Football… where everybody knows your name.

On occasion it seems the world wants to remind you of something, leaving little signals everywhere. When Norm Peterson (actor George Wendt) of Cheers left us this month, it smelt exactly like one of those moments. 

This is a Sunday Column that I’ve always been reticent to write, because it is so bloody nuanced, contradictory, and very easy to descend into clichè and shmaltz. It was always in the too-difficult box for an amateur scribbler like me.

But now it is time to at least try. There is no excuse for further procrastination.

 

A regular guy.

Cheers was a sitcom about an ex-baseball pro, Sam, and the eclectic community of friends who all found solace in his bar, and amongst each other. A true cross-section of society, with different backgrounds and characters, where the only thing they had in common was Cheers. 

Pointedly, it is set in a time before the big TV bucks had hit sport, when a top athlete like Sam still needed to earn his living another way after he hung up his boots. Little signals! 

We should refresh our memories about all that because those days may be about to return for very many. The eco-system of sports rights is being turned upside-down, and entire value chains are going to reverse. 

The broadcaster NBC provided the sweetest eulogy of all, for one of the great cameo personalities of the greed-is-good, animal-spirits 1980s. The very antithesis of that other icon of those years, Gordon Gekko.

Watching him walk through that door and head to his barstool, America couldn’t wait to say hi to Norm every Thursday night. Norm was all of us. A regular guy who finished his hardworking day wanting to be surrounded by friends and a frosty beverage.

Guys like Norm are more important than society realises. If we are intelligent, they will always be our conscience in life and business, there to warn us when we are getting ahead of ourselves, when we mix up our priorities, when we chase the wrong things. A moral compass and bullshit thermometer, the classic man on the top of the Clapham omnibus.

In the working class towns where most football is played, Norm is always around . 

He is the most loyal, authentic and honest of all friends, and in the very last scene of the show it is of course him who reminds Sam as to what he should always remain faithful. It isn’t one of the many women who have passed through his life. Neither is it his sport memorabilia. It isn’t even money. 

Where everybody knows your name.

Sam’s true love is the Cheers bar, and what he has created for his community. Look how he touches the counters and walls as it fades out.  All best articulated by the theme song lyric.

🎶 Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.

Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.

Wouldn’t you like to get away?

Sometimes you want to go… where everybody knows your name,🎶

Norm Peterson today reminds us of those exact same truths for our beautiful game, now apparently so confused about what really matters.

 

Cheers is the perfect metaphor for fandom.

Sam’s bar is what most of us believe our football clubs should look like. A place to get away from the harshness of life, a sanctuary where you feel you completely belong, and where everyone does know your name. Football clubs are by definition a broad church and you are a paid-up member of the congregation. Not a name on a database of clients. 

Do we think that Sam saw any of his Cheers regulars as mere customers? That he’d tell Norm to change his front row seat one day, after 20 years, so that he could sell it for more money to some high-roller from Indonesia? Do we believe he’d kick out his loyal legacy crowd, so he could raise the price of beer, and scalp the tourists passing by for the weekend?

The answer is clear. Now reflect on how your own football club is behaving these days, in its frenzied pursuit of a few extra bob. Yes, Cheers is a big signal for sport, if it wants to listen. Sadly, it doesn’t.

Our industry has, for a while now, clearly decided to be more Gordon Gekko than Norm Peterson, chasing bigger revenues every single day, with seldom a thought to the inevitable consequences of all that, later in the 4th quarter.

That’s what happens when you take capital from guys who need a quick return. He who pays the piper calls the tune my friends, and the tune is quick new top-line bucks.

For example, is there anyone out there who thinks that the NFL is doing the right thing here?

For me it is lunacy, but every rights holder has now followed this path, seemingly unaware of what true fans really think about excessive subscription costs and horrendous discoverability. What they think is “firestick”!

This week we again saw the communal wringing of hands over the latest report on piracy. The usual talking heads all missing the point, often the same people who were at fancy conferences five years ago calling it “acceptable leakage”.

This industry absolutely deserves where it finds itself today because we were always going to end up here. It was the easiest ever “short” call to make, and the everyman on the top of that omnibus would have reached the same obvious conclusion.

We all know Everyman. They may for each of us have different names and accents, but they are all basically the same guy. They are Norm Peterson, and their stories are all similar.

Well nearly!

 

The Authenticity of Cesare, the ultra fan.

About a decade ago, on a sleepy Sunday, the phone pinged sharply. A text, from an infrequent sender. 

Turn over to the Parma game immediately.

The old Tardini stadium was agitated, with passions running very high; something was up. Parma’s Antonio Cassano, the last of Italy’s true football mavericks, was having his ear bent by a rather stern and serious looking “ultra” fan who had descended to the pitch to make his views known, at more than close quarters. Cassano appeared unusually sheepish, in a way that drew the eye, because listening to someone, anyone, was never Antonio’s strong point. If he had, he’d have been Baggio or Del Piero.

