The best way for football clubs to get rid of the massive wads of cash thrown in their direction by benighted supporters and unimaginative TV companies has traditionally been to pay £50m for a half-decent right back who can’t cross. But wealthy teams are always innovating and this summer they have found a new way of blowing their loot: social media content.
The big clubs with a marketing department (ie all of them) and a brand (all of them bar Burnley) have been hiring a load of over-enthusiastic millennials to make stuff for Facebook, Twitter and the rest. I had the misfortune to sit in front of Arsenal’s Snapchat crew last season and let me tell you they made a humdrum 2-0 victory over Hull sound like the second coming of the Christ.
One particular strand of content has, as they say, been functioning like a virus this summer: the “signing announcement”. Ten years ago, supporters would learn their club had bought a player via a paragraph in the local paper and a photo of a man holding a scarf. Not any more. This week, FC Sevilla announced the return of Jesús Navas from Manchester City with a full-on action video in which the distinctly mediocre winger is kidnapped. The film has a happy ending when Navas is released from his bondage in the back of a Seat. It turns out he has not had his pinky removed in an attempt to solicit a ransom but has re-signed for his boyhood club (#NavasAnnounced). Everyone cried.
Navas is not the only the player to have inspired semi-compelling content this summer. When John Terry took the surprising decision to join Aston Villa, his new club took the surprising decision to make a minute-long animation imagining how the deal might have played out over a club WhatsApp group (life is too short to explain further).
Crystal Palace meanwhile announced the arrival of their new manager, Frank de Boer, with a clip of white smoke emerging from the chimney of Selhurst’s Original Tasty Jerk restaurant.
PogBOOM is coming to Old Trafford.@paulpogba: Welcome home to @ManUtd.#FirstNeverFollowshttps://t.co/UKrEgp7Mcy
— adidas Football (@adidasfootball) August 8, 2016
All are following the lead of last year’s buzziest piece of marketing, in which Manchester United announced the then-world record signing of midfielder Paul Pogba with a music video in which he danced as United fan Stormzy rapped.
But that may have been the apex. Despite recent elaborate efforts, the trend may now be coming to an end. There is no clearer sign of this than the fact that announcement videos have begun to satirise the trend for announcement videos. And when Cambridge United are making postmodern social media content to promote the signing of a 37-year-old goalkeeper, the jig must surely be up.
