Interesting location for a 'socially distanced' meeting

The Covid pandemic has had a significant effect on the ability of fans to attend soccer games, and resultantly a significant effect on clubs' finances, a topic in the news in recent weeks (campaign to help football and its 'grass roots' ).

Similarly, the need for social distancing extends to other activities at clubs and their grounds, as I (Alex) found out last week.

A meeting with the Commercial Manager of York City FC was conducted not in the office, or even in the Boardroom. Rather, we met pitch-side, sat on the managers dugout/subs bench (and wearing face masks).

We talked about our research on football supporters (segmenting soccer fans by 'value'), football finance and history (Journal of Management History article) and project management (Dynamic sublimes ).  We also talked about York City FC's development of a new stadium.

We also discussed exciting opportunities for research, teaching, and other opportunities between our university work and the football club. Watch this space for more details.

New Article Alert: The Rise of Marketing

A quick newsflash to announce a new text, 'The Palgrave Handbook of Management History' (Palgrave, due August 2020) print edition is available now to pre-order.  The electronic version is available now, and will be made available to anyone that pre-orders the print edition.  The book is edited by a team of top management history experts led by the editor of the Journal of Management History Bradley Bowden, as well as Jeffrey Muldoon, Anthony M. Gould and Adela J. McMurray.

Although we have not written any sport or soccer-specific content for this book, we have co-authored a chapter entitled 'The Rise of Marketing' which focuses on the era from the early 20th century until the 1980s.  This is an area of management and theory we have of course written about in papers published elsewhere, about marketing and soccer clubs and the world cup.  

Kevin has provided another couple of chapters on 20th-century management, focusing on the work and impact of the paradigm creating business historian Alfred D. Chandler, as well as a chapter about the history of strategic management writing, and edits a section of the book focusing on the history of management between 1940 and the 1980s, a period considered the height of modernity.  Other authors who appear in the section include Jim Philips writing about Industrial Relations, Alice White discussing the rise of Organizational Psychology, Kaylee Boccalatte and Bradley Bowden on Keynes' rivalry with Hayek, and John Quail, focusing on the struggles of British management after World War Two.  This will be a useful contextual section for sports historians to draw on.

The book more broadly contains chapters by the editors and other scholars on both classical topics for management historians including (but not limited to) the industrial revolution, the impact of Ford and Taylor, and the Tavistock Institute. It looks at a broad selection of less well-trodden periods and geographical contexts too, from antiquity to the medieval, and early modern, from China and Russia to Africa.  There is likely to be something of interest to everyone in the book!  Click here to see a list of chapters already finalized.

•  “The most comprehensive and in-depth examination of its subject matter in the market place.”

• - Spans management history thought and traditions

• - Maps the discipline both temporally and geographically

• - Engages with pre-modern ideas and post-industrial concepts

Overall, it is an extensive reference book of around 1200 pages, and is priced to appeal to libraries rather than individuals.  The chapters are useful summaries which can get students up to speed on a variety of topics.  So if this looks interesting to you please request to your university librarian that they purchase for their collection:

Click here to find out more (and please share this link with your friendly librarian/library purchasing officer): 9783319621135

Latest Paper Published in International Journal of the History of Sport

We are thrilled that our latest paper has been published by International Journal of the History of Sport.

Entitled 'Opportunities for all the Team: Entrepreneurship and the 1966 and 1994 Soccer World Cups', this paper does exactly what it says in the tin.

The International Journal of the History of Sport, yesterday

We apply swarm theory together with a framework of sports products to analyze the marketing and entrepreneurial 'products' associated with two financially successful FIFA World Cups in the second half of the 20th Century.

The 1966 edition of the tournament was famously hosted and won by England and spawned the trend for World Cup mascots, with 'World Cup Willie'. The 1994 tournament hosted by the USA took the commercialization of soccer to a new level. Both tournaments notably made use of existing stadia rather than the sorts of extensive new-build construction projects so often associated with sporting mega-events, and both also left observable legacies from a social and cultural perspective, as well as for sport.

We hope that you enjoy the paper, which is online now and will be part of a future Special Issue of the journal.

