A company set up by comedian Michael McIntyre and Gary Neville is supplying fans to Sky Sports football shows for them to offer opinions on their clubs. Sky is also in the partnership to monetise those views.
The company, Fanalysis, corporatises the judgments of supporters. And with a total attendance of 15 million at Premier League games last season it isn’t a shallow pool of people eager to have their say. Armchair critics are another vast resource.
They are not paid to appear. But there is said to be high demand from Fanalysis users to be in the spotlight. By not charging for their time, they keep the cost base low for a firm that began when McIntyre pitched the idea to Neville. “It just made sense straight away,” Neville says on the Sky website. “Who watches and knows the players of their own club the most? The fans.”
Sky was equally enthused. They say “fanalysts” will feature in “live match build-up, post-match reaction and across Sky Sports News social and digital”. Guests will offer “supporter-driven player ratings, manager verdicts and perspectives”.
The world is short of many things. Mainly peace and sanity. But fan opinions aren’t in deficit. The new bit here, however, is those views arriving through a limited company supply chain to Sky’s HQ in Isleworth.
McIntyre, Neville and Sky, which holds a minority stake in the firm, have constructed a business model out of people giving their verdicts on the team they follow. “We were awful in the second half,” is among the insights from a West Ham fan currently being shown on Sky’s website. Some are more interesting than that.
“When it comes to their clubs, fans know best,” said McIntyre in the blurb. “No stats, clips on YouTube, journalist or pundit can compete with the fans who live and breathe their club… ” This must have made Sky Sports’ legion of former-player-turned-pundits uneasy, though perhaps not Neville, as he is an investor in the scheme (he is not listed as a Fanalysis director). If fans know more than professional analysts, what’s the point of cramming studios with retired stars? Sky argues there is room for both.
McIntyre’s suggestion that nobody is asking supporters what they think is a novel claim
McIntyre’s suggestion that nobody is asking supporters what they think is a novel claim
On its app – the real goldmine, the owners will hope – Fanalysis is chiefly a tool for “rating players and managers”. Every day is the Colosseum, with thumbs pointing down or raised. “They’re watching the closest, they care the most, but nobody is asking what they think,” the Fanalysis site insists.
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That’s a novel claim. From the BBC’s 606 phone-in to the “get involved” section on the corporation’s live blogs, broadcasters and media firms encourage “audience interaction”: not for plurality’s sake so much as its own digital metrics: clicks, hits and algorithm glow. (The Observer also invites and publishes fans’ views on their clubs several times a season, although we commission them ourselves and don’t use a limited company created to supply them.)
Bringing “customers” inside the tent is now common business practice. Survival can depend on it. “Memberships” work well. Top-down journalism is harder to sustain when everyone demands a dialogue.
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Professional journalists being condescending to fan columnists isn’t a good look. It’s true that many fans have their noses constantly pressed to the window of their club while football writers might swing by only once a month. There remains a distinction, however, between independent, professional reporting and opinion based on allegiance.
Fanalysts, though, have moved the whole bunfight on. They “will appear on shows such as Monday Night Football, Fan Club, Soccer Saturday Fan Zone [and] The Premier League Show”. Unpaid, they are fanning out across the network. Sky says viewing figures for the Fan Club are up 9%.
For sure we are on new ground when fan opinion is a service industry and start-up opportunity. At the very least, via the TV shows, they will boost the profile of the company’s app, which may be the real point.
Many supporters say they don’t want to listen to each other on TV or radio. They can do that at work or in the pub. They want to hear people who know what’s going on behind the veil and are either paid to find out or, as former players, have the inside track. McIntyre does his best to frame Fanalysis as a kind of Plato’s democracy. He called it: “A Tripadvisor, Letterboxd, Goodreads for football. A place where fans can input their analysis on their own club.”
He says he “went on this incredible and unexpected journey that has led to this amazing partnership with Sky, the undisputed home of football, to give fans a voice like never before”.
Undeniably, an A-list comic, a Manchester United legend and a sports broadcasting giant are formidable allies for people who love to rate things. Fanalysis’s listing at Companies House shows how on-board Sky is. Steve Smith, executive director, content, at Sky Sports is also on the Fanalysis board as the Sky Sports representative.
The combination of comedy (McIntyre), gravitas (Neville) and platform (Sky) is what marketing folk call good synergy. Whether it was conceived to free the voice of the masses – or just commercialise that liberation – only the idea’s three authors could tell us.
Or, four authors, if you count the fans themselves, who find themselves in a splash of McIntyre’s limelight.
Ruminations like this are meant to conclude with the question: where will it all end? We’re already at that ending. Football’s culture of mass agitation and polemic is normalised. Plenty of people like it that way.
Charlie Brooker has yet to write the Black Mirror episode where football managers are bundled on to ejector seats, with electrodes controlled by fans. Watch this space.
Feature image: Sky Sports