood. Rather, he’s opting for building out the consistency of the way the general public views the Knicks’ brand. “It’s going to be my responsibility that they also love the brand the same way I do,” he says.
Consistency. Perception. Affinity. Authenticity. Sense of place.
All vital aspects of effective brand strategy; all operating under the auspices of a named creative director. It speaks to a level of trust (even if we are yet to see Fieg get his mitts on the blue-and-orange jersey) that I don’t think many football clubs are currently capable of.
In the words of one Tweet from Athens Kallithea FC—a Greek outfit recently taken over by the team behind Venezia FC’s recent rise:
“The bigger the club, the more art comes into conflict with corporate and commercial forces.”
III.
Football is a game whose world keeps shrinking.
Even as it sells itself to ever-more global eyeballs, expanding markets at a rate that’d make Stephen Hawking’s calculator explode, it has never felt more isolating. Fewer fans than ever can afford to go to games. Those that can are increasingly gate-kept by moves like antisocial kick-off times (the Premier League will begin introducing 8pm Saturday kick-offs this season) that favour foreign broadcast audiences over the souls in the stadium.
But, as profits begin to plateau, even in the white-knuckle fiscal throat-grip of the Prem, TV cannot save you.
Okay, now for some numbers to back up the moral grandstanding:
The buoying effect of broadcast revenue has given football clubs a false sense of security. In a 2022 research paper, 14 of 20 clubs in the 2019/20 Premier League season reported that broadcast revenue made up more than 67% of their total revenue. Six clubs saw TV money make up over 80% of their revenue, with the highest reported at 87%.
Here’s a few choice cuts from the paper, pragmatically-titled ‘Assessing the financial stability of football’:
While international broadcast rights for the EPL continue to grow, the domestic broadcasting income is showing signs of plateauing, and other international leagues have seen a fall in domestic broadcasting income.
Clubs relegated from the Premier League have on average a reduction in income of £53 million (47%) in their first season in the Championship. This income figure includes parachute payments from the Premier League.
Furthermore, while clubs are highly reliant on one source of income (and/or key providers of funds), this impacts their financial resilience to withstand major economic shocks (not just the pandemic). There is evidence of a lack of economic resilience across most clubs (including the wealthiest ones).
Where risks of this nature appear reasonable during periods of strong growth in revenue, they are likely to have a great impact if the growth in broadcast revenues falters—something we are seeing in other European leagues.
Football is increasingly putting all its eggs into one basket. According to an Ofcom survey this week, only 54% of young people watch any kind of live television. At the current trajectory, a crucial new generation of fans, the ones clubs (and advertisers) are so desperate to serve, will be missed.
To recapture the imagination, we need to favour depth over breadth. As social media teams clamber over themselves to indulge fickle algorithms, it’s a simple fact that, as a species, we haven’t changed that much. And story always wins out in the end.
“We are, as a species, addicted to story,” writes Jonathan Gottschall in his book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. “Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.”
Everything from the look-and-feel of the match day experience to the tone of social media posts is storytelling. Great creative direction can help bring real-world and online storytelling together, making them feel part of the same whole.
Some can be quick to dismiss younger generations as brain-dead weaklings with an enfeebled relationship with social media, preferring to stay at home rather than venture outside. ‘They want content that is digital-first with only digital-first things to say. The game going on in the stadium is of little concern’. I’ve seen this opinion in senior marketing positions, and the result is content that panders to the ‘idea’ of a younger generation rather than attempting to galvanise it, favouring social media growth over true brand affinity.
An evolution of storytelling—inside and outside of the stadium—is needed to make football mean something again to a generation who increasingly see their values better reflected elsewhere.
IV.
Let’s use the slo-mo wreckage of Paris Saint-Germain as another quick example.
The French club has spent €1.3 billion on players since it first started dribbling around FFP legislation in 2011. They have, in that time, featured dozens of iconic names in their ranks, and currently have the world’s best player in Kylian Mbappé on their books. They even added a paradigm-shifting Jordan-sponsorship into the mix, alongside choice collaborations with renowned names in art and streetwear. They play fast, flowing football and are art-directed to a T, and yet they remain a club that is impossible to love.
In short: they have the creative, but no direction.
It’s little wonder PSG are currently mired in civil war, its fanbase increasingly alienated, its players scrambling to escape their lucrative contracts. They did not seek to build connection, put forward a story, or build a reason why you should care. It could only dine out on morbid curiosity for so long, stuffing more and more world-class players into the squad’s clown car before driving it into the Seine.
Much of the team’s downfall has been blamed on its pathological inability to win the Champions League. But really, it’s about so much more than that. Because if success on the pitch doesn’t come, you have to ask yourself:
What else is left?
V.
In the end, you have to make people care. That’s all the job boils down to. Make fans care and make fans dream.
