Voices: why digital is both the problem and the solution

Voices. It’s amazing how much comes down to voices.

All we are is community. And community is just voices.

Who has a voice, who listens to it, and is the impact of that voice mostly good, or harmful?

Actual, real voices which can be used to boo footballers taking the knee, or cheer them. Online voices, which can be used to send abuse to a footballer, or support them. Symbolic, metaphorical voices, like the message someone chose to send when they defaced a Marcus Rashford mural, and the decision others made to use their voices to write notes of support.

Covid-19 showed us that the world is one community: our success in dealing with the pandemic (or lack of it) will be the greatest measurement in living memory of our ability to think about others, not just ourselves. To listen to voices of reason, or voices of harm.

The global sports industry is also a community of voices.

We’re a community made up of famous athletes, local athletes, billionaire owners, fans at the stadium, fans overseas, grassroots volunteers, the media, commercial sponsors and more. Everyone within this living, breathing, trillion-dollar organism has a voice.

Summer 2021, so far, has been defined by how those voices are used.

• Footballers ‘took a knee’ to protest against racial inequality and explained very clearly why they were doing so; some fans booed them anyway and some cheered; ultimately, the cheering prevailed, but we may well return to this debate when the domestic season starts up fully
• Politicians have talked about sports when it suits them to do so. Sometimes tacitly supporting the booing of the knee; other times calling out abuse on social media. Tyrone Mings used his voice to call out the contradiction
• Some England fans behaved horrendously at Wembley throughout the tournament and especially on the day of the Euro 2020 final; others sent abuse to players online; many others behaved impeccably but their voices, whilst the majority, aren’t amplified as much (neither news agendas nor algorithms are very interested in rational voices - something traditional media and social media has in common)
• Away from football, we saw an athlete reach the very top of his sport only to be immediately suspended because offensive messages sent in his past came to light
• Naomi Osaka used her voice to say she didn’t feel able to face press conferences at the French Open. She was fined. She then withdrew from the tournament. For obvious reasons this news story, and what it might say about traditional media’s voice in our global community, slipped down news agendas extremely quickly

Voices used for harm; voices used for good.

There will be no voices from fans at the Olympics. Not inside the arenas anyway. So whose voices will we hear the loudest?

Will any of the athletes feel uncomfortable about press conferences, as Osaka did? If they do, how will we react? Will we talk about holding the athlete to account, as some did when Osaka made her position clear, or will we realise that such talk is a little preposterous when these are athletes playing sport, not senior political leaders in public office?

We may not see a repeat of the abuse sent to the England men’s footballers on social media, because the culture around an Olympics is different, but it isn’t unthinkable. If the GB women’s football team makes the final, capturing the nation’s hearts along the way, and it goes to a shoot-out and someone misses the decisive penalty, what then?

Either, voices will be used for good, and a community of fans will send supportive messages. Or - and let’s hope this doesn’t come to pass - someone will decide to send abuse.

They might find that their message never sees the light of day, if someone has thought to apply filters and other protections to the player’s social media accounts, or it may get through. In which case, maybe it gets reported. Maybe whichever social media company is involved acts quickly and decisively to do the right thing. Or, maybe it issues a baffling response about how the abuse isn’t a breach in community standards; these things, incredibly, can still go either way.

If none of that happens at the Olympics - and let’s hope it doesn’t - then realistically, there will be further tests of how we handle all this when the new domestic football season (already started in some places) follows on quickly from Tokyo.

So what do we do?

Digital is the problem; digital is the solution. The 21st century paradox.

In terms of social media abuse, I’ve written previously about how complex it is to solve this, even when everyone involved (the platforms and the football industry) wants to (and, however it may seem, those parties all do). Mostly this is because we keep focusing on the output of problems (racism and misogyny online) instead of the problems (racism and misogyny).

Solving deep-rooted societal issues such as those which surfaced during Euro 2020 - like England fans’ behaviour, or how it can feel for females at a men’s football match - are somewhat out of my area of expertise (and, it should be acknowledged, outside of my own personal experiences as a white male, although I’ve been very involved over the years with the output of the issue on digital platforms and seen first-hand the pain that this poison causes).

