Building on Rented Land

A week ago Chelsea posted a photograph of the Champions League trophy on the Stamford Bridge turf, ribboned in blue and captioned as London’s home of trophies. It was a wink at the rest of the capital — banter, not bile. No player was named, no missed penalty mocked, no line crossed. And after I put it into a Sports Executive WhatsApp Group it set off a debate among the people who do this for a living: few found it sharp and on-brand, others found it tasteless, beneath a club of that stature, not classy.

Set the taste argument aside, because it is the less interesting one, though i was surprised at the amount of push back. Whether a post is classy is a brand question. Whether it earns attention — and who banks that attention — is a balance-sheet question. And on the balance sheet, the modern football club is making a quietly expensive error: it has kept the cheap half of its media business and given the valuable half away.

Lets start with the numbers that appears in every fan-engagement deck and is almost always misread - the number of fans a club has. Football Benchmark’s analysis of the world’s twenty biggest clubs found Manchester United posting an average engagement rate of 0.3% on its content, Juventus 0.2%, with Liverpool, Bayern Munich and Manchester City clustered around 0.4%. Set against that, the transfer reporter Fabrizio Romano runs an engagement rate above 5% across 44 million Instagram followers - and yes i understand why clubs dont post transfer rumours!

The honest caveat first. Engagement rate is a treacherous metric: a club carrying hundreds of millions of dormant, duplicate and bot-inflated followers — Real Madrid and Barcelona sit on combined followings north of 400 million — will always show a depressed percentage, because the denominator is vast - and its a consequence of a prior poor KPI they had of chasing follower numbers at the behest of Meta and others. At this point though, few if any major clubs now don’t understand the impact of digital and the importance of using the variosu forms of digital content to try and connect. But this is a story about which kind of relationship they have chosen to own, and what they do with the attention once they have it.

Look at who actually commands attention at scale, and a pattern emerges that ought to be uncomfortably familiar to anyone in sport. MrBeast, the most-subscribed individual on the planet with more than 650 million followers across his channels, built that audience on one thing: competition. Contestants, challenges, eliminations, cash on the line — structured jeopardy, filmed with real emotional stakes and a constant thread of humour. When he and IShowSpeed ran fifty creators through a two-day, last-one-standing contest, observers noted that the moments of rivalry and vulnerability were precisely what made it travel.

The funny thing is that Mr Beast did an interview with CNN when he made it clear that his model is based on competition as its what makes people watch to the end - they want to see who wins! He’s not hiding the format that works.

Dude Perfect tells a similar story in their success. Five friends from Texas A&M turned basketball trick shots into a sports-and-comedy business with more than sixty million YouTube subscribers — making them, remarkably, the fourth-most-followed sports channel in the world. Their formula is friendly competition and humour rooted in genuine friendship, kept relentlessly family-safe - again banter is good, foul language or aggression is unnecessary to build engagement, and actually is often detrimental.

Private equity pays attention to this kind of success: Highmount Capital put a nine-figure sum into the group, calling it a media juggernaut at the intersection of sport and comedy. And Mark Goldbridge wins on personality, reaction and the shared ritual of suffering through a game with someone who sounds like your mate. To me its like the days i used to watch Test Cricket with the Radio Commentators on the BBC because they had more personality and chit chat than the TV ones who were far more prosaic. Mark Goldbridge, is modern day radio!

Notice what every one of these machines runs on: rivalry, jeopardy, narrative and humour. Now notice that football (and sports in general) is one of the richest natural supplies of those ingredients in modern-day culture — genuine competition, ready-made villains, decades of rivalry, last-minute drama, heartbreak and euphoria with most fans surviving the ups and downs with humour. Clubs sit on the raw material these creators have to manufacture from nothing, and most (though not all) of them process it into the emotional equivalent of a parish newsletter: fixture graphic, team news, full-time scoreline, sponsor activation, repeat.

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Here is where the deepest problem hides. Take Arsenal right now. They are champions of England for the first time in twenty-two years and were beaten Champions League finalists in Budapest a week ago. Their official engagement will be at the highest it has been in a generation — and only some of that is a content achievement. It is a results achievement. Win things, and the numbers come; the table does the engaging for you. They have a fabulous off the pitch team who i guarantee have maximised this and have worked extraordinarily hard to deliver good content.

