People with commitment, emotion and creating brands.

Football is all about feelings. Big feelings. The entire stadium is often filled with mixed feelings. Good against evil. Right against wrong. Us against them. We are right. They are wrong. Football clubs have some of the strongest brands there are. We have large target groups who love their brands over all else, often unconditionally. Few brands could dream of such enthusiasm. Perhaps the closest other brand to this is Harley-Davidson. There’s something special about brands with logos that quite a lot of people are willing to have to tattooed on their bodies without the slightest intention of ever having such tattoos removed. So maybe it’s not all that strange that an incredible number of major, international companies want to associate themselves with all the world’s football clubs and players.

Locally and globally

Of course, any major football club experiences the entire spectrum of enthusiasm from its followers. From occasional guests and plastics, to fanatics and ultras. Many are captured by football at a very young age. Maybe their feelings for their club begin innocently – by receiving a special football shirt for Christmas, for instance – but that’s enough to get them hooked. Then they constantly start seeking out the stronger stuff. Football boots. Football matches. Football pubs. Club membership. In a world where people are less and less likely to be faithful to a specific product, football clubs are quite unique. Certainly, many of them are strong brands in just a geographically limited area – i.e. in the town where they’re based – but some of them grow out of the local following and end up with a national or global following, and there are pretty much no limits on how big a team can be.

Football–an enormous arena

Football is the world’s most popular sport, and people who’ve tried to survey it have found that there are around 3.5 billion football fans here on the planet, around 1 billion more than cricket fans – a sport assisted by the fact that a country like India, no less, is rather surprisingly in second place. Manchester United and Real Madrid top Deloitte’s Money League, a survey of the money available in football. The two clubs had an annual turnover of around 6 billion each in 2017. According to Forbes, each of the three clubs Manchester United, Real Madrid and Barcelona are valued at just over USD 4 billion. To put it another way, there are incredible amounts of money in football and many people are of the opinion that the sport itself is being completely destroyed by the extreme focus on money. There’s so much emphasis on advertising and PR, TV contracts, profitable football tours, investments and player sales.

Value and values

At the top level, monetary value is referred to more frequently than internal values. Because when a single top player (and a fairly poor actor) is sold for USD 255 million, no wonder the press has a field day. That was how much Paris Saint-Germain paid Barcelona for Neymar (then Silva Santos Júnior). But what happens if we search behind all the big numbers? Do we find any values that aren’t just made up of figures? Is there anything that could be even more inspiring for talented football players and clubs than the dream of riches?

Purpose is all about the things that should ideally be even more important for a company than money, and this is one of the topics discussed by our very own Bård Annweiler in his book Point of purpose . Of course, earning money is absolutely vital, but there are companies whose good results are due to who they are and what they represent, not because of total cynicism in the hunt for money. Certainly, representing nothing at all other than earning as much money as possible can work in some contexts, but in the world of football extreme financial cynicism from the management is one of the few things that can make people turn their backs on their own team. In other words, the people who follow a team can sometimes accept extreme cynicism behind the scenes at a football team,as long as it doesn’t manifest itself in a way that destroys the football – and the results – that they love. When the country of Qatar buys French club Paris St. Germain and fills it with some of the most expensive players in the world, this is much more to do with international politics and profiling, not football.

The face factor

One new aspect of top-flight football is that the fans follow the stars even more than they follow the clubs. Without a doubt, much of the interest in Real Madrid waned when superstar Ronaldo made his surprising move from there to Juventus, and at the same time, 520,000 (!) Juventus shirts with RONALDO on the back were sold in the first 24 hours after launch. In other words, individual players become bigger than the clubs they represent. And sometimes, more or less everything other than the football becomes more important than what’s happening on the pitch. It’s not for nothing that Neymar, whom we referred to previously, is referred to as the Kardashian of football. And just in case you were wondering – this wasn’t meant as a compliment.

Human traits

When Marcelo Bielsa, the radical new manager of Leeds, made his stars pick up litter at the training ground for three hours so that they could experience for themselves how hard normal people have to work to be able to afford tickets to a match, this bears witness to a trainer who thinks a little bit differently when it comes to what’s important. For me personally, who found Leeds to be a kind of mild “hate team”, this tiny, symbolic gesture gave me a much more positive opinion of the 2018 Leeds team than the previous variants.

Norwegian club Sarpsborg 08 approached from a slightly different angle, as the club was at the bottom of the 1st division in Norway in 2009 and just a short step away from bankruptcy on account of poor financial management. It was high time for a complete revolution. Supporters and volunteers began fundraising so that Sarpsborg 08 could survive as a club. The players accepted voluntary pay cuts, and Ole-Jørgen Halvorsen, who clinically scored the penalty that qualified the little club for the Europa League in 2018, went from door to door nine years previously in order to save the little bits of the club. In Sarpsborg, people worked out what was most important. Manager Bakke says that he’s been reminded about priorities at 08 a number of times. The most important thing is the reputation, then the finances (they have to be decently healthy, and you mustn’t spend money you don’t have) – and the football comes third.

