AUDIENCE(92)

While I had played the game as a youth, I had lost touch with it over the years—something that’s easy to do in the NFL/NBA/MLB-obsessed U.S. of A. This cabbie piqued my interest, however, with one statement:

Mate, there are over 7,000 football clubs in the U.K. alone.

Wait . . . what?!? My mind couldn’t comprehend the number. Granted he was including professional, semi-professional, and amateur clubs; but still, 7,000 seemed well beyond the realm of possibility to someone living in the bubble of North American sports.

Nevertheless, I pressed on, peppering him with question after question. He told me about the birth of football in 1863 and that soccer was actually the original British term for the game—a contraction of Association Football.a I was also introduced to the concept of relegation, a process by which the bottom three or so teams from an upper division are demoted each year in favor of the promotion of an equal number of teams from a lower division.b

Upon returning home, I promptly fired up our television and discovered I now had access to the Fox Soccer channel (@FoxSoccer). I called this “a sign from God.” My wife calls it “the beginning of my lost years.” In an instant, I became an absolute English Premier League (@PremierLeague) junkie, developed my affinity for the Tottenham Hotspur Football Club (@TottenhamHotspur), and sought out anything and everything I could read about The Beautiful Game.c

As my madness fully took hold, I discovered some fascinating parallels between the spread of soccer around the world and the Internet-powered channels that dominate our marketing conversations today:

1. The game was nothing new. FIFA (@FIFA) recognizes the third century BC game of Cuju (pronounced Tsu-Chu) to be the precursor to the modern game of soccer.2

Similarly, when you examine all of our marketing channels today, you realize they are really just technologically supercharged word of mouth—which has been around since humans developed language.

2. Chaos ruled the early days. Early versions of soccer and rugby were played in England from the eleventh century on. Those games, however, more closely resembled mob rule than an actual sport. Indeed, a French observer of one such a game in 1829 commented, “If this is what the English call playing, it would be impossible to say what they would call fighting.”3

The early days of Internet marketing were a similar Wild West of chaos; brands were unsure how to play the game and fought over URLs, and a great many start-up deaths ensued when the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.

3. Rules take time, experience, and consensus to create. Until they were codified in 1863 and 1871, respectively, soccer and rugby weren’t distinct sports. Prior to 1863, you could show up to play a game of “soccer” only to discover that the home team’s rules required 18 men on a side and allowed the use of hands and violent shin kicking. Even now, the rules of soccer continue to evolve. Tackles are more tame, penalties more severe, and in 2013, FIFA finally introduced goal line technology to ensure that goals are called accurately.

Do you know—I mean really know—the rules of Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter marketing? You might have a sense of them, but it’s not like there’s a rulebook to guide your efforts. As Internet marketers, we’re a lot like England in the 1800s when lots of different games dotted the countryside. They called them soccer or rugby; we call ours social media. Right now, the home teams (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are writing the rules. But increasingly, the participants—brands and consumers—are leveraging their personal experience to dictate what’s right or wrong in terms of taste, timing, and privacy. This isn’t a process that we can rush; the distinct rules for each social channel will become clear. But we have to accept that rulemaking takes time, experience, and unfortunately, some bruised shins.

4. The game travels with the forces that move people. The reason soccer emerged as the world’s game is because of two forces: British colonialism and the emergence of steam locomotion. The first took the game to distant shores, and the second allowed professional teams from Manchester to travel to London to develop regional—not just local—rivalries.

The twin forces impacting marketing are the Internet and mobility. The Internet enabled email, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other U.S. innovations to connect and inspire the globe. Mobile devices then took that one step further, untethering consumers from desktop computers while transforming them into rivals for attention with brands themselves.

5. Simplicity drives adoption, but not necessarily ROI. Author Julian Norridge sums up the global spread of soccer thusly: The appeal was the same as it was to the English working class. The rules were simple. It was flexible—you could play almost anywhere. It was cheap—all you needed was a ball and something to mark out goals. You weren’t as likely to get injured as you might be at rugby. And, above all, it was skillful and exciting.4