SPECIAL REPORT | SOCCER
Mersey tide Liverpool were the leading force in English soccer in the years before the Premier League and, despite underachieving in recent times, remain among the world’s best-supported teams. Transatlantic commercial duo Billy Hogan and Olly Dale explain how the club is reaching out to a global fanbase which is hungry for success but loyal to the cause. By Eoin Connolly. Photographs by Graham Fudger.
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his is Anfield, a few hours before Liverpool’s Premier League encounter with Newcastle United in early November. Billy Hogan (left), the club’s chief commercial officer, and sales director Olly Dale (right) have just finished an interview with SportsPro in an executive box looming over one corner of the ground. The two are chatting about a freakish comeback win in that week’s Capital One Cup as the conversation turns to the nebulous concept of momentum in sport; the feeling of an intangible force working in one team’s direction. It is not the first time the term has come up on the day. “We haven’t had as much success as we’d have liked on the pitch the last several years,” admits Hogan during the interview, “and our fanbase has remained incredibly loyal and incredibly strong throughout that process. I think we’re now, as we talked about, feeling a great momentum within the club as the business side is really getting up and going and as the football side is starting to see improvement on the pitch under Brendan [Rodgers]. There’s this great sense that we’re heading in the right direction.” It is now just over two years since John Henry and Tom Werner completed their takeover of Liverpool from the locally despised Tom Hicks and George Gillett. The experience since, Hogan says, has served to confirm what Henry and Werner’s Fenway Sports Group (FSG) had already suspected: “the size and scale of the club, the support and the strength of the fanbase, the opportunity that exists
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from a commercial side that hadn’t yet been tapped into.” Yet they have been two years of trial by fire as well, not least on the field, and there is a sense that it is only now that FSG is fully bringing the club under its own auspices. On the playing side, this has meant hiring and then firing Kenny Dalglish, probably the most popular living figure associated with the club. The Scot’s messianic presence went from energising to enervating during an emotionally draining 15-month second stint as manager and he was replaced over the summer by the highly regarded if untested Brendan Rodgers, arguably FSG’s first long-term appointment in the role. Commercially, things have progressed with altogether less heartbreak. Dale stresses the contribution to the commercial project of Ian Ayre, the Liverpool managing director who was commercial director under Hicks and Gillett. Liverpudlian Ayre was instrumental in securing Liverpool’s front-of-shirt sponsorship deal with Standard Chartered – a partnership which not only earns the club a reported UK£20 million a year but was also activated in a way that foreshadowed the current international strategy. American Hogan worked on the acquisition team that evaluated Liverpool as a prospective Fenway purchase but only arrived at the club full-time in May. His relationship with English colleague Dale dates back three and a half years to the latter’s time at Premier League club Fulham. Dale reached Anfield via FSG’s in-house agency Fenway Sports Management, where Hogan also worked. The rest of the team coming together
under Hogan is a blend of Liverpool experience and expertise from Fenway and beyond. “That’s been the most important thing, frankly, in my time here, is to get that team in place,” says Hogan. “And now that we’re in place, go from here.” Both Hogan and Dale believe that membership of such a prestigious and extensive portfolio of properties as FSG, which includes Major League Baseball’s Boston Red Sox, Nascar’s Roush Fenway Racing and a partnership with LeBron James, brings a unique set of benefits. “It gives us a great sense of scale in terms of our connections,” says Dale. “That, for me, is an important point to make. We’re able to have a close relationship with a huge amount of organisations who are working in the sports industry. So that’s big and as we’ve said previously, this industry is moving very quickly, it’s very dynamic, and the ability for us to be able to tap into different areas of expertise across the group is hugely beneficial for us.” Dale, unlike Hogan, is permanently based on Merseyside, and while he jokes of 11pm phone calls from Boston – preferable, he says, to the “7pm ‘putting the kids to bed’ call” – the arrangement brings further rewards. “I think what’s helpful from a Liverpool perspective also is that the sports marketing industry in the UK is reasonably young by comparison,” he explains, “and we’ve been able to learn a tremendous amount from the more developed, established sports marketing industry, which is a much bigger industry in the States.” The learning process runs both ways, of course, and for FSG there has been much to discover about the nature of English soccer and Liverpool Football Club. There have been some embarrassments, most recently the brief, bizarre stint of director of communications Jen Chang, who left the club shortly after becoming embroiled in a bullying scandal with a Liverpool season ticket holder who ran a parody Twitter account which had posted transfer ‘scoops’. Still, much of it has been positive, even during times of adversity or painful reflection. Hogan speaks with quiet admiration of the extraordinary campaign for justice waged by the families of the 96 Liverpool supporters killed in the
Hillsborough stadium disaster of 1989. “Obviously what they’ve gone through and those families went through was unimaginable,” he says. “But I think it really is about – and I guess what makes Liverpool unique in that regard – the strength of the fanbase and the feeling almost of a family within the fanbase.” Among much else, the ongoing Hillsborough campaign has reinforced something that really does make the Liverpool support look different; an ineffable sense of seeming very big and very small at the same time. “This isn’t a club that has developed a fanbase on the back of short-term successes over the last five years,” says Dale. “This is a club that has a long-term, very large fanbase. So that’s the first point. And I think, like we said, there’s a special sense of community about this football club, which I think is probably unique in football.” Though the bulk of the club’s massive haul of silverware was plundered in what might be called soccer’s pre-commercial age, Liverpool were among the first English sides, along with Lancashire rivals Manchester United, to develop a truly international fanbase. The breadth of it becomes apparent as Dale checks off a list of the club’s regional commercial targets. “There are some very established markets for Liverpool in terms of fanbase,” he says. “A lot of people talk about south-east Asia and south-east Asia is hugely important – we’ve got a million Facebook friends in Indonesia so we’ve got a very strong following there, huge presence in Thailand and other territories around south-east Asia. But let’s not forget about Scandinavia, where there’s a long-term, very passionate presence for Liverpool. Similarly with Ireland. We have a tremendous amount of support in South Africa and Australia, areas where we’re looking to develop more relationships and develop our presence.” Not forgetting, of course, that although their 18th and most recent English league title came as long ago as 1990, Liverpool remain perhaps the best-supported club in England and the dominant thread in the cultural fabric of their home city – with apologies to both Everton and The Beatles. Maintaining equilibrium between domestic and international interests,
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