Which raises the only question that matters for a club thinking beyond this season: where do those same fans go when you are twelfth in November? Because most clubs, most of the time, are not winning the league - by default, only one can win! And the evidence is that in the lean years the audience does not disappear — it migrates. AFTV, the unofficial Arsenal channel, has 1.8 million subscribers and built its biggest moments not in a season like this one but in the genuinely difficult years; its routine-reaction viewership actually softens as the team wins. The fan and creator ecosystem is sticky precisely because it is not hostage to the scoreline. It offers tone, story, argument, community and humour — reasons to show up that survive a goalless draw in the rain. Its a bit perverse of course that the fan channels technically would want the team to perform worse as it will drive viewership…

That stickiness is the whole commercial game, because attention is not the end point — conversion is. A follower is a vanity number; an engaged fan is a customer, and the research suggests an engaged fan spends in the order of six times what a casual one does.

The mechanism that turns the followership into conversion is exactly what clubs have outsourced: humour, storytelling, and content that reflects the lived texture of supporting a club — without tipping into the cruelty or abuse the best operators carefully avoid. Stale, story-less, voice-less content does not merely underperform. It actively disengages the audience the club is spending a fortune to cultivate. Personally, the AS Roma social accounts under Paul Rogers are one of the benchmarks to look to.

It would be easy, and wrong, to file this under clubs being lazy. The blandness is rational. A club’s social output is built by committee, lawyered for brand safety, and constrained by sponsors who do not want their logo beside a joke that ages badly. Edge carries genuine downside. The climbdown by Chelsea the day after their UCL Trophy post was the disappointing one as it immediately undid the goodwill the fans would have enjoyed with the banter.

Fan media also enjoys a structural advantage a club cannot replicate: it is free to be furious, partisan and unfiltered precisely because it carries none of the institutional liability. The club, optimised to sell reach to sponsors and protect partners, produces exactly the safe, high-volume, low-feeling content the incentives reward. That is what a market failure looks like — every party behaving rationally while the most valuable asset quietly leaks out of the building.

Let me put it another way. F1 became too corporate, bland and uninteresting -i worked in it and you could see everyone acting like robots, media trained to death. Liberty came in, added social media, storytelling and the now infamous Drive to Survive. The key, though… it made the characters interesting again, and guess what - sponsors flocked! SO bland can only take you so far.

The creator economy that football feeds is, on Goldman Sachs’ estimate, a $250 billion market heading towards roughly $480 billion by 2027. Romano’s Instagram alone is reckoned to generate two to three million dollars a year. DAZN, understanding exactly what it is buying, built a Global Football Creator Program around more than a hundred creators with a combined reach of 32 million, on the back of a study finding that 93% of fans want content beyond the match itself (though we have seen MCN’s fail before as creators tend to function better with a freer hand).

Clubs generate an outsized share of the passion that powers all of this and capture a rounding error of the value, because they have built on rented land: pouring content onto platforms they do not own, optimised for a reach number they can sell to sponsors as impressions, while the engagement — the trust, the daily habit, the first-party data — accrues to whoever owns the relationship. Romano owns his audience. AFTV owns its audience. Dude Perfect raised private-equity money against its audience. The club owns a figure it rents from Meta.

Which brings us back to the trophy on the Stamford Bridge grass. That post was not a lapse in taste. It was, for a moment, a club behaving like a creator — reaching for the tribal, competitive, humorous elemental base that drives the engagement it normally rents from somebody else. The instinct to call it “not classy” is the institutional immune system doing its job: defending a reach-optimised, sponsor-safe model that is, slowly and expensively, losing the contest for the one thing the whole business runs on.

Classy is a fine ambition. But in a market where the audience has already voted with its attention and its wallet — and where it keeps showing up for whoever makes it laugh, argue and feel something through the bad seasons as well as the good — a club that is too classy to be interesting is not protecting its brand. It is subsidising someone else’s.