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The Footballer as a Star Product

Football: the Perfect Metaphor of Our Time

Text Jordi Argenter Writer

© Claudio Chaves / Mundo Deportivo

© Albert Armengol

Once upon a time, when clubs sold articles other than membership cards and tickets, they did so on the sly, as it were, and drew no benefit from their infrastructures except on match days. Now clubs have no qualms about squeezing their star players as a multiple source of revenue.

Every now and again I am struck by the idea that much of the money spent on television advertising since the appearance of what is known in Catalan and Spanish by the English word zapping has more than likely been squandered or at least there has been a lack of control over its profitability. The proliferation of choice with Terrestrial Digital Television (TDT) and the other digital satellite and cable channels makes whoever has the remote keep on changing channel until they find the spectacle that most satisfies them. This operation, which we call zapping, is the first step leading to the loss of precise control over the profitability of investments in advertising. The viewer also uses it to skip the commercials and see what is on on other channels. It is estimated that a daily average of 30% of the people watching television in Spain use zapping in this way. 

       The second step, which is complementary to the first, is determined by the ambiguity of the audimeter, the most suitable instrument for measuring television audiences. However, the audimeter has serious drawbacks of which some business executives are often unaware. I am referring, first of all, to the fact that there are just 1,500 audimeters, an amount that seems rather small for a population of forty-seven million inhabitants. And I am referring, secondly, to the fact that these devices have been measuring audiences by thirty-minute time slots without distinguishing between programmes and commercial breaks, and fail to detect whether, when the commercials come on, the viewer turns the sound off or down. Nor is much known about which family member or members sit in front of the television set. And lastly, so as not to keep on and make myself a bore, until now the audimeters did not record the digital channels. All in all, a trifle, but one which was the cause of considerable concern among true professionals.
 

The saturation of television advertising 

Another factor reinforcing my idea about the squandering of money spent on television advertising is that the messages being conveyed have reached saturation point. The president of Henkel Italia, Giovanni Montorfano, put it much better than I could myself. In an interview published in Il Mondo in December 1988 he said, ‘People are really exaggerating. In advertising, the use of hyperbole, when it goes beyond a certain limit, becomes counterproductive. I am referring to the forced pressure either in the contents of the message or in the quantity: when the agglomeration goes beyond a certain limit, the audience’s memory declines to practically zero. And some exaggerate also in the race to monopolise the prime time slots for products that have no need of this type of space. In the market you can see some obvious cases of overspending – companies that seem not to have realised that, for some products, once they have reached certain limits, there is absolutely no use in making them more widely known. It is much more effective to trust in a marketing mix... overcoming a certain laziness and inertia in finding alternative paths’.

       In this situation, the answer hit upon by creatives consisted in making the product appear in the programme itself, forcing the viewer who wanted to see the show to swallow, at the same time, almost without being aware of it, the product’s presence. And it was the emergence of private television in Italy which adopted the strategy of integrating the product, the brand and sales promotion into television broadcasts themselves to its maximum degree of development. The result was the television promotion, an authentic innovation combining promotional surplus value (a game and a prize) and a show (presenters, singers, dancing, games, comedians, imitations, interviews, stage decor, feathers, sequins, etc.). And all that keeps the viewer glued to their seat for the benefit, of course, of the product and the brand. Nobody turns on the TV to watch a commercial, however impressive and creative it might be, but many people do turn it on to watch a variety show, a game show or a programme of entertainment. This is the case, for example, of ‘Premiatissima’, which appeared on Italy’s Canale 5 in 1982. Devised by the great creative Paolo Girone, it basically consisted in a contest between the most famous Italian singers for whom viewers could vote with slips of paper to be found in drums of Dixan washing powder and participate in this way in drawing millions of prizes every week as well as the big final prize. It should be added that there was a giant packet of Dixan in the middle of the stage. The funny thing is that what made the audience buy the drums of Dixan with the voting slip inside them was not just being able to take part in the competition and have the chance to win a prize, but also the involvement in choosing the best singer. In Catalonia, TV3 produced ‘Filiprim’, a programme broadcast every weekday evening containing some of the best television promotions with their corresponding competitions and a very good show compered by Josep Maria Bachs, the most popular presenter of the time, which had as its cornerstone the ill-fated comedian Jaume Perich. 