Digital is the problem; digital is the solution. Sometimes, the answer to bad noise, is more good noise.

Just like when the England men's football team repeated their reasons for taking the knee, over and over, and good people listened to them, and cheered them. The boos were drowned out and the politicians realised there was no more capital to be had there, and moved on.

Just like when football fans said No to the European Super League, or fans of another English football club said No to a new sponsor and its archaic advertising.

Voices used for harm; voices used for good. Communities that have lots of the former are toxic. Communities that loudly amplify the latter are inclusive, vibrant, and progressive. People are educated by the lived experiences of others, and we move forwards together.

Here at Seven League, we’re proud of the communities we build.

We’ve built them around European social media channels for the NBA and NHL. We’ve built a digital community around the NFL Academy. And we’ve created, with FIFA, a community called Fan Movement, which started in 2018. This year we launched the Fan Experience Panel out of Fan Movement, allowing FIFA to consult fans to improve their experience of the sport.

There’s a big difference between using social media simply to publish versus using it, or other forms of digital media, to build communities. One is linear; the other is much more than linear. Done properly, an online community is the most powerful tool a sports rightsholder has.

In my opinion, every rightsholder in global sport should develop a genuine digital community. It can, in some ways, be similar to the role traditionally played by organised fan groups but through digital it becomes broader and deeper; immediate and two-way.

How many missteps would the sports industry avoid in the decade to come if every club, league and governing body had a digital, global community for instant feedback and ongoing dialogue? If those rightsholders spoke regularly to fans to informally test ideas, get feedback, and make good decisions together?

Digital allows these conversations to happen privately, publicly, in larger groups or smaller break-out groups. Diverse, well-managed communities make better decisions, just like diverse leadership teams do. But only when those voices are given an opportunity to be a constant part of a rolling, evolving decision-making process.

In business, this area is often referred to as “soft skills.” It’s a laughably inadequate description. Nobody ever defines what the “hard skills” are in comparison but in general people have buckets in their minds of stuff that’s vitally important to business and then the “nice-to-haves” (another useless and inappropriate term).

Talking to people and listening to people; understanding someone else’s viewpoint; walking a mile in their shoes. Those are skills which have stopped human beings from tearing each other apart for millennia. “Soft skills” - bullshit. We wouldn’t have reached this point in human history without “soft skills.” It’s hard to do it well, but the business objectives we associate with “hard skills” fall apart when you don’t.

Our response to Covid showed that we can (to an extent) do it when it’s most needed. But not all of us are brilliant at it. This places greater responsibility on those who can do it - both the communicating of messaging and the understanding of those messages.

Yet it’s the stigma about communication and community being somehow part of “soft skills” which stops this vital being prioritised across all businesses globally, both inside the sports industry and beyond.

What if it was prioritised, though? What if everyone realised the link between community, diverse decision-making, and revenue? In 2021 we’ve seen what happens when decisions are made when fewer people are involved in decision-making: worse decisions are arrived at, contracts torn up, and all of the revenue those “hard skills” worked so hard to achieve, goes up in smoke.

This is the true value of community, and through digital, it can be unlocked at scale, globally. Digital is the problem (abuse) and the solution (true community, education, diversity of feedback, empathy, and better strategy).

In the meantime, we all have a choice. Use our own channels to promote good noise - by amplifying and understanding the experience of others? Or use our channels for harm? Harmful use of digital media can be everything from sending abuse to athletes, to the type of every-day snark and spite which creates a culture where others who have more poisonous beliefs start to feel that abuse is almost what social media exists for.

Personally, I still believe in the potential of the medium, even if at times the use of the medium is truly shocking.

Sport is nothing without community. Community is nothing but voices. Voices are either used for harm or for good.

In the 2020s, the sports that succeed will be the ones that know how to engage with the good voices, in order that we preempt bad decisions, and educate the bad voices, or at the very least, drown them out. It takes time and investment - investment that won’t always be seen as critical and may even be seen as “soft.” But the question over the course of the coming decade will increasingly be not whether we can afford to dedicate resource to this, but instead, can we afford not to?