And yet here he was, like a wee boy…

It appeared we were witnessing just the latest example of the intolerable power that the extreme fanbase “ultras” have over Italian football. Aren’t they the real bosses? Who can prevent games from starting or ending? That control who enters and exits the stadium, who have the “rights” to sell replica kits in the stadium? Who decide which players can be bought and sold by the club directors? Who demand entire teams beg for forgiveness on bended knee in front of them, if not honouring the jersey? And today it was Cassano’s turn to bow and kiss their ring.

No. The reason for my text suddenly became very clear indeed. Cassano was speaking with Cesare!!!!

Cesare Frambati, part of our direct family, a shy gentle giant of a man, a kind and generous soul, utterly respectable, deep values, loved by all. A humble job. A man to trust your kids with.

 

The only true constant.

No longer 19, Cesare had tripped while struggling down from the stands, and it was Cassano who had rushed forward to catch him, to break his fall. In fact, on closer inspection, it was clear that Cassano wasn’t under any siege at all, and had actually moved to pitch side to seek some kind of solace. Cassano recognised Cesare as one of the good guys, and wanted to personally explain to him that he was done with the club. At wit’s end.

Parma Calcio back then was a footballing basket case, owned and run by a mixture of the crooked and the incompetent. Drowning in debts, it hadn’t paid its players for months, and the previous owner has scarpered, dropping the stinking mess in the hands of some unknown spiv from Eastern Europe.

“What more can I do, Cesare, what more can I do?”, Cassano asked of his surrogate father.

The next day, Cassano left Parma Calcio, but he had made his peace with Cesare, before slamming the door.

As all these new “owners” into football come and go, often leaving disaster and debris in their wake, there is only one constant in our game. People like Cesare. True fans who turn up come rain or shine, win or loss, glory or humiliation, because they love their town, their clubs, their mates. They are the very core of our sport, and the eternal soul of the product, exactly as Norm was the central anchor for that entire Boston bar.

In Parma, everyone knew Cesare’s name; still do. He has universal respect. 

This is a dynamic badly badly misunderstood by many of our new finance friends, who all consider sport as an asset class, maybe part of a multi-club organisation (MCO), a vehicle to make some money. Most of them also think that we in Europe have been incompetent amateurs in not maximising the commercial opportunities of a loyal fan base. One might even hear them declare that they have now arrived to “westernise the club” by upgrading the commercial operations.

If only it was that easy.

Ironically, Big Finance as yet doesn’t realise that the real financial return they seek resides elsewhere, and it must always pass through people like Cesare Frambati, sooner or later. The key to unlocking it is called EQ.

 

The enduring value is the tribe, La Piazza.

Any good investor in business needs to understand well what the uniqueness and moat of their product really is. And they need to protect it, ideally build on it. Football in Europe, in South America, and some others places, is not an asset you judge by next year’s revenue line. That’s an error.

This may seem rank heresy for an industry now valuing all its football assets on a revenue multiple, but it is true. Revenues are not a proxy of valuation in any business, but especially in football when you pay every cent of them away to players and agents. It is in reality just a vanity KPI.

You can’t even judge a football club by what you see reported in the Balance Sheet. The true value is in the unreported intangible asset of its fanbase, with their depth of loyalty. The very best investors in football, the elite, will also carefully consider the expectation-level of those fans, as that correlates highly with the quotient of difficulty in managing the club. They have a phrase for all that in Italy.

E’ una piazza difficile.

Genoa FC for example is renowned as a club with an expectant and truculent “town square” of fans. Udinese, on the other hand, having won fuck-all, less so.

Good football investing is exactly in the identification and management of these intangibles.

 

Crystal Place at Wembley was Cheers.

This clip needs no comment, and it’s better that way because no vocabulary can ever be adequate to convey what our eyes see. Crystal Palace is a small team, and few of the readers today will have any direct emotional tie to their win. But for some beautiful reason, none of us can watch that clip without a lump in the throat. Look at every single one of them, across age, gender, race. Totally eclectic and diverse. People with very little in common most of the time. But that day they were all Palace.

The world’s most universally spoken language isn’t Manadarin or Hindi; nor Spanish or English. It is the language of the football fan. A shared global dialect able to convey emotions on an entirely different level to almost anything else, capable of amazing expressions of love. The “tifo” banner at Wembley, of a dead father and his two young sons, seen by those surviving boys.

Unimaginable emotion, that generates zero revenue for the club!

That is a product, a gift, that no money can ever buy. It certainly can’t be pre-packed in some strategic fan engagement team of skinny-jean hipsters, and it is definitely not for sale. It comes from the heart, and can only ever be earned.

