Uefa marketing manager Noel Mooney advised the UAE clubs to form mandatory five-year marketing plans to reverse dwindling attendance figures last week.
Mooney was speaking at a two-day Asian Football Confederation (AFC) development workshop at the Dusit Thani Hotel in Dubai, which was attended by representatives of all 14 Arabian Gulf League (AGL) clubs.
“If you can’t tell me exactly where you want to be in five years’ time, you are working on a month-to-month basis and you are going nowhere,” he told clubs.
His comments followed a 15 per cent decline in year-on-year AGL attendances last season, according to Middle Eastern football website Ahdaaf.me.
It comes at a time when the AFC are encouraging greater self-sufficiency at clubs over traditional reliance upon wealthy benefactors.
Suhail Al Areefi, chief executive officer of the Pro League Committee (PLC), who organise the league, welcomed Mooney’s suggestion and urged clubs to formulate their five-year plans immediately.
“Clubs should know that marketing is an investment and from higher attendances you can get income and sponsorship, it’s all related, if you pay now, tomorrow you will have good revenue, so we should work on it,” he said.
The clubs aren’t new to this however, rewind four years and Al Jazira were regularly getting gates of more than 25,000 thanks to Ferrari raffles at half-time. Al Wasl were also witnessing a 53 per cent year-on-year increase in attendances in 2011 after hiring legendary Argentine 1986 Fifa World Cup winner Diego Maradona as coach. But once the Ferrari was won and Maradona was sacked, attendances dropped again.
Mooney is suggesting more organic and sustainable methods to draw and retain fans this time around. “The strategy should be about creating a unique position of the club in the minds of people and then communicating that to the people and linking it to the community,” he said. “What does the club stand for? What’s the emotional connection? I’m personally a Celtic fan, I don’t care who they sign, I’m emotionally connected to that club, and it’s that emotional connection to your club that I question whether people have here.”
He used the example of Celtic, who were formed by a Catholic priest in 1887 as a means of raising money to buy food for poor children in the immigrant Irish community of Glasgow, Scotland. Today they sell 750,000 shirts a season, a staggering amount despite not playing in the Uefa Champions League, because they represent benevolence and the Irish diaspora.
“Why do you exist and what is your reason for being?” he asked club representatives at the workshop. “Everyone can just be a football club, so what?
“If you can occupy a clear and unique position in someone’s mind that makes them connect with the club then you’ve got a far better chance of succeeding.
“People think a brand is just a logo, it’s not just a logo, it’s an idea in people’s minds.”
Sharjah were closest to realising this four years ago when they aligned themselves with local charitable organisations and social and environmental community campaigns, and set-up football schools not only for Emirati children and players with the ability to turn professional, but also expatriate recreational players, who would become the next generation of supporters.
Mooney said a child who plays football is 12 times more likely to come and watch their local club play, and that they would in turn bring their family and friends. It was Sharjah that pioneered on this front until a sudden diversification of funds away from these policies when the club got relegated in 2012.
Expatriate engagement has been limited elsewhere however, and with Emiratis making up just 11 per cent of the total population that in turn limits a club’s potential market. Even billboards all over town advertising this week’s Asian Champions League semi-final between Dubai’s Al Ahli and Saudi Arabia’s Al Hilal have been printed only in Arabic.
“There’s no reason why expatriates shouldn’t be involved,” Mooney said. “As a fan wherever I am in the world I check to see when and where the next game is on. I absolutely reject the theory that people don’t arrive in Dubai and look for that,” he added, stressing that as a result, multilingual mobile optimised websites for each club should feature prominently when typed into search engines and social networks, with clear and consistent branding. An interesting thought when considering expatriate football fans might naturally type in âUAE Football League’ when searching for the ambiguously-named Arabian Gulf League. Constant changing of fixtures and no clear time and date to watch the games, like all at 7.30pm on a Friday for example, also alienated fans.
“If games keep moving all the time people don’t have what we call an appointment to view,” he said. “If you move matches all over the place that makes it very difficult for fans to plan their diary and that’s an example of how you can screw up a league.”
He also spoke about the importance of maintaining innovative content on social media and club websites, because when fans aren’t in the stadium, the club’s shop window is online.
Having the names, details and email addresses of every fan, he said, would also be pivotal, not only in understanding your club’s supporters and engaging with them directly, but also when it came to courting sponsors who wanted to understand your fan base as much as you do.
In all, he said consumer research was needed to find out why people weren’t coming to matches and what he called a âmarketing mix’ was needed to bring people back to the stadiums using segmentation to appeal to different groups of fans (young and old, local or expatriate) using different methods.
But unlike previous superficial attempts that had failed, this latest vision had to tap into human emotions and be maintained and overseen by qualified marketing professionals who would be held accountable if targets weren’t met.
