You can tell a lot about a football club by their first ever tweet. There’s Chelsea, punishingly efficient by using it to announce the creation of the account itself. There’s Leicester City, upbeat and forward-thinking: “Leicester City have now entered the world of Twitter!”. Watford’s first tweet introduced Badge Moose as the admin and promised a free-half season ticket when they reached 300 followers – gloriously 2010.
Then there’s Manchester United, who first tweeted in 2013, four years later than some clubs, shortly after the appointment of David Moyes as manager. “New era, same spirit. The season starts here. Let’s do this. #mufc,” it read. Like the defender crunching into the back of a centre forward, it’s crucial to get three corporate slogans in early doors.
Over the last few months, United’s Twitter account has become a source of some amusement to a wider audience and some embarrassment to match-going supporters. One fan told i this week that they had unfollowed after it had “pissed me off too much”. He is sent the choice bits by friends anyway.
Only last week, United tweeted to ask if “Anyone else go about their day saying Siuuuuu 100+ times?”, accompanied by the requisite cry-laughing emoji because this is all terrific banter. After the draw against Aston Villa, during which Donny van de Beek played one minute, they congratulated him on reaching 50 appearances for the club. That wasn’t so much failing to read the room as crashing into a moment of mournful reflection with a bag of cans and three fireworks.
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“’Football banter’ has developed because football is fun, exciting and deeply partisan. Manchester United is a behemoth of a brand that needs to recruit future global generations of fans, at a time when the idea of club fandom itself is coming into question, so they reach for them through the light-hearted tweeting that appeals to them.
“But keeping everyone happy is impossible. For every potential fan somewhere in the world is another, perhaps older and differently motivated, who finds this type of content from their club increasingly annoying. They might be taking it all too seriously but clubs must balance that against the very real possibility that it’s their money that’s more likely to find its way to Old Trafford.”
It is the disconnect between the strands of the club that is most jarring. Were Manchester United top of the Premier League (as, as if to indicate just how long the last year has been, they were exactly 12 months ago from the time of writing), none of this would likely cause a stir. Perhaps there is a strategy not to alter the style whatever the results on the pitch, but it can come across as tone deafness. As for the Van de Beek tweet, could the expectation have been for anything other than a negative reaction from supporters?
This raises the question of who and what a Twitter account at a superclub is even for. That same question dogs every major football club and brand. If it is for merely providing fans with information, fine. If it is to provide insight into life at the club, fine. If it is for maintaining the relationship between current supporters, fine (but they are split into very different spheres, given the club’s global fanbase).
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And if it is merely to generate social media engagement (by which we roughly mean post impressions) that give United greater leverage when negotiating sponsorship deals, perhaps those controversial – in the eyes of many supporters at least – tweets are working perfectly. The Van de Beek tweet currently has 4,683 quote tweets and will have had millions of impressions. Is this all good business?
Last March, Ed Woodward spoke on a conference call in which he claimed the scale and engagement of the fanbase set United apart globally and thus increased the club’s power. Woodward infamously talked up Google searches for Angel di Maria increasing 12-fold after his signing for the club. Di Maria was also largely wretched on the pitch.
“As social media matures, the occasions on which the collection of likes and retweets serve any of those legitimate objectives are vanishingly rare,” the strategist says. “Replies, when meaningful, are slightly different – that’s conversation, which, when meaningful, is a deeper and truer level of engagement.
“The business need that sits behind ‘image’ might be brand building or reputation management, but simple engagement is typically justified as a proxy measurement for acquisition or awareness; Manchester United arguably don’t need either. If they did, likes and retweets would be surface metrics at best and there are reputational consequences for cheapening the public conversation. Brand building is a longer term approach than engagement baiting.”
And that’s entirely the point. When the team is underperforming on the pitch, the brand suffers beyond saving by some light-hearted tweets that can actually have a detrimental effect. The accusation from Manchester United supporters that i spoke to is that their beloved club got lost somewhere along the way, caught in the trap of maximising their marketing appeal and allowing on-pitch results to wane.
Ed Woodward – fairly or otherwise – came to represent that decline in their eyes. Is the content of a Twitter account crucial to that? Maybe not. But there is a huge difference between engagement and image. It is a fine – and sometimes – blurred line that every club must tread carefully. And at least they didn’t make Van de Beek play a bloody piano.
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