NEW!! All Together Now? by Matt Riley: 2020

All Together Now?
by Matt Riley
1/9/20

The fractious, polarized Thai football universe has now had this forced hiatus to recharge, reflect and renew. But more importantly (and less likely) it has also been a chance to take a long, hard look at itself in the mirror.

And now, more than ever, Thai football as a product needs to attract the attention of current, future and lapsed fans. On the plus side, for Thai clubs with the muscle to qualify for the AFC, the shop window could just be about to expand. European channel Sport1 will broadcast the competition in Austria, Switzerland and, most intriguingly, Germany. With the large amount of German visitors to the Kingdom (there were over 800,000 of them in 2019) not to mention the half a million or so who have made Thailand their home, there is an attractively large, football friendly audience open to sampling another spicy Thai dish.

But big competition is about to arrive close to home. Not only is the J League a far superior product with extensive English content, a national team inside FIFA’s top thirty ranking (one hundred and thirteen places above Thailand) but they have astutely cherry picked some of Thailand’s best talent to put on display and whet Thai appetites. “Pocket Rocket” Chanathip Songkrasin at Hokkaido Consadole Sapporo grabs most of the headlines, but elegant left back Theerathon Bunmathan at Suphanburi FC’s partner club Yokohama F Marinos is another Thai export with the potential for a bigger league (although, at thirty, Theerathon’s extra four years over Chanathip makes that unlikely).

Behind these A list Thai exports come two high profile, but less regionally impactful players. Technically, Chanathip’s teammate Kawin Thamsatchanan is on loan from Belgian First Division team OH Leuven, but it is unlikely that Leicester City’s feeder club are going to call for his return. Despite his famed professionalism and a positive start at the club, a foot injury and long layoff saw him slide down the pecking order and he was only to make eleven appearances for the club as third choice stopper. 

Teerasil Dangda fills the final spot. Now coming to the end of his storied career, he has put aside an ill-fated spell at Spanish Segunda Division club Almeria and the double bagel of appearances and goals at Manchester City to complete a solid spell at Sanfrecce Hiroshima before joining current club Shimizu S-Pulse. Now, those players will activate Thai fans for coverage of The Levain Cup (the equivalent of England’s Carabao Cup) on Siam Sport in Thailand and the J. League's international YouTube channel. Its forty-five thousand subscribers would get a big boost if it could mainline Thai football fans, particularly if more young Thai talent could be persuaded to make the very challenging jump up to Japan.

Thailand’s lukewarm attempts at international marketing will then come under enormous pressure. Japanese football is driven by a more powerful engine than the ponderous, meek Thai FA attempts. Dentsu Sports Network, based in Tokyo, have the hunger for “eyeballs” and the need to show a return on investment. They are not mired in political point scoring. Sports media is in their DNA. They are not confined to vested interests and regional gerrymandering. They also have the huge financial muscle of revenue exceeding a trillion Yen (seven billion pounds) and over sixty thousand employees to develop a global footprint and regional power. Most importantly, they need to focus on added value for their clients in globally recognised standards of success, not stroking the feathers of high-profile political figures.

The best example of how nimble and three dimensional the J League’s marketing machine is came with the signing by Vissel Kobe of Barca legend Andres Iniesta. Using the leverage of Japanese technology firm Rakuten’s sponsorship of the Catalan giants, this player met the twilight of his career as part of a joined up strategy that held so much more merit than sacks of Saudi money or an annual title procession at Qatari cash cows PSG. Rakuten bought Kobe in 2015, so they controlled the asset and his platform. They created Iniesta TV for their new brand, sitting as it did as part of the Rakuten sports streaming service, but also as a platform to promote the wider Japanese game globally. They understood that, when the tide of Japanese football rises, all the club boats will float. But they didn’t focus only on these macro decisions; they oversaw the micro environment of Planet Iniesta too.

Rakuten’s brand partnership with the player is only part of a wider world brand association that is overseen by the company’s own team, a very astute way of filtering the relationships with the player and bolting on connections of their own. In a sense, Iniesta is a standalone brand that is filtered through a global Rakuten platform, a controlled ecosystem of targeting content to a clearly defined audience and as a strand in a clearly thought out strategy of Asian growth for Japanese football, followed by more global reach sitting on a solid local foundation.

Looking at the procession of household names who have limped through Thai football on their way out to pasture with very little more than global rubbernecking of a career being extinguished, the difference is stark and should be a wakeup call to those with stewardship of the Thai game. If Thai football is to avoid slick colonisation from a J League determined to activate a football loving Thai population increasingly uninspired by some of the insipid offerings on their doorstep, the nettle needs to be grasped. Without collegiality, there is only inefficiency. Without a strategy there is only improvisation. Without leadership, there is only tribalism. Thai fans deserve so much more. And now is the time, for once, for the game’s controllers to put the people that fight through dispiriting traffic to watch fractious and staccato games at the heart of the Thai football future, not taken for granted and marginalised. The J League juggernaut is fired up and ready to roll.