Sarpsborg 08 say: We aim to create historical moments

This sentence goes some way to explaining the club’s priorities. In that respect, you could say they’ve delivered – and how. After just ten years as a cooperative club in the Sarpsborg district, they’ve stepped up and established themselves in the top part of the Elite Series, played in the cup final twice, and not least pulled off the incredible trick of reaching the group stage of the Europa League. And to do that, they had to beat Icelandic, Swiss and Croatian opponents. Maybe it’s precisely because of their own vision that the club has prioritised progress in the Europa League over attaining the best possible position in the Elite Series, at a time when they have to play two tough matches a week.

The author isn’t exactly neutral when it comes to the fact that the club closest to my heart will now be eating cherries with the big names in Europe, but what maybe gives me the greatest sense of pride is how the club behaves. How they work together, do voluntary work and clearly value the many volunteers, how they employ managers on five-year contracts where others operate with a kind of eternal relay of new managers, how they’ve decided that they’ll never spend money they don’t have or jump on the price bandwagon and buy players who are just too expensive. According to their values, they have to be responsible, popular, cheerful, proud and ambitious. It’s obvious that kind of rubs off on others.

Manchester United

Let’s have a look at what one of the biggest clubs in the world have to say about themselves. Manchester United say they should be the best football club in the world, both on and off the pitch. They explain it as follows: The club reckons they should be part of society in the broadest sense, and that their success shouldn’t just be measured in the terms of the number of trophies they win, but also on the basis of their importance to the society in which they live. Everyone in the club is obliged to tackle environmental and social topics at a regional, national and international level by using the influence of the Manchester United brand to provide support and create awareness of the many challenges we face here on our planet.

It’s fantastic that football teams are aware of their responsibilities, and we just have to cross our fingers and hope they’re able to live up to their basic values even when the cash flow is causing struggles and there are many temptations.

(NB! Exciting things have happened since this article was written. There were theories that Mourinho was on his way out at the time, but who could have guessed that Ole Gunnar Solskjær was on his way in? At the time of writing, the world's most famous Norwegian has taken over for one of the world's biggest clubs, and at the time of writing this parentheses he has won the first five matches. Does not have to do with pounds and pennies. Feel free to call it the club's purpose)

So what can the business community learn from football?

It’s not quite true to say that all companies can learn something from all football clubs – and what’s more, both football clubs and companies in general form far too complex a group to all be tarred with the same brush. But it may be interesting to look at what football has to offer that many business stakeholders should ideally have.

Supporting the team

Companies that are able to support their employees and their surroundings, no matter what they may encounter in the business world, have maybe mastered the trick of creating a club feeling internally. A positive attitude towards voluntary work in the community, close cooperation, celebrating victories and “sharing a destiny, sharing consolation” when times are hard can all be worth their weight in gold.

Measurability

You can lose a battle but win the war, and this is true whether we’re talking about league games or business strategies – but for every single battle, people have to give everything they have over a short period of time. The great thing about football is the clarity and the rules. The pitch is a certain size. Matches last for 2 x 45 minutes + added time. People know when they’ve won or lost, they can feel how close they were to success or disaster. Everyone involved is aware of the challenge, the framework, and the rules, even if they may be unlucky when it comes to decisions made by the referee or “diving” opponents. Recreating the clarity found in football is something that other companies could certainly strive to imitate in their own arenas. If everyone involved has a platform they share when facing up to the challenges encountered by the company, it’ll be easier for them to all pull in the same direction as they share a goal and their support.

“Companies that are able to support their employees and their surroundings, no matter what they may encounter in the business world, have maybe mastered the trick of creating a club feeling internally.”

Showing feelings

Although there are many masculine constraints when it comes to football, this is an arena where men of all ages allow themselves to show feelings that they’d have had problems recognising in other contexts. This might be part of the reason as to why so many companies that have something to sell like to target men in football contexts – precisely because they can get them when they have their guard down. That said, more and more ladies are turning up now – both as players and to watch the men’s games. Men as a group have probably changed quite a lot over the past few decades, but without altering the popularity of football all that much.

Building brands

There should be a lot to gain from the world of football – and from other sports as well, for that matter – not least when it comes to employer branding. When the female handball teams were playing in the European or World Championships, there were entire sections full of Norway Post employees who didn’t hesitate to show their affiliation to the company they worked for and the team they supported. People who simply don’t know anything about football, or who don’t want to know anything about football, often just see lots of people wearing very similar – and equally ugly – clothes in the stands. The fact that this is a kind of role play for most people, something that happens during matches, perhaps goes completely over their heads. Very few fans wear team kit from top to toe during their leisure time. Most people put their loud, two-coloured shirts away and dress in anything from Blåkläder to Balenciaga when it’s back to work. When there are 3.5 billion fans in the world, it’s sloppy to dismiss them all as “football idiots”. When there’s a match on at Watford, for example, you’ll probably find everything from the most narrowminded yobs to no less than Sir Elton John in the stands, and they’re all cheering for the same team.

So let’s be sporting.