A mass spectacle 

There is no doubt that the Romans’ panem et circenses would nowadays have to be translated as bread and football, at least in a large part of the world in which this sport predominates over rugby, cricket, basketball, baseball and others. I won’t attempt to quantify this, as it seems perfectly plain. In this case we also have one of the two components of television promotion—spectacle—which can help us overcome all the problems besetting TV commercials and arouse consumers from their profound torpor. 

        For a long time now, football has been a spectacle. At the beginning, the spectators were the supporters of the teams at the grounds where the matches were played. It was a neighbourhood sport. I remember the particular case of one of my mother’s uncles, Joaquim Riera, an absolutely delightful person who told me how Joan Gamper saw him playing a game in his local neighbourhood and signed him up for Barcelona, the club of which he was the chairman and founder. The signing-on fee consisted in paying for his tram fares to the ground. How things have changed! The decisive turning point came when the spectacle crossed over onto television and became part of popular culture. And at the time when satellite and cable communications systems became operative, television broadcasts spread all over the world. The spectacle became a business involving huge amounts of money. 

       For the purposes of advertising, which has to overcome the saturation of commercials and consumers’ lack of attention, the communication creatives saw in football a spectacle that, in conjunction with a powerful sponsor, provided a major opportunity to shake television viewers out of the drowsiness brought on by the long streams of advertising messages during the commercial breaks. When they talk about powerful sponsorship, they mean a varied range of techniques that get away from the pure commercial, yet retain the decisive impact characteristic of the spectacle.
 

Competition sponsorship 

One of these techniques—the simplest of all—is pure sponsorship of the matches of a particular competition, such as the First Division of the Spanish Football League, under the auspices of Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria. The bank of which Francisco González is the chairman has committed 60 million euros for three seasons of this league to which it now gives its name. The Santander, for its part, pays around seven million euros a year, at least until 2012, when its contract expires, to sponsor the Libertadores Cup, South America’s equivalent of the Champions League. At the draw for the clubs to face the six Argentinean teams, held in Asunción, the bank’s chairman, Emilio Botín, explained his interest. ‘When they told me we had the opportunity to reach 1,500 million people in eleven countries in South America I didn’t hesitate for a single moment’. It is another instance of opting for spectacle—the spectacle of football. 

       The UEFA Champions League is sponsored by six major brands: Heineken, Sony, Unicredit, MasterCard, PlayStation and Ford. I have not been able to ascertain the sums involved, but the UEFA estimates the profit produced for it by the 2007-2008 Champions League at the modest amount of 824.5 million euros. The spectacle is worth it. 

       Major interests are also involved in football’s great events, such as the World Cup. As a general rule, a group of a dozen sponsors that make various kinds of products (from chocolate to cars) conclude an agreement with FIFA to pay a certain amount for the sole rights to advertise their articles and associate them with this huge event.
 

Sponsoring clubs and national sides 

Another path taken by sponsorship marketing—one more affordable for certain brands—is sponsoring all kinds of clubs, both those which are important globally or nationally and those playing at a regional, or even local, level. The list of club sponsors and the turnover generated by this communication technique would be never ending. At this point I would like to draw attention to a special case of reverse sponsorship. I am referring to UNICEF’s sponsorship of Club de Futbol Barcelona. When a commercial brand sponsors a football club, it pays for the right to appear on this club’s players’ shirts and for a number of other rights specified in the contract. But in this instance it is the club, Barça, that is paying to be able to bear the name of the sponsor on its jerseys. It is regarded as a contribution by the club for benefit of all the children in the world protected by UNICEF. One of Barça’s big successes as far as positioning itself in the market is concerned has been to achieve a strong local connection (the city of Barcelona), a national identity (Catalonia) and an international promotional dimension (UNICEF), because the market is global and it has to compete with all the other clubs in the world (the Champions League, the Club World Cup, etc.). It is the formula in vogue in the business world and a successful strategy for the future: the perfect combination of the local and the global. 

