From his seat in the stands, Patrick Nally enjoyed the same pitch-perfect view of the opening ceremony of the FIFA World Cup 2010 as the other 87,000 spectators at Johannesburg’s Soccer City Stadium.
The view was shared, but his perspective on the events unfolding beneath him was unique because, in many respects, Patrick Nally was the man who made the World Cup what it is today. Nally is widely and readily-acknowledged as the founding father of modern sports marketing but has been forced to sit on the sidelines for the best part of three decades watching the systems and methods he devised for FIFA and other major sports bodies being operated by others.
But now he is back. Thirty-two years after the World Cup in Argentina ushered in a new era in sports marketing, Nally is once again onside.
“After all those years of being persona non-grata it is fascinating to be back on the inside,” he says, reflecting on one of the most remarkable stories in the history of sports business.
The world was a very different place back in the late 70s. It was in the year of the Argentina World Cup that the first cellular telephone was introduced in the USA, the last Volkswagen Beetle rolled off its German production lines and, around the world, audiences flocked to the cinema to watch Grease, Saturday Night Fever and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
It was also a world in which sports marketing was beginning to take its first fledgling steps towards becoming the multi-billion dollar industry it is today, and much of the credit goes to Nally - who had been quick to spot the unique qualities of sport as a medium for brand communication.
As a partner of British sports broadcaster and journalist Peter West in the PR firm West Nally, he had developed sports-based communications strategies for Gillette around one-day-cricket and for Green Shield Stamps (an early customer loyalty programme) in tennis.
“We were a classic fee-based PR company but became successful quite quickly and we became independent of our parent company Chesney-Goode,” Nally recalls. West Nally’s PR work for Coca-Cola attracted the attention of the shrewd, ambitious and well-connected Horst Dassler, son of Adidas founder Adi Dassler, who quickly made a connection between the latent power of World Cup football, Coca-Cola’s global marketing ambitions and his own company’s aspirations.
The catalyst, he decided, was West Nally and in particular Patrick Nally, then a work-all-hours twenty-something with big ambitions of his own. Nally sold a shareholding in West Nally to Dassler (held through ROFA) and the pair embarked on what appeared to be a marriage made in heaven.
In essence the relationship worked something like this: Dassler was able to draw on his connections to open doors to major sports governing bodies, leaving Nally to use his innate creativity and communications skills to develop profitable commercial programmes for them. It had all started with Coca-Cola.
Now an ever-present around the world’s major sports events, it is difficult to imagine a time when Coca-Cola had to actively seek ways of achieving and securing its status as a global brand. But that was the challenge handed to Nally who decided that the engine should be football. Dassler backed the Brazilian João Havelange for the presidency of FIFA and then, as with Sepp Blatter many years later, the global development of the game was a major election issue.
Havelange was able to deliver on his election pledges to create opportunities for football in developing countries with the introduction of the Nally-designed Coca-Cola Youth Cup, first held in Tunisia, and a range of global development programmes.
It was a competition which ticked all the right boxes for Havelange, for FIFA and for Coca-Cola. It was also a programme which highlighted the opportunities and obstacles which existed on the frontier between sport and business.
“We simply had to do all the work,” says Nally. “Federations didn’t have anything like the levels of staff they have today so we did everything ourselves, even down to writing the manuals, putting in the structures and creating the individual programmes.”
But Coca-Cola wanted something in return - access to visibility at the biggest football show in town, the FIFA World Cup.
“The problem was FIFA couldn’t deliver any rights because they simply didn’t own any rights. Broadcast rights were dealt with through an arrangement with the European Broadcasting Union which dealt with national broadcasters, while board sales were handled largely by local agencies. I was caught between a rock and a hard place. Coca-Cola wanted something back but there was no mechanism in place to achieve that.”
For the full interview see the latest edition of SportBusiness International published July 1.
