by Chris Harris
With Christmas over, and feeling happier, more positive and refreshed, Greg began running ideas past Catherine and trying to work out what they actually needed following the sudden and disgraceful departure of Michael Hall. Because everything else had happened at such extraordinary speed he had, by his own admission, rather taken his eye off the commercial ball. In normal circumstances this would hardly have constituted a crisis, because for a club of their size replacing the part-time Commercial Director / Financial Director….bloke whom knows a bit about money, was not something that needed to be accomplished overnight; they could have advertised properly, interviewed half a dozen candidates, taken references and allowed the right person several weeks to bed themselves into the club.
The arrival of the Korean opportunity changed all of that, because suddenly the potential commercial rewards were abundant and potentially enormous, while neither Greg nor Catherine had the faintest idea how to negotiate with the representatives of a major K-pop band, let alone multinational Korean companies who they hoped would inevitably now begin to take an interest in, what was rapidly becoming one of those strange collisions between football and popular culture that nobody could possibly have planned. This was operating at a level considerably above negotiating a few thousand pounds with a local builder’s merchant for an advertising board behind one of the goals, and Greg knew enough about business to recognise when he needed somebody who understood the territory rather better than he did.
As so often happens, however, when something appears complicated the solution arrived by the most straightforward route imaginable, because Greg put a very simple advert on LinkedIn and Stephen Giles replied almost immediately.
Stephen lived in Eastbourne, barely twenty minutes away, and within half an hour of their first communication a very smart Mercedes-Benz swept into the ground, and Stephen climbed out of it, Greg’s mind wandered towards whether or not it had one of his car dealership motif stickers on the back window.
Stephen was in his mid-fifties and had spent much of his career in business before establishing his own consultancy, but the detail that immediately interested Greg was that he had previously undertaken commercial work with Sussex Cricket Club, which meant he was accustomed to sitting across the table from substantial regional and national businesses rather than limiting his ambitions to the local firms that traditionally populated smaller non-league football grounds. He understood corporate partnerships, knew how larger organisations approached sponsorship and, perhaps most importantly given what had landed in Greg’s lap that morning, did not appear remotely intimidated by the sudden scale of the opportunity.
Within a remarkably short conversation, Greg and Catherine reached much the same conclusion: Stephen looked like a very good fit, certainly good enough that there was little point manufacturing a lengthy recruitment process simply to appear to have conducted one.
Lucy Lottwell had already agreed to come down and go through the relevant paperwork if Greg thought Stephen was suitable, and so the whole thing gathered momentum with almost comical speed, to the extent that Stephen Giles had woken on the morning of 10 January with no idea that by lunchtime he would effectively be stepping into the commercial operation of a football club and that, by the afternoon, he would be dealing with representatives surrounding a huge South Korean pop phenomenon and a multinational South Korean motor manufacturer eager to exploit what was rapidly going viral across both football and popular culture.
Dean had been slightly wary of the conversation with his boss about bringing Jin Seo-jun in. He knew it was going to cause enormous disruption at a club completely underqualified for huge media scrutiny, except for supersonic levels of tenacity and ambition. When Dean and Piotr had mooted their new philosophy of bringing in younger players but also the need to generate further funding to fund a journey up the non-league pyramid, Greg had expected some small funding initiatives, not a nuclear option. But Greg’s business success was based on instinct and grabbing opportunities; this looked like one and had the advantage of virtually zero outlay. It was a logistical and technical gamble, not a financial one. He had given them the green light with relish.
Later that afternoon they decamped to Greg’s house, where his large office served as the epicentre of his various business interests, and while Greg and Catherine discussed the terms of Stephen’s employment, what exactly his remit should encompass and how much freedom he would have to negotiate on the club’s behalf, Lucy sat nearby working her way methodically through the paperwork and making sure that the extraordinary speed of his appointment did not result in anything important being overlooked.
Without terms being agreed Stephen was now already speaking to agents, representatives and commercial contacts about sponsorship arrangements of a size that would previously have sounded absurd at a club like this, and by late afternoon he was negotiating figures and packages that would not have looked entirely out of place in the commercial department of a Championship football club. But for Stephen the remuneration was relatively inconsequential; this was a project of a lifetime, utterly ambitious but also short-term, which was perfect, it was not a long-term commitment.
By the close of play — which on this particular day turned out to be ten o’clock at night — they had received six serious commercial enquiries, and by the time the sixth arrived Stephen had actually begun putting people off, reasoning that there were only so many advertising hoardings you could sell, only so many match-ball sponsors you could accommodate and certainly only so many companies you could plausibly describe as temporary stadium or principal partners during a three-month period before the whole thing became unworkable.
Five substantial corporate sponsors, Stephen decided, were enough, because beyond that point each additional company would begin wondering why it was paying serious money to associate itself with something in which its own impact was becoming progressively diluted, it was about hitting maximum impact.