The ‘why’ in football has always been presented as a simple question with an equally simple answer. ‘Because we want to win.’ But winning alone does not build affinity. Ask PSG, a club who won two French league titles before their Qatari takeover and nine in the dozen years since, and are still struggling for relevance. Compare their story with that of arch rivals Olympique de Marseille (one league title in thirty years but with a stadium that is absolutely fucking jumping every single week) and I think you’ll be hard-pushed to find anyone who’d choose Paris over Provence.
Football’s fight for relevance in the next decade is a search for meaning. With fanbases increasingly alienated, it’s clear that meaning won’t hang on the league table.
Storytelling wins. To quote Simon Sinek: “People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.”
Even with suitable investment in creative, it needs to drive a brand’s wider Why. In divorcing the aesthetic from the strategic, the artistic from the commercial—in keeping the creative, without the direction—you lose the opportunity to tell meaningful stories that actualise true affinity. In football, you lose the chance to make the club you support into the club you love.
A final example: Arsenal. Few have capitalised on sense-of-place better in recent years. Geography and history are, after all, the things that make each team unique. Arsenal have recently re-energised its fanbase by re-affirming its connection to the local community and doubling-down on its sense of identity. It's a move that often requires reminding fans why they fell for the team in the first place, which is a perfect vantage point from which to tell stories.
Priding itself on a heritage of multiculturalism and a fanbase reflective of the local area in a way few London clubs can replicate, the club’s highly-covetable ‘cool’ status is pretty unassailable (despite a few decidedly wonky kit choices from the Puma days).
What’s been most interesting is how these off-pitch aspects have clearly helped drive Arsenal’s overall strategy3. It balances the necessary ‘hygiene’ content (mostly match day info and training ground photos) with creative work that feels confident, tangible, and filled with the lived experience. A good example is shown by foregrounding a club fanzine like Eighteen86, which connects the match-goer with the online international fan in a way that feels authentically nostalgic and warmly aspirational, while feeling lightyears ahead of its peers. Their messaging: there is nowhere better to be a football fan in London right now than N7, whether you’re there in body or spirit.
All these small choices matter. The result is a surge in positivity from Arsenal’s notoriously discerning following. It all has a tangible effect on a team who, after trusting in the slow burn of Arteta’s process, are back to being credible title challengers for the first time in two decades.
If that sounds reductive, it’s worth remembering how big an impact atmosphere can have on a match. The magic of football has always been in its dialogue between the pitch and those in the stands, the ability for fans—suitably charged—to seem to suck the ball towards the opposition goal through pure emotion.
Storytelling is a huge part of that work. The club’s marketing teams combines production of emotive creative that foregrounds player stories, fan emotion, and local pride while players are given leeway to talk to the press with humanity. Bukayo Saka, for example, is a fantastic player—one of their own—but, thanks to the storytelling around him, he is loved beyond his partisan club fanbase. Aaron Ramsdale’s recent piece with the Player’s Tribune helped paint his character and background in a whole new light. Jack Wilshere—a revered Academy talent robbed of his prime by cruel luck with injuries—has been welcomed back into Arsenal as a youth team manager; his story has come full circle and his comeback is treated to an intimate video treatment worthy of the journey.
This kind of emotive storytelling shouldn’t be an exercise in drumming up false narratives. You cannot make something that isn’t there. You cannot sell Burnley like Venezia (sorry, lads). But every game, every player, every manager, and every club contains endless stories; every fan in the stand and every stand in the stadium, every city and suburb, every pub and cafe that lines its streets, every train station, bus stop, and corner shop has a story that helps create the world around a football club. Clubs began as centres of community, and it's high time they put in the work and reclaimed that position, reflecting its people’s lived reality instead of pursuing something akin to hero worship.
In possession of a focused strategy, implemented from top to bottom, with a consolidation of its values and goals into an clearly-defined point-of-view, with the trust given to its creative teams and respect given to its fans, a football club can become more than a football club once more.
It can be a lens through which we see the world.
From the 2022 paper referenced in section III, Crystal Palace reported broadcast revenue as 80% of their total revenue and change is scary.
It should be noted here that Arsenal are certainly not perfect in this regard. Accusations of sports-washing through its ‘Visit Rwanda’ sponsorship and its handling of the Thomas Partey case cannot be overlooked, and do a lot to spoil any sheen of positivity around the club. I use Arsenal as an example of how great creative direction can accelerate goodwill and even social change, but it’s still a sobering reminder of the cognitive dissonance endemic in society and big businesses, and shows just how far we have to come.
The contrast between how Arsenal and PSG are handling the WHY is such a good one!
Loved this piece, Sam!
To answer the tweet, small clubs have less to lose. Smaller fan base, lower minimum quantities and so on. They are more of a creative project than a football club now tbh. They capitalize off the emotional / creative side to fill the gap on the pitch and mismanagement of sporting funds.