       Some national sides also accept sponsors, although they play a lot fewer games than clubs. For example, Nike sponsors the Brazil team. 

       The big manufacturers of sports goods, from jerseys to trainers, shorts, caps, socks, racquets, wristbands, headbands, gloves, golf clubs, etc., vie with each other to sponsor clubs and individual players. Endorsement by sports stars is specially important in this type of sponsorship. It is as though a sportsperson who wears or uses a piece of equipment of a particular brand were saying, ‘I (who, as you know, am one of the best sportspeople in the world) have chosen this brand because it is the best on the market. Buy it’. The three major brands competing with each other are Nike (USA), Reebok (USA) and Adidas (Germany). 

       Competition among sports product companies led to power shifting to the players and sportspeople sponsoring these brands. This power has entailed an increase in their remunerations, which were already extraordinarily high, and their transfer fees, which the clubs often cannot pay without getting heavily into debt. All the revenue a club manages to scrape together ends up going straight down the drain of big transfers and enormous wages. Having such widespread and intense fame thrust upon them has meant that some footballers have been unable to cope with such a sudden wealth of money and celebrity, and have slid down the slippery slope of nightlife and even drugs, and have neglected their obligations as professionals. A sorry state of affairs.
 

Globalisation and the new communication systems 

Nowadays, television seems to be the baddie, because it boosts the football business in a free market context. Although the free market in question is relative, as the huge sums of money involved in buying the sole rights to a national league force those tendering for them to band together and mean that only two or three groups in each country have the capacity to put up the amounts needed to win the auction. It has now reached the point that the European Union Commission itself has had occasionally to intervene to safeguard the sacred principle of free competition. In early 2003, the European Union Commission’s diagnosis of the fact that the English Premier League had sold sole live broadcasting rights to a single television channel, BSkyB, was that this was a form of price-fixing and an attack on free competition. 

       This explosion of the potential of the mass media in the digital era, the boost it gives to sport and the fame it bestows on its leading figures allows the marketing experts and advertising communicators to feed off footballers to make up for the deficiencies caused by the saturation of advertising on the small screen, zapping and the unreliability of the audimeters. Now these experts go from the spectacle of the matches to the icon of the club and the footballer himself in an unprecedented commercialisation of football.

 
The rights to a player’s image 

In 2004, when he was still a Real Madrid player, David Beckham was the highest paid footballer in the world. He earned 22 million euros (France Football), 11 million of which came from advertising and merchandising. Image rights, i.e. the appropriation of someone’s personality, including their image, voice, name and signature, began to function full tilt in the 2000-2001 season. Football is an industry and the player is its star product. Exceptional footballers receive emblematic treatment and enviable remuneration, topped only by the bonuses awarded themselves by the directors of major financial institutions. I am not talking here about the fees paid for transferring a player from one club to another, I am simply mentioning the record of 94 million euros Real Madrid paid Manchester United this year for their star player Cristiano Ronaldo. Naturally Florentino Pérez, who is once again the Madrid chairman, bought the player because he plays well and can considerably help to strengthen the team, but also because with Ronaldo’s image rights he can make a notable profit from merchandising and this will allow the club to engage in some extraordinary commercial activities. 

       Not very long ago, clubs did not carry out any commercial actions aimed at their members or fans, as the games were the fundamental product and relations with their supporters were stimulated almost exclusively through what happened on the field of play. Clubs sold articles other than membership cards and tickets half on the sly, as it were, and drew no benefit from their infrastructure except on match days. As I have already said, the link between supporters and their club, and vice versa, was an emotional tie. That relationship has now been turned on its head. Clubs have begun to recruit marketing experts into their management structures instead of taking on former players in need of a job. They have created veritable marketing departments to strengthen the club’s brand image, gather information on their fans’ characteristics and boost merchandising strategies. The club’s brand image is an identity link that binds fans together and softens the hearts of each one of them. A broad fan base is extremely useful for the club’s potential sponsors. In addition, it greatly enhances profitability by getting more out of admissions (for example, by selling seats left free to Barça members and consumers), making good use of certain infrastructures (such as the Barça Museum, the museum with the most visitors in Catalonia), exploitation of third-party products and services (for example, credit cards with the club’s name), etc. Generally speaking, the most successful clubs in terms of results and the most attractive ones internationally are those that have the biggest fan base and the biggest marketing potential. 

