Can The Club Machine Ever Be Authentic?

Messi and maté go together like mitochondria and the cell. The drink is the Argentinian’s stimulant of choice and he’s rarely seen without a brew in hand. So why haven’t I ever seen Messi in a maté advertisement? I’ve seen him juggling a ball for Pepsi, I’ve seen him hit impossible moving targets for Lays. So why have I not seen him in the most glaringly obvious, authentic brand partnership of all time?

Football clubs are historically bastions of culture, but increasingly they are looking for ways to cultivate authentic online personas. Clubs have graduated from e-sports deals and branched into the domain of fashion, which is less intuitively linked to football culture. However, all this talk of authenticity seems dubious in a sport which historically, has been rife with corruption. With the increasing commercialisation of what began as the sport of the poor and the working class, of street kids in the dusty lanes of provincial Latin America, comes more than a few raised eyebrows at the precept of bringing authenticity back to football.

Chelsea FC recently debuted their 2021/22 home kit in a video released across their socials. The creative direction paid homage to Chelsea’s history as a mainstay of London culture. The Zombies 1968 single “Time Of The Season” and a psychedelic sensibility plays into the design of the new kit and is a sartorial retrospective of the club’s history. Well-placed creative design is becoming more common in football kits, while other areas of creative “collaboration” in football appear slightly more misguided.

Former Manchester United and Bordeaux striker David Bellion spoke to The Sneaker Pod about his approach as a creative director and stylist. He refers to déformation professionnelle; a failure to look beyond one’s own area of expertise and to consider a wider perspective. He attributes this as a reason that professional football is yet to cultivate an authentic culture in the fashion space.

“It’s difficult to make them understand that for their club this is the story, [while] for another club [that] is the story,” explains Bellion.

Bellion highlights that clubs are slowly integrating creative brand partnerships, often led by individual players. They are moving beyond the nonsensical McDonalds sponsorships that have long burned our retinas from their LED screens framing the pitch.

“Now clubs are starting to get into that slowly,” he continues. “In PSG for example, you have a guy like Guillaume Salmon inside that was from Colette. He knows a bit of the story. In Arsenal it’s Hector Bellerin, it’s the player who knows the story. So you can see that it’s moving in clubs.”

Sports marketing agencies at the helm of the creative challenges in football are not concerned with holding onto the old order. Ehsen Shah, chief executive at B-Engaged told Vogue Business Vogue Business that their primary target audience is 13 to 35 years old. “We always have the issue where an old school football fan doesn’t get it, but we’re not trying to communicate to them.”

Almost 10 years ago, City Football Group (CFG) disrupted our conception of football clubs and redefined the future of corporate football. Following their goal of creating a worldwide network of clubs, CFG also plans to pair players with entertainment brands such as EA Sports. However, the impersonal, removed nature of such corporations begs the question: will players be engaging in authentic, meaningful partnerships or will they be whisked through their careers disconnected from the brands emblazoned on their jerseys and in turn, from their fans? The calibre of CFG’s players is intended not only to win championships, but to entice sponsors into brand deals. However, the transactional nature of this tactic could equally harm an individual player’s social capital as fans come to expect more authenticity from what a player tries to sell them. For this reason, it is important for players to know the difference between brands that are keen to exploit their Instagram grid as ad space and those that genuinely want to connect with a fanbase and build a brand story together with the athlete.

Conversely, David Bellion stresses the importance of equipping players with meaningful knowledge of their brand partnerships and fortifying them with the cultural capital that they can then use to shape their own futures, rather than being swept up in the jet stream of corporate football.

Bellion speaks of his close relationship with Napoli and Chelsea midfielder, Tiémoué Bakayoko. Bakayoko is a major shareholder of French luxury fashion brand Études and is the first footballer with this title. He is also involved in their creative projects and is the only French footballer to feature in an editorial campaign for Air Dior. Bellion emphasises what it is that makes their collaboration effective and more importantly, worthwhile.

“It’s a transmission for me. Whatever I say to [Tiémoué] he keeps it in his heart and brain. The best victory is not just to be a stylist and say, ‘here are the clothes’… it’s ‘this is the brand I’m showing you’. You give him culture and afterwards, he uses his culture for his interview or his life.”

