Kevin at FootyCon 2019

Delegates pose in football shirts at the conference dinner

Kevin: I enjoyed attending FootyCon 2019 at Manchester City's Ethiad Campus where I presented our paper comparing the 1966 and 1994 FIFA World Cups. The Ethiad Campus, with its many nursery pitches, was worth visiting in itself as an example of modern practice in the football industry.  The conference was excellently hosted and organized by Dr Gary James of De Montfort University and featured keynotes by practitioners and academics alike.  The academic keynote by Marion Stell, of the University of Queensland was especially interesting for its focus on the comparative merits of documentary versus oral history in researching the development of the women's game in Australia.  Stell found that some player's reminiscences of matches played nearly forty years ago did not line up with the reality as reported in newspapers, some of which came from scrapbooks kept by the players themselves.  The practitioner keynote was provided by former Sunderland, Man City and New York Cosmos star Dennis Tueart who focussed on lessons for business practice from his football career.

This is the abstract of our paper:

We provide a comparison of the 1966 and 1994 FIFA football World Cup finals tournaments, examining how the marketing strategies for these events aimed at the whole people - and the populist elements of such strategies. The two cases provide interesting comparison and contrast: - Firstly, both were relatively rare examples of financially successful World Cup tournaments, although there are geographic and temporal dimensions to consider: In both cases the economic benefits were not experienced equally by all stakeholders or uniformly across the entire duration of the tournaments, as ‘world cup fever’ and the anticipated tourist bonanzas were not realised by all host cities. - Secondly, both tournaments were notable for mass-marketing innovations, i.e. the introduction and popularity of the first mascot and serious licensing/product marketing efforts in 1966, and then the increasingly sophisticated targeted branding and merchandising strategies of 1994. - Thirdly, both tournaments contributed to the popularising of 'soccer' and the FIFA World Cup in their respective countries, for example soccer becoming more accepted by the 'mainstream' mass-media. In turn this further enhanced the sport and the World Cup tournament as spectacle and as a platform for advertising, and ultimately to the commercial and economic growth of FIFA (which today has more members than the UN). - Fourthly, linked to this popularizing of the sport, both tournaments evidence ways in which Heads of State as well as other politicians and municipal leaders identified opportunities to associate themselves with soccer and its world cup, and how these efforts can be considered against the back-drop of 'populism'.