In politics, you’re either on-message or you’re losing. Let’s get to it.
Welcome to On Message, a weekly look at where the battle lines are drawn and who is winning the war of words.
This week… Super Failure.
Over the past week, you may have heard that European football (known around these parts as soccer) was rocked by the creation of what was called the Super League, a new group of Europe’s 12 biggest clubs.
Now, since European soccer is foreign to many of you: here are a few things you need to know. Let’s use England as the example, if for no other reason than to help you appreciate Ted Lasso.
Anyone can start an English football club and start in the lowest league. Clubs advance from one level of competition to the next by finishing at the top of the standings. Teams that finish at the bottom of the standings are relegated to the lower league until they can with their way back up.
The difference between a spot in the highest league (the Premier League) and the second-highest league (the Champions League) means hundreds of millions of dollars in economic impact reaching beyond the clubs and into the local communities.
England’s top league, the Premier League, is considered the best in the world and the top teams from Europe’s top leagues qualify to compete in the UEFA Champion’s League.
This Super League would essentially make the Champion’s League obsolete and guarantee the top clubs – by dollars, not necessarily by wins – would get their share of the big TV and sponsorship money without having to qualify as they do for the Champions League.
Now, you may be thinking, what does this have to do with politics or communication?
The answer is everything.
Bizarrely, the actual announcement of something as potentially earth-shattering as the Super League didn’t come with a big press conference or even a carefully produced explanation of the upside to such a league.
They could have at least have stolen a page from Apple’s playbook because no one does a better job of rolling out something new.
Not rolling out the Super League in any formal way meant the organizing clubs had no way to dictate the message.
The only news for media outlets to share was the list of teams in the Super League and, once they exhausted that, they were clearly going to get a reaction from players and fans… and there was ***plenty*** of that to go around.
Over the next two days, it became clear the organizing clubs had not reached out to players, managers, or fans.
That group naturally unified around a single message: this is a bad idea driven by greedy club owners.
It seemed as if the 12 clubs – particularly the six based in England – were completely unprepared for the backlash or too arrogant to consider the power of the supporters who are, at the end of the day, their customer base.
Of course, politicians didn’t miss the opportunity to pile on and champion a cause so widely supported by both the elite and working-class.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson threatened to block the move by any means necessary, picking up big points across the political spectrum.
In fact, the Super League bungled this rollout so badly, they did the Prime Minister a big favor by making Brexit look like a smooth breakaway by comparison.
A non-existent rollout, not dictating the message, a complete unwillingness to communicate with key stakeholders and no plan to counter the opposition’s message is a recipe for disaster.
So no surprise, 48 hours after the news broke, so did the Super League. Owners of English Super-League-to-be clubs (many of whom are Americans, by the way) were quick to offer apologies for the move and fade into the hedges like Homer Simpson.
Is the idea of a Super League gone for good? Probably not. But could Europe’s top football clubs have done any more to ensure their failure?* It’s hard to see how. *
That’s it for this week.
More On Message in the next issue of the Utah Political Underground. Don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to our new YouTube channel.
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