Tinkermen!

At Soccer Business, we have spent the last couple of days tweaking the website. We will be making more improvements in the coming weeks and there’s a full revamp on its way.

Why are we telling you this?

Well primarily because we feel its important advice to freshen things up.

Whilst the beauty of 5 and 6 a side football is there is no closed-season, it doesn’t hurt to get the squad ready for an assault on the title, if you will.

It’s all about staying ahead of the competition.

Simply put, there’s not a lot of spare money out there and you need to make sure that your league is best placed to take what there is.

Your League operating partner will be looking at their website and making sure its doing as well in Google as possible (it’s a fact that when people talk about Search Engine Optimisation, what they actually mean is Google – 93% of searches each month come through them in the UK and Ireland) but there are things you can do.

You can make sure your promotion is up to date, you can get on Twitter and Facebook and get teams in. You can make sure your league is the best it can be.

Like a Premier League Manager will tell you at this time of year – it never hurts to have a little tinker.

If you need any help, get in touch!

Is Soccer Really A Business?

So, is soccer a business. Or a game.

One or two of the lads in the Soccer Business Office support a team that is the subject of a takeover bid right now were chatting this morning – this is when they weren’t trying to work out a way to help YOU run a 5 0r 6 a side football league in your town.

And the tone of the conversation set me thinking, when did football stop being a game and become a Business.

The takeover bid might stall apparently, due to the chap who wants to be the new owner not bidding the right sum, and one of the Soccer Business staff said: “Well I can understand the owners wanting their money back, they came into the club to make money.”

And it’s a fact. Gone are the days of a philanthropic local chairman – the archetype of yore – barely any of the current owners of Premier League clubs fall into that category (possibly Dave Whelan at Wigan or Peter Coates at Stoke, and maybe at a push Bill Kenwright at Everton.)

Is that a bad thing? To be honest, I don’t know.

It’s easy to see it as a negative, but there can’t be too many Man City fans, for example who want to swap Sheikh Mansoor for Frannie Lee or Peter Swales and how many Chelsea fans are hankering to see Ken Bates back?

The problem surely comes when the owner appears to be totally unaware or uncaring regarding the history of the clubs they are custodians of. I am thinking here of Venkys (the Indian Chicken Magnates who bought Blackburn, or The Glazers at Manchester United. Both these consortiums made drastic changes immediately – in Venkys case to the management structure or in the Glazers example saddled the club with massive debt and whacked the prices up.

What surely is needed, like any relationship, is a bit of give and take and sensitivity. Its not a bad thing to make money out of football – of it was we wouldn’t be here. And whatever anyone might say it was ever thus.

But it is a bad thing when the marriage is the right one, if the sensibilities of the community are considered as well as the needs of the club (or the business).

And that, really, in a nutshell sums up Soccer Business. We want you to run community leagues, and we want you to benefit too.

Maybe that’s a lesson that certain chairman would do well to learn.