FREE SOCCER MAD BOFFINS PODCAST

The university of York and York Festival of Ideas have released their new 'Story of Things' podcast series.  which includes an episode by Dr Kevin D. Tennent and Dr Alex G. Gillett (aka The Soccer Mad Boffins) and Dr Alex Jackson (from the National Football Museum, England).

Indeed, the series promises a broad and fascinating selection of podcasts.  According to a spokesperson for University of York "Archaeologist, Dr Penny Spikins returns for a second series of The Story of Things podcast, where she is exploring research projects in sporting events, voice recognition, bee conservation, and how the police force are tackling issues of mental health".

Download the podcast for free using this link:

Itunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-story-of-things/id1246158465?mt=2

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/the-story-of-things


Produced by Philippa Geering of Overtone Productions,our episode entitled 'The Story of Football' clocks in at around 18 minutes and focuses on the FIFA World Cup as a sport mega-event. We focus in particular ion the 1966 FIFA World Cup, and contextualize it by talking the listener though football history more generally, ideas about sport mega-events as mega-projects and their associated opportunities and threats.  We also visit the National Football Museum and Old Trafford Stadium in Manchester, and join some University of York students for a game of football.

L-R: Philippa Geering (Overtone Productions) interviews Dr Alex Jackson (National Football Museum), Dr Alex G. Gillett andDr Kevin D. Tennent (Soccer Mad Boffins)

The podcast ties-in with our appearance at the York Festival of Ideas on June 12th, where we will give a talk entitled 'The Business of The World Cup' which will be chaired by the former Chairman of the Football Association, Greg Dyke.  Tickets are free but you must pre-book one to gain admittance on the evening: http://yorkfestivalofideas.com/2018/talks/business-world-cup-football/


Read more about the podcast series here:

https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/features/2018/story-of-things-podcast-returns/


Read more about York Festival of Ideas here:

http://yorkfestivalofideas.com/2018/

Frontiers of Management History Book Series launched in conjunction with Emerald!

Soccer-Mad Boffins sign the contract at Emerald HQ

Frontiers of Management History is a new book series that will be published globally by Emerald Publishing.  

The series aims to provide an outlet for forward-thinking management and business historians, whose work addresses new perspectives, theories, frameworks, critiques, and applications for practice. By doing so, Frontiers of Management History will create a new space in which to champion the craft of the historian together with the method of the social scientist, two approaches which in today’s interdisciplinary environment are increasingly ‘speaking’ to each other.

Niall Kennedy (Emerald) with Kevin and Alex

The series will include edited collections as well as authored volumes of management history, and the series editors welcome theoretical, empirical and historiographical contributions concerned with organisations from various sectors. 

For more information or to propose an idea for a book, please email:

frontiersofmanagementhistory@gmail.com

Photo credit: Mick from Emerald

Fans as ambassadors

One argument for hosting global sports events such as the FIFA world cup is that the exposure can help to forge a positive image of the host country’s nation and culture (Sola, 1998).  Certainly, imagery of passionate Brazillian supporters creating a sea of yellow shirts in the stadia, cheering their team, and then crying and chewing up flags towards the end of the competition did much to reinforce stereotypes of a nation obsessed with football and its national team’s performance.

The same principal may also apply though to visiting supporters who act as unofficial/part-time ambassadors for their country.  You may, for example, have read in newspapers or websites about a reported tradition amongst a section of Japanese supporters who tidy up litter in stadiums after their team’s matches, using blue plastic bags.  According to The Wall Street Journal (2014) “The state government of Rio de Janeiro last week recognized those tidying efforts, holding a ceremony to thank fans of the Samurai Blue who cleaned up after matches.”

Closer to home (for us here in York, UK at least) football fans may remember Scotland’s ‘Tartan Army’ receiving The Belgian Olympic Committee’s annual Fair Play Prize for their sportsmanlike conduct at the Belgium v Scotland match in September 2001.  This built on a tradition for the Tartan Army, who had formed the Scotland Travel Club in 1980 to encourage responsible behaviour at away matches, following a series of violent clashes . Scotland fans went on to win awards for good conduct at the 1992 European Championships in Sweden and at the 1998 World Cup in France.