At the core of football in business there is always an agenda, likewise with brand partnerships involving players worth millions. The real challenge for football clubs is to hone in on those that are authentic, who not only match the club in core values, but want to contribute meaningfully and push professional football culture forward. That doesn’t mean the brand needs to be one that is traditionally associated with football. On the contrary, Bellion believes that the answer often lies in unexpected or smaller scale brand deals.

“The professional football world doesn’t understand and doesn’t know all those people at all. So, to create the bridge and to say to those people, those communities, ‘come and do whatever you want’, that was the key.”

Last year, Pharrell Williams, founder of wellness brand Humanrace entered a creative partnership with Adidas “inspired by and in celebration of the imperfect beauty of the human spirit”. Together they designed special edition kits for the five ‘A Clubs’; Juventus, Arsenal, Manchester United, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich. It may well be that Williams is passionate about the “universality of sport”, but the decision to mark the teams with a visually striking brand campaign is also a way for Adidas to reaffirm their territory across the juggernauts of European football. The merging of these disparate motives resulted in a campaign which was not only mutually beneficial but reinvigorated the history of football club kits with unique, culturally significant designs. A jersey was also designed for Romance FC, a grassroots team from London, lending credibility to the Humanrace mission and staying true to the company’s values.

Adidas’ creative director Inigo Turner said, “Through sport we have the power to change lives... And while these shirts won’t do that on their own, what we’re saying is that we can use them to promote messages and highlight these causes”.

Releasing these shirts simultaneously across rival clubs gives the impression of a visual flash mob during a time when our world is becoming increasingly visualised online. It sends a message of togetherness in an unexpected context and captures the attention of an international audience. This collaboration is a very authentic slap in the face, if not in its motivation, in its crude, hand painted, DIY design.

While some clubs are just beginning to explore diverse collaborations, Paris Saint-Germain has already cemented its identity as the first fashion monolith in football. In 2018 the club signed on with Jordan brand as their official kit purveyor, launching the most unexpected partnership in professional football. Off the back of their affiliation with Jordan, PSG has also collaborated with BAPE and Levi’s - both brands with strong social capital in the streetwear space.

David Bellion told The Sneaker Pod that, “The difficulty is most of the time [clubs] don’t have a strong [fashion] culture like we have here [in France]. I’m not saying that we are super cultivated, but we have this kind of culture and understand that there is a scene of football which is different from the mainstream scene that the clubs are used to communicating with and doing business with.”

PSG is the ninth most valuable football club in the world as of June 2021. This is due to a great ability to attract top tier talent and capitalise on unexpected fashion collaborations. These garner hype in the intersectional space of sport and fashion. However, PSG has already been accused of clout chasing with their Jordan affiliation, many questioning what the brand has in common with the club. PSG’s strategy does not make clear what it is that attracts them to the American hip-hop culture that Jordan is imbibed with, how this fits into French hip-hop culture, or how that in turn fits into football at the Parisian club. There are a few too many jumps in the logic for people to locate meaning in the partnership. Consequently, fans have quickly weeded out the empty brand affiliation.

This May, almost 110,000 people signed a petition to boycott the 2021/22 PSG home kit which was designed to pay homage to the 1990s Chicago Bulls basketball uniform. This was a risky design decision that left some fans outraged at the creative liberties that were taken with PSG’s historical jersey.

The petition read, “We are viscerally attached to our historic colours… We know that this respect is necessary for an institution as strong as the fans. We dream of seeing our players win so many titles wearing these unique colours that make our hearts beat faster”.

Primarily, fans are indignant about the abandonment of the Hechter jersey. Daniel Hechter was a designer and PSG fanatic who redesigned the kit in 1973 and is revered as a founding father of the club. In this sense, while hopping on the Jordan bandwagon made history, it also backfired on PSG, proving that balancing authenticity with lucrative brand deals is difficult for even the most progressive and experimental clubs.

Football clubs will not achieve authenticity in brand partnerships with a one size fits all strategy, nor will they forge an authentic persona by bandwagoning a label with underdeveloped relevance to their own identity. Authentic partnerships will not only allow football clubs to forge an identity off the pitch and in the fashion space but will also equip individual players with the cultural capital to forge their own personal brands and have increased opportunities after they retire from the game.

It could also mean that the next time Messi is sipping a maté, he could be doing so as a paid partner. Until then, the Earth will continue to spin, just slightly off kilter.