       Image rights are a legal issue that gives rise to a lot of doubts and conflicts. Do they belong to the player or the club, for example? What is the exact scope of these rights? Is it possible, in his name, to stop a television channel from reporting news or broadcasting images not authorised by the player? Can a club prevent television cameras from recording not the whole game, but certain fragments to accompany the sports news? The only valid general criterion is that the will of the parties concerned predominates, on condition there exists a contract. 

       There came a time when the big clubs realised the importance of image rights and set up their own departments to pursue bootleg merchandising manufacturers. In England, Arsenal was the first club to register its brand; many other all over the world have followed suit. But in spite of all these precautions, the arguments over image rights continue to proliferate. 

       In 2000, image rights played a decisive part, for example, in the conflict over the transfer of Lluís Figo from Barça to Real Madrid for 61 million euros. A clause in the player’s contract assigning his image, merchandising and licensing rights to the club buying him was a key factor in the transfer going ahead with all opinions in favour. The next year a similar arrangement enabled the Madrid club to buy Zidane from Juventus for 76 million euros and this to become the most expensive signing in history. In 2002 Real Madrid again bought a player with the profit they could get out of him through merchandising in mind. This time it was Ronaldo Luis Nazário de Lima, who was transferred from Inter Milan to Real Madrid for 41 million euros. All these transactions allowed the club buying the players to capitalise on the commercial value of their new acquisitions, especially the sale of shirts with the name of these three players on them. It is no surprise, therefore, that in 2001 Real Madrid sold more football jerseys than any other club in Europe, with a turnover of more than 44 million euros.
 

Football merchandising and licensing  

A question of vocabulary has to be cleared up which often surprises those of us who have been around for quite a few years. In the marketing manuals of our youth, merchandising was the set of techniques employed to obtain profit at the point of sale. They spoke to us, among other things, about the shop, the section, the shelves, stock management and rotation, profit ratios and how to make the shop more attractive. Today, at least when people speak about some sport or other, we all understand by merchandising the right to create, manufacture and sell some piece of the equipment of the sportsperson with their or the club’s name on it. One hundred and sixteen clubs belonging to the six major European football leagues (France, England, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands) earn between them 615 million euros a year from this, 65% from the sale of shirts alone (European Football Merchandising Report 2008). Barça is the only one of these European clubs whose articles are bought by fans from all six countries. And the potential for merchandising to grow is enormous. 

       Licensing consists in temporarily assigning to third parties the right to use the mark or brand of a very famous club (Manchester United, Barcelona, Milan, etc.) for a particular article or product (eau-de-cologne, clothes, drinks, food items, etc.). The amount of money involved here is also large, but not as large as that involved in merchandising.

       For fans, football is a marvellous game. But we don’t know whether this spectacle would be so marvellous if it were not, at the same time, such insultingly big business. Enough economic data have appeared throughout this article to make anyone’s hair stand on end. I don’t want to engage in demagogy, talking about the wages of a young person earning a thousand euros month or what a worker gets paid, but it is obvious that the balance that in principle ought to characterise the relationship between the significant culture of football and the commercial and remunerative aspirations of the whole system of clubs, national sides, players, agents, federations, sports products manufacturers, communication platforms, etc. has been upset. I don’t know how to sever this Gordian knot, which means that the more the television platforms pay to broadcast football matches, the more the superstars demand, in a spiral of the absurd, without even the economic crisis bringing down their transfer fees, or their remuneration or their sponsorship, merchandising or licensing fees. I wouldn’t want to see this spectacle of such great beauty disappear, but I am sincerely ashamed to collaborate in this business by paying the membership fee of the club of my dreams or being just another number in the television audiences that oil its workings.

 


Spring (April - June 2010)