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Melbourne is the most crowded sporting marketplace in the world, and the battle for media coverage is intense. So when a team has a major announcement, you need to make sure both the content and the timing of the message is right.
Football has always battled to understand this, especially when it comes to announcing major signings, and that’s why the unveiling of Tim Cahill by Melbourne City this week was somehow both baffling and unsurprising at the same time.
While Cahill’s signature was expected for months, the timing of the announcement last Thursday was not designed to garner maximum impact, and disappeared quickly into the ether.
Announcing a major signing during the Olympics, when the world’s sporting attention is on anything but the A-League, is bad enough. But announcing it at the very time that Australia’s men’s basketball team was taking it right up to Team USA is simply asking to be ignored.
Add to that the fact that the men’s 100-metre freestyle was held on the same day and Kyle Chalmers produced an epic finish to win Australian gold and it’s little surprise that the Socceroos champion’s big decision barely rated a mention.
Football purists will say that the Olympics doesn’t matter, but mainstream media begs to differ, and signatures of this size are all about the mainstream.
Cahill’s massive salary is more about the mass appeal of the game than his side’s prospects of winning their first title, so City and FFA must get maximum value.
Ah well, you say, everybody knew he was signing anyway. Fine, so surely then when he was unveiled as a Melbourne City player, at an official press conference, they could ensure some clear air.
The men’s track 100-metre final – the marquee event of any Olympics, let alone when it features a world superstar like Usain Bolt – had been scheduled for last Monday morning (AEST) for a long time.
Any media strategist knows there are some things you can’t compete against, and Bolt is one of them.
So what does Melbourne City do? They hold Cahill’s unveiling press conference less than an hour after Bolt left hearts aflutter all over the world.
What happens to the biggest announcement in the club’s history? It gets buried at the back of the TV news, behind an avalanche of Olympic stuff.
Twenty-four hours later, with Bolt having sprinted out of the news cycle, what led most of the Melbourne TV sports news bulletins? Adam Cooney retiring.
That was your window, Melbourne City, and you missed it spectacularly.
This is hardly a first. The press conference announcing Harry Kewell had signed for Victory was held on a Saturday afternoon. While Anthony Di Pietro was lauding it as the “biggest signing in Australian sports history”, the majority of mainstream Aussie sports fans didn’t realise Kewell had signed on for at least a week.
The reasons given for these missteps are centred around the wishes of the player and their manager, but if a club is paying someone a million bucks a year, then they should get the right to set the timing of their announcement and press conference.
In the case of Cahill and City, value for money is going to be measured in public relations and media coverage, not goals.
Let’s hope, the rest of Cahill’s time in a Melbourne City shirt is a little more polished than his first week.
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