Cristiano Ronaldo (Lapresse)
Football super league? Super flop even according to online users. The analysis of Zwan and Semrush
The Superlega? A project that lasted a few days was received in a very negative way. According to Semrush’s study, the sentiment of online posts was mainly negative, Zwan’s analysis shows a reputational collapse of the clubs involved
In recent days there has been a lot of talk about the idea of launching one Super league football, an alternative competition to Champions League, reserved exclusively for the best clubs. From the beginning, the idea received timid appreciation from the stock exchanges, with the 20 clubs involved aiming to obtain important gains, but it did not convince fans and online users and, above all, the Governments, to the point of being wrecked in a very short time revealing itself a boomerang that is anything but positive.
To understand what were the main reasons that caused the project to be wrecked so miserably, Zwan, reputation marketing agency, e SEMrush, SaaS platform for managing online visibility, analyzed in detail what happened, highlighting a general negative sentiment in the posts shared by users and how all this led to a collapse in the reputation of the clubs involved.
The Superlega, in fact, it was based on breaking one of the cornerstones of sport’s reputation: meritocracy. Zwan underlines how the fans were immediately among the most involved reputational Stakeholders, with demonstrations in different cities, then the players themselves began to distance themselves, and finally the institutional social and political exponents from all over the world. A real reputational crisis on several fronts, which is now causing the image, and therefore the reputational capital, of the clubs involved to collapse.
Also on social media, Semrush found that several thousand posts were shared with negative sentiment, not only towards the Super League, but also towards UEFA e FIFA, expressing a need for change but a total lack of sharing in this initiative. In just 3 days, the negative posts in Italian against the Superlega there were almost 6,000, over 3,500 against FIFA and a little less those against the UEFA.
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The interest of users also decreased rapidly, probably because many soon realized the impossibility of carrying out the project, with the various clubs that in a few hours were called out one by one. Also according to the Semrush study, the number of online searches for the “uefa super league” item grew by almost 1,400% from 17 to 18 April, with a further increase of almost 220% the following day, and then drastically collapsed. from 20 April.
Through the algorithm of ReputationRating, which considers all the different Drivers and Stakeholders that make up the reputation, weighing and measuring their dimensions and certifying a series of objective and subjective parameters, through blockchain technology, Zwan has detected a decrease in the Reputation of the Clubs involved by an average of 21.73 % compared to the previous week.
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“The Juventus, (- 24.41%) and the Real Madrid (-21.56%) were the most affected, precisely because they were identified as the main supporters of the Superlega project. – Declared Davide Ippolito, CEO of Zwan and co-founder of Reputation Rating – The statements of Uefa president Ceferin played a lot against the particularly negative data of Juventus, on the alleged immoral conduct of Juventus president Andrea Agnelli towards Uefa. The stock market boom (17.8% by the Bianconeri), which lasted only one day, did nothing to bring benefits to the Clubs. This reminds us how the reputation of an organization does not depend exclusively on investors and financial performance , which represent only 2/10 of the reputational drivers “.
The most affected in the clubs were the CSR Driver, precisely as a direct consequence of the betrayal of the values of sport, in favor of those of business, and the Consumers / Subscribers Stakeholder, understood as fans in this analysis, among the crucial and among the most “betrayed” by this operation. Respectively, CSR and fan reputation are down by more than 23% and economic repercussions are expected in the near future.
“On the other hand, this situation is only the mirror of a deep-rooted reputational crisis in UEFA (-9.25% in the reputational rating following this affair). The drivers of Governance and Leadership & Innovation suffer above all in the UEFA reputation. The picture is that of an institution that has long been unable to innovate, no longer a solid and secure leader in its sector, and with questionable ethical and governance choices, such as the assignment of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, despite the scandals that emerged in the construction dedicated infrastructures. – Joe Casini, co-founder of Zwan and Reputation Rating added – As a response to the Super League, there is a belated and slow reform of the Champions League, promised even for 2024. Yet another proof of how slow and cumbersome the “Uefa machine” is.
“As is well known, most football fans, regardless of nationality, are very passionate and experience firsthand everything that happens to their favorite team. – Commented Fernando Angulo, Semrush Communications Manager – Reading the posts, in fact, we notice a strong attachment to clubs and a negative connotation linked to feeling betrayed. There were also many highly sarcastic posts, while the purely informative posts with a neutral tone were only 1 in 5 for the Superlega topic, just over 1 in 10 for FIFA and UEFA “.