And as well as helping to publicise their country, fans might themselves benefit from media coverage – a 17 year-old Belgian fan was ‘discovered’ by beauty firm L’Oreal after a World Cup photo went viral (The Independent, 2014), although the company was soon forced to drop her after pictures of her on a hunting trip in Africa emerged on Twitter.

As one of the most important stakeholders in football – arguably those for whom the game exists – it is no surprise that media attention upon this group increases as media coverage of football events itself increases.  Hosting the world cup may create benefits in terms of national profile, but qualifying can also create similar benefits if your fans are well behaved.  Japan has promoted its image as a highly civilised and ordered society abroad – this may act as a spur to tourism and investment in that country.

Networking the World Cup

The latest in a line of attempts to ‘measure’ the world cup in a quasi-academic fashion comes from The New York Times, where graphics editor Gregor Aisch has developed a series of network diagrams to show the ties between clubs and countries. In his latest diagram, Aisch aims to show how many clubs have two or more players at the world cup playing for different teams.  The logic seems to be that clubs with the widest diversity in terms of national team representation (i.e. Man Utd and Real Madrid) sit in the middle of the diagram, while clubs with less diversity sit towards the edge.  The diagram can also be used backwards, to show the clubs that contributed players to each national team.  The diagram is relatively intense, but some countries, such as Iran and Australia, qualified with fewer players at well networked clubs than most.

It would be tempting to say that this is a predictor of form based on Australia already being out of the tournament, and Iran having only one point so far - but Australia will

face much better networked Spain in tonight’s dead-rubber. Perhaps the explanatory power of network diagrams in football can only go so far, on the pitch at least?

Scoring from the sidelines: advertising and the world cup

The FIFA World Cup, and the associated excitement around it, has been a tool for marketers almost as long as the competition has existed.  Since the 1982 FIFA has had official commercial partners, usually ‘global brands' - not surprisingly Coca-Cola has been the longest serving of these, supporting FIFA for every world cup since 1982. Some, such as McDonalds, came later, in their case from 1994 onwards.  Others, such as FujiFilm, supported the organisation and the world cup loyally, but not even the world cup was exposure enough to save them from decline - technological in the case of Fuji, which supported FIFA from 1982-2006.    For the 2014 tournament there are six ‘FIFA Partners’, eight ‘World Cup sponsors’ and six ’National Supporters’, brands better known in the home country.  

Increasingly, FIFA and national organisers have insisted that stadiums and other activities organised to coincide with the world cup are kept free of any advertising or marketing activity from non-sponsors. Before FIFA did this, television authorities insisted that advertising be kept away from the pitch area, where it might easily be seen on TV. This has meant that ambush marketing as a tactic has a long history associated with the tournament, going back at least to the 1966 competition when Swiss fans carried banners advertising Swiss co-operative stores at Hillsborough stadium, in Sheffield (Chisari, 2007).  More recently, at the 2006 world cup, 1,000 Dutch fans watched their country’s match against Ivory Coast in their underwear after organisers confiscated their orange trousers, which had the logo of a Dutch brewery on them (Anheiser Busch’s Budweiser was the official beer - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/5091154.stm).

This world cup has already seen a stream marketing and advertising campaigns related to to the world cup.  One of the most tangental has been Listerine who seem to be claiming that their product can deal with the damage to football fans’ teeth caused by the FIFA World Cup. On the other hand, Kia’s campaign for the USA would seem entirely tangential to the product being sold.  More local businesses have also attempted to take advantage of the world cup for marketing purpose;

the Frenchgate shopping centre in Doncaster offers a ‘World Cup Lounge’, which they claim allows shoppers to ‘cheer on England’, although presumably the shopping centre was not open for England’s 11pm BST kick-off against Italy on Saturday.   Perhaps this oversight is why England didn’t win.

Have you seen any tangential, esoteric, or otherwise strange world cup related marketing or advertising?  Let us know by commenting below.  More on this as the tournament progresses...