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Day 3 of WFS Live: How football clubs secure partnerships outside their local geographies

This week I’ve been attending World Football Summit‘s second WFS Live event. Day 3 included a panel discussion on “How football clubs secure partnerships outside their local geographies”.

As a translator, this session was of particular interest to me, since translators play such a vital role in helping football clubs and leagues to reach new markets.

Matthieu Fenaert of Real Valladolid explained that, in the current economic climate, it was important to consolidate existing partnerships, rather than building new ones. Asked how international sponsors could be retained in these difficult times, he said that clubs needed partners, not sponsors, a view echoed by the other panellists.

On the topic of foreign investors, he said that they had to respect the history of their new club, noting the uproar among Cardiff City fans when Vincent Tan changed the club’s colours from blue to red – a decision eventually reversed due to fan pressure.

Marc Armstrong of Paris Saint-German said that clubs had had to adapt their sales methods due to travel restrictions. He said that, while on the one hand there was no replacement for face-to-face travel, perhaps it would not be necessary to travel so much in future.

He also spoke about the club’s shift from national sponsors to global partners. When I lived in Paris and attended games at the Parc des Princes, nearly all PSG’s sponsors were French brands, many of which operated solely in France. Fast forward 20 years, and the club’s partners are much more global, a deliberate strategy by the club.

Marc added that the club had created a lifestyle brand to stand out from other clubs. Other strategies had included establishing innovative partnerships, such as with Finnish mobile game development company Supercell, and putting key players in contact with the leading influencers in key markets. Creativity, flexibility and intelligence, said Marc, were necessary to find opportunities.

Casper Stylsvig talked about some of the innovations that AC Milan had introduced, reaching out to fans through music and entertainment. He noted that many big brands sponsored both music and sport. Since people today consume sports differently, clubs needed to change their narrative. By way of example, Casper Stylsvig referred to the virtual concert the club had organized the previous Friday, in collaboration with Roc Nation. Such events should be connected to the club’s image: last week’s concert featured many upcoming stars from the world of music, in keeping with a club that had one of the youngest teams in Europe.

I was particularly interested in hearing the thoughts of Andrew Hampel, since, like me, he provides clubs with skills and expertise that they do not have in house. For instance, moving to a new stadium is a once-in-a-lifetime event for most football clubs, but Legends International has already worked with several football clubs that have built a new ground. Like the other speakers, Andrew Hampel stressed the importance of partnership, rather than sponsorship, and said that, to engage in a sophisticated way, clubs needed to understand their partners’ businesses – which is where companies like Legends International come in to provide the necessary expertise.

Despite the current economic climate, football clubs – especially the heavyweight clubs – are looking to go ever more global. Although there is currently a major focus on new markets in the Asia Pacific region, which will require language consultants who work with major Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai, the English language is still going to be a vital part of club’s communication strategies, perhaps even more so than the local language in some cases.

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WFS Live Review

Used with permission by World Football Summit

This year I had been looking forward to attending one of the World Football Summit events, either in Madrid or in Durban. Sadly, like so many other events this year, COVID-19 stopped play before it even began, but the World Football Summit did a wonderful job at organizing an online event in their stead. Here are some of my thoughts about WFS Live, which took place online from 6-10 July.

One of the advantages of the event being online was that it attracted a more international audience, rather than the usual crowd from Europe and North America. There were many attendees from all over Africa and Asia. The speaker line-up was also impressive, no doubt helped by the fact that it was far easier for top speakers to fit an online event into their agendas than it would have been for them to fly perhaps half way around the world to attend an event in person.

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The true identity of Athletic Bilbao’s last Englishman is finally unearthed

Earlier this month, Spanish football historian Lartaun de Azumendi published a 43-Tweet-long thread to explain a remarkable discovery he had made about Martyn Veitch, the man usually cited as the last foreigner to play for Athletic Bilbao before they introduced their famous Basque-only policy.

His discovery quite literally changed the history books, as several days later, Athletic Bilbao updated its website to reflect Lartaun’s discovery. The thread was in Spanish, but as a professional translator specialising in sport, I’m always on the look out for interesting stories that would interest English readers, so I asked Lartaun if I could translate it.

Although I have published a version on Twitter, I recommend reading it on here, where I’m free from the shackles of the 280-character limit. Enjoy!
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