#AgainstModernFootball - club social media banter

Social media has enabled a lot of groundbreaking, socially significant things. It allows you to check the news headlines in the time it takes to wait in line for a coffee, it gives you a direct line to some of the best known personalities in the public eye and it even makes it possible to track down loved ones caught up in a disaster or tragedy. But of all the things social media was originally designed to do, facilitate a spat between Aston Villa and Virgin Trains probably wasn’t one of them.

But that’s what it did on Tuesday, as one mismanaged organisation clashed with another. Virgin Trains started it, aiming some guerrilla marketing at the manager-less Villa Park club, tweeting that the latest batch of Aston Villa managers had “just left for Birmingham New Street” along with a picture of an empty train carriage.

Villa responded with a comeback straight out the Charlie Nicholas playbook, asking “would our managerial candidates actually get here for interviews on time if they arrived via Virgin Trains?” They presumably decided to leave “I know you are, but what am I?” in their drafts. It didn’t end there, however, as Virgin Trains reacted one last time. “We’ve had more trains arrive on time in the last week than you’ve had wins in 12 months @AVFCOfficial.” They’ve also had more trains arrive behind schedule in the last week than Villa had wins in 12 months, but they left that part out.

However, this episode was just another thread in what is becoming an epidemic in modern football. Football club social media accounts are increasingly engaging in what has come to be known as ‘banter.’ The kind of ‘banter’ that’s designed to go viral on the Lad Bible, read by failed footballers wearing backward snapbacks, multicoloured high-top trainers and eating a cheeky Nando’s.

It’s too much. Aston Villa certainly weren’t the first club to engage in banterific behaviour, with their Midlands neighbours West Brom also guilty of such a crime. “Fellaini has now taken his tracksuit off, fortunately he has a Man Utd strip on underneath,” they tweeted midway through a match two years ago, just minutes before Maroune Fellaini smashed home an equaliser. Retribution in this case was served rather swiftly.

This summer proved the nadir of clubs’ social media banter, with the transfer window just too good an opportunity for those with the Premier League log-in details. Arsenal announced the signing of Granit Xhaka by responding to the countless numbskulls who seemingly tweet every club they can find to demand the announcement of a new arrival. ‘ANNOUNCE POGBA’, ‘ANNOUNCE MESSI’, ‘ANNOUNCE ANYONE’, they tweet like some kind of tedious spambot. Arsenal lowered themselves to that level by confirming Xhaka as one of their players. “Ok, let’s announce Xhaka,” they tweeted alongside a picture of a slightly puzzled-looking Swiss midfielder.

The next stage of club social media banter might even see a transfer bid submitted on Twitter in GIF form, because that’s how everything is now communicated on Twitter. Is there any real need for fax machines, particularly given how frequently they fail on transfer deadline day? If transfers were conducted through Twitter David De Gea would probably be a Real Madrid player by now, although the deal would have been announced with a meme.

Clubs are losing sight of what fans actually want from a social media account. They want news of new transfers, they want interviews with managers and players, they want ticket information; they don’t want manufactured spats with rival clubs and certainly not with a train company.

Of course, social media is an effective way to make a seem brand seem more personable. Oreo have even put their surge in sales over the past five years down to an effective social media strategy, bypassing Kit Kat as the UK’s most popular biscuit.

But that’s precisely the problem - football clubs aren’t brands. They might have inadvertently become brands in the age of the Premier League’s megabucks, possessing an image that is instantly recognisable around the world, but they don’t need to be more personable on social media because they have actual people, players and coaches, to make them more personable.

So next time a football club is goaded by a brand they should consider why they are on these networks in the first place. It’s possible to curate a compelling Twitter feed without dredging the social media sea bed of lad banter. In future let’s leave the spats with Virgin Trains to Jeremy Corbyn.