On a recent Footballco Business Podcast, host of the SportsPro Podcast, Tom Bassam, discussed the media and marketing highlights from Euro 2024, from the biggest brands and players, to the kits and media trends coming out of this year’s tournament.
Listen to the show in full below, or click here.
Most marketable player - a surprise package...
While the likes of Kylian Mbappe, Jude Bellingham and Cristiano Ronaldo rightly dominate talk around the most marketable athletes, international tournaments are perfect shop windows for lesser-known players to increase their brand as well as put themselves on the shortlist for clubs around Europe.
This is why we asked Bassam to tell us which players he thought broke through during the Euros.
He said: "We [SportsPro] picked our most marketable eleven at Footballco's Hotel MUNDIAL event in London. This is one [player] that we picked out as a name in the taxi ride over to the event itself when we were figuring out who was trying to really nail down our first choice eleven.
"At that point, Martin Ádám, the big Hungarian bloke, was the name we went for. He looks like a lumberjack, and that really opens up different categories when it comes to sponsorship. He could sell you a drill, he could sell you a chainsaw…
"My colleague, Sam Carp, pointed this out at the time. He'd obviously become a bit of a figure of fun on social media, but he just doesn't look like a professional footballer. But he came out and addressed it in quite a sweet way talking about how he was born this way, there's no real choice for him to look like this.
"He is a big guy, and people liked him for that and fair play to him. He's playing at the top of the game, he's in that squad on merit, not just because he's a kind of Hungarian Peter Crouch."
(C)GettyImagesPodcasts vs TV
International football tournaments are the perfect time to sell TVs, with sales usually tied to new broadcast innovations. In the past, we've had curved screens, HD screens and 4K broadcasts. But, if anything, we've seen a reduction in broadcast innovation, with Euro 2024 matches broadcast in 1080p HDR at best. Read more on this topic at SportsPro.
With TV failing to provide content consumption innovation, the real media story at Euro 2024, at least in the UK, was the importance of football podcasts.
Bassam added: "In the UK, what has been described as the first podcast election in which the likes of The News Agents and such would be battling with The Rest is Politics for our ears on our commute to talk about the latest developments in the general election.
"Well, this very much felt like the podcast Euros. You've got the Stick to the Football guys on ITV and then you've got The Rest is Football guys on the BBC, which is a slightly strange position in that you've got Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, who are the lead pundits on that network, yet, they're sort of disappearing off afterwards to go and create something completely independent of the BBC.
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Getty"Yet the BBC will report on what they say as if they're not people that also work for the BBC. That then riles up the players. They've definitely managed to create a whole host of headlines. It's just quite an awkward contract situation."
Host of the Footballco Business Podcast, Alex Manby added: "I always think those guys on The Rest Is Football, they must sort of have to check themselves. Is this the BBC one where we have to watch our language or is this The Rest Is Football where all of a sudden, Shearer in particular can be potty?
"It was on The Rest is Football, wasn't it? After they'd upset the England players, someone, I think it had been Lineker's son actually said, "Well, we've done X number of downloads" and someone worked out, well, you've earned that amount of money out of it, and everybody was shocked that the amount of money there."
Brand of the tournament
There was much talk before and during the tournament about adidas' Jude Bellingham activity. We had the 'Hey Jude' campaign, which clearly showed that adidas sees Bellingham as Beckham's heir (as if there were any doubts).
In the group stage, the brand rightly received plaudits for its reactive image following Bellingham's overhead kick goal against Slovakia.
For Bassam, there was more to adidas winning the Euros than Bellingham, some of which went unnoticed by many fans.
"They did a great campaign around the launch of the German kit, it was called Typical Deutsch. We've talked about it on our podcast as well. It's kind of similar to another ad, which maybe we'll come on to mention later, in that it flips stereotypes on their head, or it makes light of stereotypes anyway. So it's kind of taking things that we think about Germans and turning them around. It's never great to talk about a TV advert when someone could literally go and watch it, so go and watch the TV advert, and you'll know what I'm talking about.
"That was great, but the ball technology has really shown up in this tournament because it's shown up in a way by almost not showing up, it's shown up by making VAR offside decisions almost just like a non-entity, it's absolutely fantastic not to be looking across a pitch and worrying about what a middle-aged man just off of the M1 is doing with a cursor.
"It takes that all out because there's this sensor in the ball, which indicates when the ball's been kicked, and therefore, it makes it much easier to tell whether or not someone's offside. And they've also got the wonderful Snickometer, which really harks back to one of my favourite areas of English cricket.
"There was a penalty decision where it was given where it was shown to flick off a player's hand. That may be or might not be a handball in your head, but it's great to have the technology to show that it actually happened. So, for me, adidas really had a pretty good tournament in that regard and it helps that one of their flagship teams has got the title."