So the world is now a place in which LeBron James can own a stake in Liverpool. On Twitter yesterday, the news was greeted first breathlessly and then, by People Who Know Things, with derision. Ives Galarcep pointed out that athletes buy small stakes in teams all the time. Jen Chang declared that this was no different than if David Beckham bought 0.1% of the L.A. Dodgers. (But wouldn’t it sort of be a story if David Beckham bought a share of an American baseball team?) Calm down, was the general cognoscenti idea. This isn’t real. It’s just a marketing stunt.
And that’s absolutely true, at least if you exclude marketing stunts from your idea of what’s real in contemporary sports. LeBron James will not be donning Liver Bird cufflinks and driving in to Melwood to hash out transfer policy. Damien Comolli will not phone him to ask for ideas. He will, occasionally, appear, either at Anfield or not at Anfield, wearing Liverpool colors. He will infrequently issue to the press quotations about Liverpool’s performance that seem to have been generated by a computer. He will have no input into the day-to-day running of the club.
What he’s after—which is, again, real or not real, or a story or not a story, depending on what you think is meaningful in sports at this particular moment—is to extend the reach of his brand/identity/persona into international markets where Liverpool is huge and basketball is an emerging sport. If you’re a passionate Liverpool fan in China with a dawning interest in the NBA, and you’re thinking of buying a basketball jersey, you are confronted, like an airline passenger, with a choice among many options, most of which probably seem somewhat similar. But if there’s a superstar who (arguably tenuously) shares your own (arguably tenuous) connection to Merseyside, then maybe you buy his jersey, and maybe you pay a little more attention the next time one of his games pixelates across your Sopcast screen. And then you’re a customer, and thank you for flying Air Bron.
So yes, it’s a marketing ploy. But saying it’s not interesting for that reason, or that this deal is no more mindbending than the Williams sisters buying a share in the Dolphins, is missing the point. Marketing ploys—maybe you’ve heard this—are a big part of how sports culture works these days. And—maybe you’ve heard this, too—sports culture is an impossibly gargantuan behemoth within the only-very-slightly-larger sphere of culture itself. LeBron owning a piece of Liverpool is a story precisely because it’s a marketing stunt, because it occurred to someone as a viable marketing stunt: because a few years ago, becoming a stakeholder in an English soccer club had absolutely no presence on an NBA superstar’s horizon of personal brand management. I haven’t looked into this, but I’d guess there’s a really good chance that Larry Bird hadn’t heard of Liverpool Football Club, much less thought to own a minority stake in it. By the same token, and the Jordan megalith obviously excepted, NBA players weren’t a high association-priority for Premier League clubs until the very recent past—probably when Steve Nash started parading his love for Tottenham, which was more a lucky accident for Spurs than a deliberate marketing strategy.
In other words, the LeBron deal is a story because it’s an index of a bunch of different, independently interesting and important trends: the global reach of the Premier League (Team James didn’t do this to sell Heat sweatbands in Croxteth), the increasing global reach of basketball (Yao Ming, etc.), the increasing cultural convergence of basketball and soccer (Kobe and Barcelona, etc.), the increasing cultural convergence of English and American sports (the mere presence of FSNEGMSV in Liverpool, etc.) Because it doesn’t have a lot of practical consequences, it’s not a major story within any one of these trends—ursus arctos compared it to the Yankees/Manchester United partnership yesterday, which is probably about right—but it’s striking because it combines all of them under the flag of one enormous celebrity, which I think is why a general “wow” preceded the general “come off it.” It’s worth talking about because it’s a milestone of sorts, and because there will be more of them.
Or, because this is actually the sort of thing I can see Comolli doing, he will not care what they are if he does.
Of course it’s always possible that he could form a genuine connection with the club and the fans, get really into soccer, and make this a sincere interest or even a passion—it’s been happening more and more with basketball players and soccer—but I’m assuming the tenor of his involvement is summed up by his quote that ran in all the stories about the deal, namely that the moment he stepped on an NBA court he became a businessman.
