Three Little Words - Corporate Social Responsibility

These 3 words will forge a mass divide both inside and outside Anfield, as the fallout from the weekend continues.

There are two sides to the activities of Standard Chartered on Monday.  One is that they pay Liverpool Football Club £20m a year to have their logo emblazoned, not only on shirts, but on all sorts of visual media across the globe.  Therefore they have a right to put pressure on a situation that they feel may harm their brand via the association.  The other side of the argument is that they are a bank, and therefore should stick to concentrating on subprime mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures, ensuring that the next global crash of stock markets doesn’t occur anytime soon.  

Reality is somewhere between the two, but, as a major investor and visual partner of Liverpool Football Club they do have an interest into the perceived corporate image of the club.  I wouldn’t want to plough £20m into something only to see it very badly mismanaged and devoid of strong leadership at a director level when events got heated.  Oh, too late..

The thing is, as we move on from Gillett and Hicks we find ourselves no longer in a cowboy association, but in a global brand, with massive networks.  We find ourselves in a business.  Yes you did hear right, a business.  The days of purely kicking a ball around a pitch and being responsible to fans for league position has gone.  It left the day the Moores family handed over the keys to the Texan Bodge-it Brothers.

Liverpool Football Club is a business, granted we haven’t dropped the most important part of our output in the quest for grandeur like our friends from down the East Lancs, we still include Football Club in our mantra and so we should, but we are a fully fledged 21^st century business.  

Standard Chartered saw the actions on Saturday as bad for business, their business; this is why they stepped in.  The problem is not that they stepped in; the problem is that they felt they had to step in; they could not leave it down to the forces inside the club to sort the mess out on their behalf.

Fenway must be scratching their heads, their other global brands look to have everything associated with multinational companies, but when they look to Anfield then surely they must see the void of adequate Public Relations, the void of strong leadership decisions at directorial level.  Let’s not beat around the bush here the past 4 months have been handled in a very British way.  The sort of gaffs that have come out of Anfield lately are normally the reserve of companies such as Railtrack, even the king of negative spin, Gerald Ratner, could have had a half arsed go at the past 4 months and probably made a better job.

If the club truly believed the player from the start they should have pushed it further, they should have pushed every avenue possible, not just printed some ill advised t-shirts and indulged in cloak and dagger comments.  This isn’t a pop at the players or the coaching staff / management, it is the opposite.  They are players, they are coaches, and they are managers, they are not global businessmen paid to make decisions about extreme complex issues.  They needed strong leadership from above, from specialists in the area.

The club chose not to pursue the matter, they chose to try and draw a line under it.  Fine, I’ve no problem with that.  But then it is not Luis Suarez or Kenny Dalglish’s responsibility to push closure to the outside world.  They are football people, they specialise in football.  Someone should have gone in from the PR arena and sat them down and held their hand, helped them get their views out in the open, in a timely manner and in a way that befits a multinational company.  It was evident Dalglish and Suarez wanted to say their piece in the days after the verdict but nothing came.  Instead those who are paid to make such decisions, those who have degrees in marketing and relations sat back and let their main outputs deal with it. 

Even after the actions on Saturday it took 24 hours for statements to be made, why..? If that was the line we wanted to take, why didn’t the very people employed to release such statements step in and grip the situation and push them out quickly, explaining to all inside the club the potential gravitas to the corporate image in the ‘bigger picture’..?

In the military actions such as those are described as abdication at best, dereliction of duty at worst.

Liverpool Football Club the brand, the company, the business is guilty of gross misconduct and dereliction of duty on a scale far greater than anyone person employed to deliver its main output.. Football  

Handbags, Handshakes and Glass Houses

Somewhere in the depths of Saturday 11^th February 2012 there was a football match between the two historical giants of English football.  Unfortunately the pre and post match actions have drowned out a particularly dire affair which saw Manchester United win 2-1 on a day that will be forever about greetings (the lack of) and being the “better man” (which ironically looks to be an act of incitement).

 

Stuart Downing must be the only Liverpool player who left Manchester happy, happy in the knowledge that his woeful display will have been hidden somewhat by the charade that engulfed the final whistle.

It’s probably best to get my personal view point out early.  The trouble with that though is it’s my view point; I’m not Luis Suarez so I can’t think for him or even put myself in his shoes.  When I saw him snub Evra (and he did, let’s be honest) my initial reaction was one of support, why should he shake the hand of an accuser he believes exaggerated a situation? To a certain degree a very large part of me still thinks this now, if it was based on my life and my work, I too wouldn’t want to shake the hand of someone I didn’t like, but that’s the problem, I don’t work in the public eye, I don’t have the country’s media (who bay for my blood) analysing my every muscular movement.  This is where I think Luis was ill advised (by himself and ultimately the club).

You shouldn’t live your life by trying to make others happy, but when you are part of a bigger scheme, a bigger movement, sometimes you have to do things you don’t want for the greater good.  The greater good in this instance would have been a quick burial of all that had gone before.  Instead the refusal played right into the hands of the suitors who love to hate Suarez so much.  Within minutes Oliver Holt, Daniel Taylor and the other laughable anti LFC brigade were out in force.  Fuel for the fire Ferguson started the day Suarez made the Champions look like a Sunday league side.

Be under no mistake, the way Suarez ripped through the heart of his Manchester United defence last season took Ferguson right back to his early years at Old Trafford, playing second fiddle to Dalglish and a successful Liverpool team was not going to be an option for him AGAIN.  From that day on Ferguson did all he could to undermine Suarez, he called him a “diver” a “play actor” and other such petulant acts that hardly define a knight of the realm.  As for Saturdays comments: Ferguson would be well advised not to throw stones from his glass house. 

Many in this country and across the world will find the actions of Ryan Giggs (allegedly paying for an abortion of a baby inside his brother’s wife), Rio Ferdinand (deliberately missing a FA drugs test), Wayne Rooney (indulging in sexual relations with a prostitute whilst his wife was pregnant) and Eric Cantona (Kung-Fu kicking a rival fan) grounds for “never playing for a club again” over the refusal of a handshake. On this matter alone Ferguson has shown his hypocrisy to be as great as his over inflated ego.

 

The club have issued 3 strong statements this afternoon from the player, the manager and a director. If Suarez has gone against the earlier wishes of the club he will be disciplined and rightly so.

Of more concern to me though is the continued laughable actions of the Liverpool Football Club PR machine, who is seriously running this area of the club.? At times it appears to be Nicolai Poliakoff’s legendary creation at the helm, pouring buckets of water over themselves with ill advised actions or late actions.  In today’s 24 hour media circus you can’t afford to sleep on it, these statements, if they are sincere, should have been released 24 hours earlier, or maybe, just maybe, the player should have been told in no uncertain terms that he must do the perceived “right thing” on his way out of the dressing room.

Luis Suarez is a free man, not convicted by any legal process, he has no criminal record for any actions committed or otherwise, so is free to operate on his own terms of greetings and endearment.  However by not griping the seriousness of the situation and explaining the gravitas to the player properly the club have let down their number one star AGAIN.

Luis Suarez has come out and expressed regret for his actions on Saturday. I look forward to a similar apology from Manchester United in regards to their inappropriate comments about Luis Suarez’s Liverpool future, as well as an apology from certain media commentators (Sky News’ Charlie Thomas).  I won’t expect an apology from George Galloway who is probably too busy trying to find the next mass murderer / dictator to cosy up to.