What football taught me about services. Yes football ⚽️

If anyone else is missing the football season due to it’s reschedule, I can definitely recommend a couple of Netflix shows to help curb that need. ‘Sunderland til I die’ (which I will refer to as STID) and ‘The English Game’ (TEG) have filled the hole and surprisingly has taught me a few things about designing services.

There is an entire society and culture around football, the fans from Sunderland are not just fans but they are part of the club no matter what, often born into it. This can bring hefty pressure on the Club, knowing that the end user, the fan, is not fickle and they won’t be easily turned to another Club. The fans will spend money on the Club as an investment and even if they aren’t always getting what they want they will ride through it until the end. In TEG we saw in episode one, workers who can’t even afford to eat come together and start investing in their football team so that they can go on to play a rematch game in London.

“Don’t those people need that money.. maybe, but they need football too”

This is quite an unusual relationship the service (the Club) has with the end user (the fans). A lot of emotion is embedded in their decisions and although sometimes you might lose some of the fans, it’s all about the long term relationship.