The Fan Engagement Pod

Episode 39 of the Fan Engagement Pod is a chat with Christopher Addison from Le Golf National in Paris, where he holds a customer experience and marketing role. He has also studied sport and management both at the renowned Stirling University, and at Dundee, where he did a Masters.  This was recorded in Summer 2020, not long after the first nationwide lockdowns finished both at home and abroa...

Episode 4 of BasChat is a bit of a departure, but for a reason. It’s the last one in its current format. As you’ll hear in this episode we’re going to be changing things around a little bit, and in the future, focusing on the club side of Fan Engagement with Bas. This time around we look at the value of Fan Engagement when you get that approach from a tech company, why clubs value sponsorships &am...

Episode 38 of the Fan Engagement Pod is a chat with Cambridge United Director, Dave Matthews Jones. Dave is the director elected by fans, via the Cambridge United supporters’ trust, Cambridge Fans United. He’s learned to accept the realities of the game and not let them get to him too much! This was recorded in late May 2020, towards the end of the first nationwide lockdown.  The role Dave ho...

Episode 37 of the Fan Engagement Pod is a chat with the Football Supporters Association’s Ashley Brown.  Ashley led the fan takeover of Portsmouth FC in 2013, and was a director until 2017 when US media mogul Michael Eisner took over. Under the stewardship of the supporters, the club was transformed off the pitch into a club unrecognisable from the one that collapsed twice and was caught up i...

Episode 36 of the Fan Engagement Pod is a chat with Cheltenham Town Media Manager, Richard Joyce and Associate Director Murry Toms. Like many clubs of their size and level, they don’t have teams of people working on communications & engagement. Richard works across the piece, whilst Murry provides support on a practical and strategic level for Richard’s work.  This interview provides a re...

Welcome to BasChat episode three. This is where me, Kevin Rye and Bas Schnater, Fan Engagement consultant and expert, chat about marketing, commercial and activations with a Fan Engagement Flavour.  This month we look at the known unknown of what happens after Covid and the return of fans to stadiums, focusing on whether brands will pull back from their involvement in clubs, season ticket ‘no...

Welcome to Episode 35 of the Fan Engagement Pod, a chat with the person responsible at The FA for relationships with The Football Supporters Association, as well as clubs and others, Director of Professional Game Relations, Andy Ambler.  Andy used to run Millwall and before that, Fulham, under quite different owners, John Berylson and Muhammed Fayed. At Millwall they had a fan on the board (a...

Episode 34 of the Fan Engagement Pod is a wide ranging conversation with Brighton & Hove Albion Chief Executive & Vice Chair, Paul Barber. Paul is someone liked and respected throughout the industry, and we cover plenty of ground, ranging from the way in which leadership and values shape the way the club is run at all levels, involving all staff, and how that impacts on engagement with fan...

Welcome to Episode 33 of the Fan Engagement Pod, a chat with another Mark, this time Mark Catlin the Chief Executive of Portsmouth FC. Mark is someone I don’t need to persuade of the merits of open and transparent communication, and good Fan Engagement, as they finished 9th in the inaugural Fan Engagement Index.  We chat about the prospects for football whenever it is we emerge from the pande...

This episode is a chat with Mark Bradley from the Fan Experience Company. Mark doesn’t need much introduction to people in English football, or increasingly, European football, given his UEFA funded grow work across the continent. We chat extensively about the roots of his work from starting off at the Halifax Building Society, progressive customer service, and developing the fan journey with the...

This episode is one of the most fascinating I’ve done, because I learned such a huge amount about a subject I knew very little about: esports. It centres around a chat with Trev Keane, a Dublin-based consultant with Took Media and a founding board member of Ireland Esports.  There’s a lot of talk about whether football - and other sports - should see esports as a threat to their business mode...

In this episode, we chat about how to ensure that insight from the fans is part of how you work with your commercial partners. Not as some kind of necessary evil, or a brake on something, but as a positive way of ensuring that you get the most out of your sponsorship and activation. We take a particular look at Borussia Dortmund, and Bas also muses about loyalty and the attempted coup by Donald Tr...