For Fenway Marketing New Sport England Ventures Group, the motive is presumably to use LeBron’s (still-potent, Decision aside) popularity to raise the stateside profile of LFC; that is, it’s the sub-motive within the larger motive of marketing and representing him generally, within which larger deal this Liverpool sub-deal is only a small component.
The rumor among Liverpool fans seems to be that FMNSEVG had a stake in the team to offload due to current part-owner Thomas DiBenedetto’s impending purchase of Roma, but whether that’s the stake LeBron is inheriting we can’t yet say for sure.
Read More: Basketball, Globalization, Liverpool
by Brian Phillips · April 7, 2011
Why so harsh on the East Asians?
As long as he doesn’t ask them to sign players from Cleveland or Akron, I’m fine with it, as I’ve said before. I think the lens on this changes a great deal if he buys a significant share- If you’re an athlete and rich (but not as wealthy as the people who buy teams typically are), buying a part of a team is a significantly risky investment as the expected return is pretty low. Do the clear monetary losses this get outweighed by the gains in market presence? Dunno.
@ao Wait, what did I write that was harsh? I definitely didn’t mean it that way. Asia is just hugely important here because it’s the biggest target market for both soccer and basketball.
This news was gloriously underwhelming to me. I’m waiting for Brian Scalabrine to invest in Tranmere Rovers.
(seriously though, the notion that people could be up in arms about such a deal is silly, as you note. LBJ could spend the rest of his life not visiting Anfield — because nowhere does it say that he has to — and yet reap all the benefits of such a strategic partnership. That said, perhaps that’s what makes people queasy; the convergence of two worlds to inflate both a little more while upsetting the applecart built from the die-hard fan base, who are presumably frightened that their club has been cheapened by doing such business.)
As long as Chris Bosh doesn’t get involved I could care less.
@Brian Phillips Your paragraph on them gave the slight impression to me that you came down maybe a little harsh. Then again the entire post is a little sharp around the edges and has a tone of disappointment towards media, stupid people (justifiably!) and the East Asians just weren’t spared.
Then again, the East Asians are super hyped up fans and some could think they are annoying. As an Iranian nothing is worse than the Japenese or South Korean fans showing up to our 100,000+ seater stadium and completely filling their tiny section, and being more enthusiastic than the home side.
So this is not about a team with a couple of star players, no depth, and a pressured coach, that underachieve on the face of huge expectations?
Interesting article, but there’s another possible motive in contention here. Maybe this is step one in FSM’s master plan to attract world-class athletes to all of their sporting ventures.
Perhaps on some level it would appeal to Lionel Messi to hang around with Rafael Nadal, LeBron James, and Lewis Hamilton on Tom Henry’s yacht. Sure that might sound slightly flippant, but the underlying principle essentially holds true: talent attracts talent, and while it will always be attractive for sportsmen to actually play with fellow superstars, when you are clearly the best in your field, you have to look for peers outside of your own realm.
In the meantime, might it not sound pretty interesting to an impressionable young superstar-in-the-making who is attracting the interest of Manchester United, AC Milan, Real Madrid, and Liverpool to court the possibility of counting LeBron James among his FaceBook friends? Like it or not, that appears to be where the cult of superstardom is heading.
James.
You’ll Never Walk Alone.
Bidness is bidness, folk. Aon and Man U love each other. MJ bought a motorcycle team (and then an NBA team, nbd). Athletes are not just rich as hell anymore, they’re also bidness players and therefore bidness movers. It’s not surprising or even that big a deal until LeBroner starts making decisions that affect fans. Erm, right. Whatever.
Well said BP. If it ups pool’s profile enough to pique the interest of transfer targets that otherwise might be concerned w/ the lack of C-league football, well, I guess it could be for good. Otherwise, the whole thing makes me want to shower. YNWA (even though I’m a lawyer, I’m starting to wonder if I should include a trademark notation w/ that acronym, given business is business is business is business; perhaps not in the mood to be fascinated – as opposed to disgusted – by sports and the advance of global capitalism today: sigh). As an aside – recently discovered your player portraits: fantastic stuff.
