Pogue Mahone
Swiftie Fan Club President
Might as well start my own ESL thread, seeing as they’re all the rage.
Second Captains podcast made a great point. After the initial brief announcement (which had more or less the same wording from every club) there wasn’t a peep out of any of the clubs until they announced they were pulling out. Every big corporation knows the importance of PR. I work for a big corporation. When we’re about to break big news we produce a raft of media briefing materials and internal and external Q&A documents. We brief media spokespeople (shout out to the political correctness thread) and plan a media campaign from minute one over the next several days.
If Klopp et al had been properly briefed and came out with just a few lines about why this was good for the club it could have made a huge difference to the fans. Or how about wheeling out a club legend or two? Likewise a few interviews with carefully selected journalists on Monday or Tuesday morning. And God knows all these clubs have at least one journalist in their pocket. They just needed to move the needle a little bit to divide the fans more than they were and it might have been enough for them to get this across the line. This would have been made even easier when you think about how unpopular the revised CL format is likely to be, with big clubs getting byes into the competition “because heritage”. Yet that obvious comparison never got a mention, by anyone.
The whole thing seems like a catastrophic communications failure. I can’t understand how they dropped the ball so badly. What was the point of 48 hours of stubborn silence? Any theories? Some of these guys have run a number of very successful businesses. How did they drop the ball so badly?
Second Captains podcast made a great point. After the initial brief announcement (which had more or less the same wording from every club) there wasn’t a peep out of any of the clubs until they announced they were pulling out. Every big corporation knows the importance of PR. I work for a big corporation. When we’re about to break big news we produce a raft of media briefing materials and internal and external Q&A documents. We brief media spokespeople (shout out to the political correctness thread) and plan a media campaign from minute one over the next several days.
If Klopp et al had been properly briefed and came out with just a few lines about why this was good for the club it could have made a huge difference to the fans. Or how about wheeling out a club legend or two? Likewise a few interviews with carefully selected journalists on Monday or Tuesday morning. And God knows all these clubs have at least one journalist in their pocket. They just needed to move the needle a little bit to divide the fans more than they were and it might have been enough for them to get this across the line. This would have been made even easier when you think about how unpopular the revised CL format is likely to be, with big clubs getting byes into the competition “because heritage”. Yet that obvious comparison never got a mention, by anyone.
The whole thing seems like a catastrophic communications failure. I can’t understand how they dropped the ball so badly. What was the point of 48 hours of stubborn silence? Any theories? Some of these guys have run a number of very successful businesses. How did they drop the ball so badly?