There is no romantic sugar-rush of shmaltz in making this claim. It is just a professional analysis of the product-market fit that sets our sport apart from Kings league, or Mr Beast, or KSI. We are not “content”!

 

Core de ‘sta città (Heart of the city).

Some financial investors of recent years have really struggled to find “connection” with things like this. Jim Pallotta at Roma fumbled the ball badly with the handling of Francesco Totti. New owners Friedkin the same with De Rossi when their fancy CEO even needed to leave the city “in a rush”. Those Americans, through luck or skill, then remembered Claudio from Testaccio. A hometown boy, a Roma fan, and the very personification of empathy.

A Norm Peterson everyman who has proven himself over and over to also be an outstanding football coach. 

Roma, Roma, Roma, core de ‘sta città. 

That is exactly what Claudio is. Total connection.

Where else do you see this stuff, if not authentic sport? It is a product that all the gold in the world can’t buy, and humble Ranieri will take that moment to his deathbed, deservedly so.

This here is the value of the “asset” Friedkin bought; nothing else. And again it doesn’t show up in the Income Statement. 

These little signals seem to be everywhere.

Goodison Park is another one of those places where everyone knows your name. A tight community club of real gravitas and heritage. The other day its children met to say thank you for giving them a loving welcoming home their entire lives. They sang Z-Cars, one last time, and grown men and women cried. Watch the clip. It rips your heart in two. 

All of this “value” has little to do with revenue. The mood music at football clubs is everything. You can take the money from the naming rights to the replacement stadium, absurdly named after a law firm called Hill-Dickinson, but you have likely sold your soul in some way. Like changing the name of Cheers to Morgan Stanley.  Indeed, there is a solid argument that many new stadia, for sure making sheds of new cash, don’t hit home with fans at all, not like the old Upton Park or Highbury did, located right in the middle of their community.

 

Football without authentic fans is absolutely nothing.

They are the product, the asset, and, as we saw during COVID, without them, football means very little.

It has always been thus. 

If you replace these proper fans with the big-eventer £5000-a-ticket hospitality audience, the tourist dollar with half-and-half scarves, sooner or later you will profoundly hurt yourself.

Many of our new American owners just don’t seem to understand this. They even boast about “better marketing” being a core part of their investment thesis for return. Growing revenues, maximising ticket yield at stadia, making fans buy 100 subscriptions to see their games. Pricing out Cesare Frambati for a richer client. 

Well, look at what this thinking has done to United. The signals were clear 15 years ago, but no-one paid attention or cared.

It’s now a leaking theatre, with very few dreams.

The hardest challenge in buying and running a football club is in realising that the fan base is the true asset, but at the same time accepting that they are also truly crazy.

You cannot reason with fans, and our new investors into the asset class should “analyse that” very carefully before deploying capital. You may have bought a beautiful zoo, but you are now holding a tiger by the tail, and that beast will never change its nature, no matter how you try to gentrify it.

Sooner or later it will rip your fucking head off, with a feral brutality you have never seen.

If you can’t handle that heat from the football fan, directly aimed at you and your family, go do something else. Because it’s inevitable if you are in, or aspire to, a high-profile role.

If you think you’re going to melt, this industry isn’t for you.

 

The Angel. 

Football fans are the most fickle, irrational, unreasonable, ungrateful bunch of scallywags you will ever meet, and there is no defence for them a lot of the times. Because they are, in the main, simple folks whose actions are totally driven by the heart, never filtered by the head.

And these people, all of us, aren’t plain-vanilla. They come in all different segments and sizes. The hardcore ultras like Cesare, the over-thinking lapsed supporter (like me) that needs to be competitive, those glory-hunters and tourists who claim allegiance, but really couldn’t name you the starting 11. Then you have the family circles of all of these, the girlfriends, wives and kids. Uncle Tommy who was a bit of a boy in his youth but now watches it all from the sofa, in total disdain. And so many more. A wide church indeed.

All of these characters are perfectly described by a young Gooner called Louis Dunford.

Overwhelming.

This Column may or may not end up a decent read, but it will never ever lace the boots of Louis’s poetry in these 4 minutes. Right here is what true talent and synthesis looks like.

Coz the manor might be changing, but the people stay the same.

If you are lucky enough to ever acquire a club like Arsenal, you aren’t buying revenue streams, a stadium, or even a squad of expensive players. You have bought a VIP entry ticket to a community, and that is a very powerful asset. It of course comes with great responsibility. Cataloguing this tribe, with all its nuances, its ebbs and flows, its rights of passage in demography, is just incredibly hard. You can’t go in like a bull in a china shop.

It actually even harder again because all of us, proper football fans, have split personalities.

 

The schizophrenia of the football punter.

Don’t be mistaken! Cesare Frambati, whilst still that gentle giant, has his full-fat personality as “capo ultra”. You don’t get elected to that role without a bit of edge. There is a version of the CV that absolutely plays into the naughty boy narrative. He has a Daspo, police bans, that limit his movements around Italian stadia. But he is no villain, and he is not alone.

