(Luca Russo) – Clubs you go to, communication you find. Right? Not exactly. Not always, at least. In an era in which it is easy to be seduced by the temptation to conform to widespread trends and fashions, the risk of presenting oneself as the copy and paste of something that has already been done exists and is also quite high.
The starting question, however, is legitimate. Especially in today’s football. Think for a moment about any of the medium-high level football clubs of the eighties and nineties and think about the methods they adopted to communicate themselves to the outside world. Now produce the same effort and repeat the exercise applied to the same company, but as it is currently known. Focusing on the distinctive features of one then and the other today is not a prohibitive task at all. They come to the surface without too much effort and with equal ease they tell us about two profoundly different ways of communicating. And God forbid: in three or four decades the world, understood as a multitude of people and related habits and customs, has undergone radical transformations which have brought with them innovations which have had the merit (or demerit?) of directing, orient, overturn the habits, and therefore the methods, of those who live there.
Football, like any other area of everyday life, could not (and in some cases should not) remain safe from it. So it happens that while in the 80s this or that club was enough “as soon as” a press office or an equivalent small group of professionals in the sector to represent itself to the varied universe of media, fans and simple enthusiasts, today the same association communicates and communicates (forgive me the not even vaguely poetic license) through a more or less vast multiplicity of channels , from the more traditional ones to the dozen (dozen?) social networks that intercept and in some or many circumstances form the fans of now and those of tomorrow and the day after.
These developments have imposed on football clubs the need to structure themselves differently than in the past in terms of communication. Having to tell more about themselves, in more ways and through more channels, the press office alone could no longer be enough or be sufficient and efficient as previously and therefore the clubs have supported it with a series of figures and professionals with knowledge and skills of the latest generation capable of accompanying the club itself and its way of representing itself to those and what surrounds it into the future.
The result was, more or less at every football latitude, a torpedo of creative, digital experts, creators of multimedia contributions, communications managers, social media managers and so on and so forth. With so much imagination in “power”, one would expect to find oneself catapulted into the role of users of contents with a high level of quality and above all different from each other because they are the result of the sensitivity, evidently individual or subjective, if you prefer, of the professionals who conceive them. But not all donuts come with a hole…
Sometimes it happens, who knows whether intentionally or not, that it is easier to become the copy and paste of something that has already been done, rather than being the first example of a magical work “that you have never seen”to quote a very well-known and equally pleasant chorus of Crociati fans.
An example? It’s closer than you think. To celebrate the very recent promotion to Serie A, Parma has created a poster that looks a lot, if not to say too much, like a social media product of the same type created by Inter to celebrate the victory of the 2023 Italian Super Cup.
Not only are the ideas underlying the two overlapping “posters”a certain thing emerges “relationship” as well as between the respective graphics. There is no doubt that Parma’s creative team is not the same as Inter’s, but let’s go back to the start: what club are you going to, what communication are you finding? Not really, not always and never mind if from time to time, or rather from often to often, “general” And “soldiers” of this immense and boundless army of communication experts become each other’s stand-ins… Luca Russo