Dean finally appeared at around eight o’clock, freed from his other commitments and arriving to find what had by then developed into a jaw-dropping commercial circus, with Greg, Catherine, Lucy and Stephen all talking at once and displaying varying degrees of disbelief and excitement at the figures being discussed.
Dean, however, immediately poured cold water over them.
“I wouldn’t get too excited about any of this,” he said. “We don’t actually know whether this is going to work. The bloke might be no good, he might be disruptive, something might go wrong and we could have him out of here within a week, so I’d be very careful about spending money we haven’t actually earned yet.”
Stephen looked across at him.
“No, that’s exactly why I haven’t structured it that way,” he replied. “The £350,000 we’ve just negotiated isn’t dependent upon him being here for three months. They’re all signing rolling monthly agreements, so even if this whole thing collapses relatively quickly, the club still receives a substantial proportion of it, and if he stays for the full three months then you’re looking at approximately £350,000.”
He paused, glanced down at the figures Lucy had given him earlier and then looked back at Dean.
“By my calculation, using the numbers Lucy has supplied, £350,000 would fund your present first-team playing budget for roughly three years at this level, although obviously there’s a fairly substantial caveat attached to that, because judging by what you’re trying to do here there’s every possibility you won’t actually be playing at this level next season.”
Greg and Catherine nodded along in unison as if they had a clue what Stephen was going on about, their brains by now were totally scrambled.
“But I’ve got to say, Dean — and nice to meet you — you’ve pulled off an absolute blinder here, because whether this lad turns out to be any good at football is almost beside the point commercially. I understand your remit is to build this club on a genuinely self-sustaining basis, and if that’s the case then you’ve effectively generated enough money in one move to cover the entire first-team budget for this season and considerably beyond it, which, unless I’ve misunderstood the meaning of the phrase, is pretty much the definition of self-sustaining.”
Dean looked slightly embarrassed. “I never really thought of it like that.”
“Well, you should.”
At almost exactly that moment Big Mal appeared from the kitchen carrying champagne, which seemed as good a reason as any to abandon serious financial analysis for the evening, and within half an hour they were all drinking together, Stephen having already been promised a bed for the night because nobody particularly fancied sending their newly appointed commercial man back down the road to Eastbourne after several glasses of champagne.
Alcohol did nothing to temper Stephen’s enthusiasm and, if anything, the newly arrived Commercial Director became increasingly bullish about what he believed had actually happened to the club that day.
“And don’t make the mistake of thinking this is just about the £350,000,” he told them. “That’s the immediate money and obviously it’s fantastic, but the really interesting bit is what happens afterwards, because every commercial conversation this club has from now on begins from a completely different position. Yesterday you were a small non-league football club asking local companies whether they fancied putting a board around the pitch; tomorrow you’re the club that’s been all over social media, associated with a major Korean cultural phenomenon and doing deals with multinational companies.”
“I’ve looked through the books and you’re currently doing something like forty thousand pounds a year in ordinary sponsorship and commercial income, not to be sniffed at in this level and, assuming you, sorry, we, don’t completely cock this up, I see absolutely no reason why that couldn’t become a hundred and twenty thousand next season, perhaps more, because you’ve suddenly got a story, you’ve got visibility and, most importantly, you’ve got proof that companies considerably larger than the businesses you’ve traditionally dealt with are prepared to associate themselves with the club.”
“So you’re talking about another eighty grand a year?” Greg said, raising his eyebrows.
“At least potentially, yes, and not merely for one season. If you handle the relationships properly, some of that uplift could continue for the next two or three years, regardless of whether the Korean thing itself lasts three weeks, three months or considerably longer.”
Stephen turned towards Dean.
“The important thing is that none of this distracts you from what you’re actually here to do, because from everything I’ve heard you’re the reason this has happened in the first place, and your job is still to manage the football team. What the club needs to do now is exploit the attention without turning you into a full-time marketing department.” Dean nodded.
“You might want somebody helping him with the social media side,” Stephen continued. “Not generating the content, because clearly that’s Dean’s thing and that’s part of why people are interested, but somebody whose job is to take what he produces and get it absolutely everywhere — every platform, every relevant account, every possible channel — so Dean isn’t sitting there at midnight posting the same thing six different ways when he’s supposed to be preparing a football team.”
That observation made Dean feel unexpectedly guilty, because there was one element of the whole extraordinary affair that he had barely admitted even to himself: if the club succeeded, and if this Korean adventure became as enormous online as it was beginning to appear it might, then his own social-media profile was inevitably going to rise with it.
He knew perfectly well what that could mean for him personally, but there was nothing remotely mercenary about his intentions and there never had been; if anything, the thought made him uncomfortable, because he had started doing all of this for the club rather than himself, and the possibility that his own reputation might become one of its unintended beneficiaries felt almost like something he ought to apologise for.
Big Mal, meanwhile, poured him another glass of champagne.
Welcome to Denham nr Lewes 