We can see fans all over Europe habitually taking all a bit too far, attacking buses, abusing players and GMs on social media, insults to all-and-sundry. Racist, sexist, politically-incorrect.

But it is who they are. Or at least who they are for 90m. A crucial difference, as any match-commander will tell you. 

Better they let off steam once a week in here where we can control them, rather than among the general pubic.

What makes our sport beautifully unique also makes it sometimes horrid and unkind. Violent even. But it is what it is. 

So how do you manage it? Because your ultimate success, your return on investment, depends only on this. Ask Jim Pallotta, look at the Glazer shambles of Manchester United today, the car-crash that has been Gerry Cardinale’s AC Milan, Suning at Inter Milan.

Every single one of these people prioritised their financial numbers as their KPI, as opposed to the curation of the one asset that mattered: the happiness of the fanbase.

 

He who best understands the fan, will win.

And make that financial return as the by-product.

This is your mission if you choose to accept it. 

Learning to live with, and channel, the split personality of the football fan is an outlier ability, given to very few. How do you nurture the tribe, manage their absurd expectations, win on the field, and at least break even at Companies House?

It is the hardest job in the world, and you won’t succeed by aloof school-matron lecturing about what your fans can and can’t do. You can only do it by trying to build “connection” with them every day, empathising with the people who love The Angel, putting yourself in their shoes, and being seen to do what safeguards the heritage of a community.

Oh, and you’ll need to accept in good heart that they won’t ever thank you, or remember all the good you have tried to do. They will never accept you selling their favourite player at 28, in the best long-term interests of the club. They won’t listen to fancy explanations about decaying transfer value post-30. 

Leadership of a tribe is often about having the courage to be unpopular, and it’s really, really hard. 

Long-term value in football lies beyond the next rights cycle.

Well beyond. And yet so many sports are being ruined by a focus on revenues. True fans are being priced out, stadia named after the most awkward sponsor, storied heritage like the NCAA being turned upside down in a new culture of money. Too many games fitted into a saturated calendar.

The future of football instead is in building a place where everyone knows your name, likely by deliberately leaving some revenues on the table. Like they do in Germany, prioritising the experience of the live game at affordable prices. In our industry, now facing a reversal in media values, the focus needs to be on “live” matchday.

Just as the music business has now substituted the juicy revenues from the CD bundle with a vibrant concert experience, so must football. And you just don’t do that by pricing out your most committed followers; those folks at Palace, Roma and Goodison. 

A football industry without media rights, and then without true fans in stadia, won’t last very long. It can’t. 

 

We prioritise revenues because we can’t control costs. 

It truly is that simple as a summary.

If the new mantra of these Columns is Protect, Experiment, Convert, with proactive advice, then we need to think different to “protect” our real value.

We must switch that equation around, to allow us to only take the commercial value that doesn’t hurt the product. Many of us are sick and tired of all the people telling us how to squeeze more money out of Cesare Frambati, expecting him to pay for our own pathetic inability to control costs.

Today’s Column ends suggesting that it’s more honourable and professional if we also start to do our bit, as the C-Suite and custodians of the game.

There are three pots of horrendous red-ink cost that can be addressed relatively easily.

 

1.

Unsustainable levels of player costs.
This can only fixed by hard salary caps for everyone, a bit like the budget limits now introduced to F1.
It has so many benefits, also in increasing the jeopardy of result. Salary caps must be mandated as hard, and there is no reason not to, especially if applied Europe-wide by UEFA, so all countries have a level playing field.

 

2.

Avoid the errors, costing hundreds of millions, from bad appointments in coaching staff, and even worse player recruitment.
Those are the triple-bogeys in football. If you can avoid those, you have a decent chance of being in contention on the back-nine of a Sunday Major.
It’s not about the birdies (small extra revenues), rather it’s avoiding the 6s and 7s (heavy unnecessary costs).
There is no moral justification in asking fans and Manchester United staff to bear the cost of the biblical laziness and incompetence of the guys, getting 500k a year, who signed the garbage the club has bought in recent years. How do you sleep guys?

 

3.

Using the technology, that is now proven, to mitigate the horrendous cost of player injuries.
Get rid of all the old-school dinosaurs in sport medicine departments that are only protecting their own mediocrity.
There are more than just marginal gains available in reducing injuries, so don’t take the advice of the people who got you there in the first place.
Of course, this effort would be helped enormously by a lighter playing calendar, getting heavier every day. It is not the fans asking for more games. It is competing rights holders that are chasing their own extra revenues.

 

If you can’t run a bar well, it is not fair to ask Norm Peterson to pay more to balance your books.

Such a simple concept, but never really given much air in all the conferences, newsletters, substacks and podcasts.

Cheers!

 

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