Ken Early: It’s high time that United remembered that winning pays

Everyone knows that Manchester United can be outplayed, Manchester United can be outthought, but Manchester United will never, ever be outdone when it comes to fronting up. After the dismal 2-0 defeat to Manchester City, captain Harry Maguire again bared his broad chest to the social media bullets. "As a group of players we are going through a tough period," his Twitter account declared. "We know and accept this is nowhere near good enough. We feel your frustration and disappointment, we are doing everything we can to put things right and we will put things right. Thanks for your support UNITED".

Bruno Fernandes' message was shorter and got straight to the point. "Goood vibes " he wrote, over a picture of some Arsenal players laughing and enjoying a group hug in training. Within minutes Bruno's account had deleted the tweet, and an identical tweet had been posted on the account of Arsenal's Gabriel Martinelli. Facepalm emoji.

The Bruno incident illustrates why many fans are infuriated by player-apology tweets. It’s the sense of fakeness layered upon fakeness. Even if people believed the players were really writing these apologies, they don’t believe they are sincere. It’s not enough that you lost, you have to come on here and lie to me too?

Petrol was poured on the already-roaring flames of the United-apology discourse by a suddenly-viral clip starring United's hitherto little-known CEO of media, Phil Lynch, taken from an interview he'd done with SportsProMedia's Stream Time podcast the previous week.

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United's strategy is to herd fans towards their proprietary mobile app, where the club can harvest their data, offer them products, and persuade them to subscribe to MUTV

“We pull, twice a day, social media fan sentiment graphs for every single one of our players,” Lynch said. “We have certain thresholds that alert us when we see fan sentiment going one way or the other... whether that be a personal issue, whether that be an on-pitch performance issue, and when that happens we then start to work with the player and his team individually to kinda try and start to counter that narrative a little bit.”

Gary Neville was among those who reacted angrily to these revelations, tweeting "Creating Robots on and off the pitch! Get the f**k away from them. It's a football club. He makes controlling fans sound like he's trying to win a general election!"

Lynch’s comments are not really a portent of a world where United players are turned into robots. They reflect the reality that football is so awash with money, clubs like United now employ officials with titles like CEO of media, while their players have private ancillary staff catering to every need, real and imagined: agents, lawyers, chefs, fitness coaches, physios, stylists, and so on.

The entourage generally includes PR people whose job is to run the social media accounts the players maintain to make extra cash - plugging their NFTs and that sort of thing. All the poring over twice-daily fan sentiment graphs and massaging of narratives and publishing of scripted apologies (ideally on the correct player’s account) is largely the preoccupation of the small number of PR people who make up this ecosystem. This is just what they do to justify their salaries. The players themselves have very little to do with it.

Lynch's comments were much more interesting for what they told us about Manchester United. The idea that the club has evolved beyond football to become a gigantic vehicle for advertising is old hat: it's several years since their managing director Richard Arnold first described them as "the biggest TV show in the world." Listening to Lynch's podcast interview, it's clear there has been a further evolution in their thinking. Where Arnold conceived of United as a gigantic soap opera broadcasting to its global fanbase on TV channels and social media, Lynch sees the club as an OTT (over-the-top) media service: not just the content, but the platform too. They're not like a show on Netflix. They are Netflix.

United’s strategy now is to herd fans towards their proprietary mobile app, where the club can harvest their data, offer them products, and persuade them to subscribe to MUTV. “The underlying baseline... is first-party data,” Lynch explained. “You get a lot of great data from social platforms but they keep a lot of data to themselves, and the more you can get fans on your own platforms, the more you can mine that data to provide insights and give them the experiences that they want.” In other words, United have moved into the surveillance capitalism business. The more they know about their fans, the more they are able to “put the right offer in front of the right user at the right time.”

It's worth noting that for all United's sophisticated thinking about how to develop their business, their actual revenue growth has stagnated in recent years

But even as their commercial thinking becomes more sophisticated, it's clear that United still fundamentally see themselves as being in the entertainment industry. Lynch: "If we're gonna engage that individual for competing against Netflix and Amazon - we're all competing for the same amount of time, right?"

“We’re competing for the same amount of time” is trivially true, but the notion that United are in competition with entertainment products and platforms is doubtful. Fans do not watch football for the same reasons they watch movies and TV shows. Even the 99 per cent of fans who will never go to Old Trafford and only follow the club on TV are not really watching for the ‘entertainment’. In the simplest terms, they are watching because they hope United will win or, if they are hater-followers, lose.

This crucial matter of winning and losing is what the Glazers’ “entertainment model” leaves out. It’s plain that people are drawn to football by something besides entertainment - something deeper, an appeal to primitive drives. Football offers tribal belonging, a sense of meaning, of collective striving towards a goal, the chance to experience the terror of defeat, the joy of crushing your enemies, of seeing them driven before you. These emotions are not easy to find elsewhere on Prime Video.

It's worth noting that for all United's sophisticated thinking about how to develop their business, their actual revenue growth has stagnated in recent years. Between 2016 and 2020 their commercial income grew by just 4 per cent, according to figures from the football finance blogger @SwissRamble. In the same period Liverpool's commercial income leapt by more than 50 per cent. Liverpool's faster growth is partly due to the fact that they started from a lower base. But they may also have enjoyed a little boost from winning the league and Champions League in that time.

Most of the problems at United post-Ferguson can be traced to this failure to prioritise, the sense that the club is so focused on commercial strategising that what happens on the field is an afterthought. "If you just started every meeting and just said "Okay, what does the fan want?" - all of our meetings would be a lot shorter and a lot more efficient!" says Lynch. It couldn't be more obvious what United fans want. They want the club to forget competing with Netflix and Amazon, and remember the real competitors are Liverpool and Man City.