On the face of it, I’m not really convinced by the “this will persuade star players to sign for Liverpool” angle. Players are pretty savvy about the business side of the game, and it’s not like there’s a lack of star power surrounding Liverpool’s rival clubs. Also I don’t see partying with LeBron as being an especially strong motive to give up a payday for a young player raised in Europe or South America. I could be wrong, but I doubt that’s where this is going.
I was a little disappointed King James didn’t sit down with King Kenny and release the information during a prime-time, Sky Sports News segment called ‘The Scouse Decision’, or some such. I would have watched and then burned something.
Interresting…but u missed the fact that Le Bron and his crew called themselves the HEATLES last winter, because of the correlation between their tickets saling average and BEATLES’average…
http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/blog/ball_dont_lie/post/LeBron-James-wants-you-to-meet-the-quot-Heatles?urn=nba-303417
What ever it’s a hard day’s night…
so you think the average liverpool fan is gonna find time to look who owns a fraction of their team? i know people know now but after a few months they will totally forget this unless the club starts to market Liverpool with pics of lebron which probably won’t make the scouse faithful happy. well,it might happen here in the states with “hey this is the team lebron owns, now support them because they are cool” kind of marketing but since mostly no one likes him here anymore i see that not happening either.
@ted Well…marketing is kind of the entire expressed purpose of the relationship, so I’m guessing it’s going to happen. I also don’t think it’s that hard to remember when an extremely famous person owns a share of your favorite team.
Do not forget the importance of image in the eyes of fellow club-owners and the elite of the sport world. How will Abromovich feel about this? It’s not always about the fans or even the players.
Brilliant article.
To the extent that this affects Liverpool’s future over the next couple of years, I think LeBron’s involvement ranks far, far below the question of whether Martin Kelly will recover from this hamstring tear and avoid having that become a recurring problem.
To the extent that this is pretty hilarious and ultimately a little bit of fun, I’d rank it below, but in the same neighborhood as, Lucas’ Twitter feed.
My reaction, of course, differs from many others because this move is targeted directly at me and others who might be willing to be like me, an American Liverpool fan. Give the people who set mainstream America’s sports agenda (i.e., ESPN, FOX and those who feed off their leftovers) more reasons to nudge soccer out into the spotlight for a little longer amount of time before going back to MLB highlights and NFL lawsuit coverage.
25,000 people sitting in the rain in Nashville on a cold Tuesday night to watch the U.S. play a friendly against Paraguay. You think that goes unnoticed? The Ochocinco thing in Kansas City: did that hurt anybody? Do the guardians of the game consider that silly and a desperate move for soccer in America? Maybe the guardians missed Justin Bieber training with Barcelona. The footage was on Barca’s in-house TV channel.
This is all part of how it’s going to work from now on. So many of the loudest voices spent all their time shouting how soccer will never come barging through America’s front door that they missed how it already snuck in the back gate, brought some friends along and is barbecuing in the yard.
And on the very same day, this match was made in marketing heaven.
One thing to consider is whether this is a way to attract attention to soccer when there may be lockouts on two of the major U.S. sports next year. Recruiting ‘Bron into the world of soccer is designed to get the attention of U.S. fans who may not have an NFL or NBA season next year and their unmet needs.
This LeBron news is most probably business-driven. However, I couldn’t really care less, as long as he doesn’t make drastic changes in the club.
@Joe
I dunno, the way the zips have pumped out talent the last few years, they probably have a player or two that liverpool could use.
@Archie_V That is simply unbelievable. Unbelievable find. Speechless
I’m Ri of changerules.net and I got directed here through The Guardian Post about the best football blogs to date. Hence, I’m new here and I must say I’m well impressed how the site manages to make football artsy and classic.