This episode is a chat with Fiona Green, Director and Co-Founder of Winners, a technology-neutral provider of services that helps sports rights owners increase revenue, participation and engagement.  Fiona is an expert in the field of data, and is passionate about getting people to understand the absolute centrality of data for rights holders. She talks about where clubs have struggled for va...

This episode is a chat with Niamh O’Mahony, Secretary of the Irish Football Supporters Network, and one of the two representatives of fans on the FAI (Football Association of Ireland) Council. She is also a former acting CEO of SD Europe, and one of the people behind the saving of her own Cork City in 2010.  Niamh is steeped in the Irish and European supporters' trust and supporters’ movement...

The Fan Engagement Pod returns tomorrow, 19/01/21. Don't forget Bas Chat, the last Thursday of every month. Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/fan-engagement-pod . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Episode 28 of the Fan Engagement Pod. This episode is back to a chat with a guest about their experience and perspective on Fan Engagement, with an old friend of mine from my days working in European football, Digital Project Manager at Brøndby IF, Troels Johnsen. We really get into some of the commercial issues around converting loyalty, identity, belonging and being part of something...

In this episode, we have a chat about Bas’s view on data breadcrumbs, where it segways with relationships, about a natty new activation between Budweiser and US women’s soccer, Bas’s take on the Premier League’s now defunct Pay Per View plans, passion products and why he calls fans ‘customer plus’. Mark Bradley and the work of the Fan Experience Company also get a very honourable mention. If you w...

Episode 26 of the Fan Engagement Pod is a chat with Wycombe Wanderers Head of Media, Matt Cecil.  We looked at whether being a fan of a club like him is beneficial in roles like his, how he focuses on what the numbers tell him, and how not to spend too much time reading Twitter or messageboards. We also chat about how he’s moved seamlessly between three different models of ownership, helping...

Welcome to a new, monthly episode of the Fan Engagement Pod which we call Bas Chat, where Kevin Rye and new co-host, Bas Schnater, go into more detail about Fan Engagement, tapping into Bas’s vast knowledge of what’s happening in Fan Engagement now. We take a particular look at activations, sponsorships and partnerships between brands and rights holders. I’m hoping to pick up some new ideas and le...

Episode 25 of the Fan Engagement Pod is an interview with the CEO of Rugby League club, Warrington Wolves, Karl Fitzpatrick. Warrington is itself close to football hotbeds, Manchester and Liverpool, so you can’t just do ‘more of the same’. Under Karl they’ve become known for their innovative approach to marketing a sport and a club that has to work far harder than football for eyeballs and money....

Welcome to Episode 24 of the Fan Engagement Pod, and this is a bit of a special: it’s a pretty free-ranging conversation between myself and Paul Musa, who runs the What the Footie podcast, with this episode published by both What the Footie, and the Fan Insights Fan Engagement Pod. Paul’s podcast was set up to help crack open some of the secrets in the game, and is worth a listen: he looks at load...

We return this episode to football activism, in a chat with Niall Couper, Head of Media, PR and Supporter Communications for Amnesty International UK, playing an important role to promote activism in the UK. It’s critical for anyone running a club or working in football in a Fan Engagement role to understand how activists think and work, which make this, and Episode 6, with Fulham, Spurs and Liver...

Episode 22 of the Fan Engagement Pod is with Julian Tagg, Club President and Director of External Affairs at Exeter City FC - the club that finished top of the first Fan Engagement Index in 2019. The 2020 edition will be out in the next couple of months. He talks about the challenge of operating what are in effect several businesses in one, resilience, whilst keeping fans involved and committed. A...

If you ever wanted to understand what the business case for Fan Engagement is, listen to this interview with Shaun Lockwood, Group Head of Marketing and Communications at Club Doncaster (which includes Doncaster Rovers, Doncaster Rovers Belles and Doncaster Rugby League clubs). He’s a relative rarity in football and wider sport, in that he gets that the nature of the relationship between the fan a...

This episode is with Ben Kensell, Chief Operating Officer of Norwich City FC, and former Commercial Operations Controller at Arsenal, and then Chief Commercial Officer at Charlton Athletic. This chat with Ben moves into an area that doesn't traditionally get talked about enough in Fan Engagement, and that’s strategy. Strategy is, as Ben explains, what makes what Norwich City do, effortless, as wel...