The driving sleet slams against the windows of the Liverpool Offices, peaking atop the city’s beautiful landscape; a welcome return home from the Far East for Liverpool’s Head of International Digital Development, Paul Rogers.
It is said that there is no loyalty in modern football, that it has a sort of ‘slutty’ personality, but there is one man at Liverpool who has seen the radical changes at the club since 2001. Paul Rogers’ first summer at the club saw the Reds complete the treble, with his Liverpool journey then taking him to Istanbul for that famous night in May 2005 and it now brings him to the present day. He has watched the managerial transitions from Gerard Houllier to Brendan Rodgers, all the while increasing Liverpool’s worldwide fame through media outlets.
Twelve years after joining Liverpool Football Club as website editor, Rogers switched to his new role of enhancing Liverpool’s international ventures. He helped create what is now liverpoolfc.com way back in 2001 then moved to television matters in 2004. Liverpool had a three-hour show which aired solely abroad and not in the UK and Rogers was part of the team that rectified this in 2007 – generating LFCTV and taking on the role of Head of Content.
From the incandescent Indonesian sun, to the deluge of the British rain, Rogers answers the call of duty wherever it may take him, and he has no complaints.
But other than a long title and long haul flights, what is does the role of Head of International Development bring with it?
“My job is to turn our attention to what goes on abroad. I’m seeing so many people who are now getting to access Liverpool Football Club in a way that they never could before. We now have a twitter account for Bangladesh and the Bangladesh fans can’t believe it! No other club in the word has got that. No other club in the world has got an Indian twitter account. We are going to places and doing things that no other football club in the world is doing.”
“Take Facebook, for example, we have more fans in Indonesia than we have anywhere else in the world. More people come from the United Kingdom to visit the official website. Second could be USA and third and fourth might be Ireland and Australia, all English speaking countries. You have to go further down the list to find Indonesia, so how can it be that we have got more fans in Indonesia but they are only say 14th in terms of the amount of visitors to the official site? The reason is because English is not a predominant language over there. This is a massive barrier for the fans to access the daily content we are producing for the website.”
The club recently launched their eleventh twitter account. @PakistanLFC joined @LFCBrasil, @ThaiLFC, @OfficialLFC_ID, @LFCFrance, @LFCArabic, @LFCEspanyol, @TurkeyLFC, @LFCBangladesh, @LFCIndia and @LFCANZ just weeks after @LFC became the most followed football club in the world. The official Liverpool twitter account was created in 2009 and now tweets to more than 1.5m followers all over the world. The Reds overtook Barcelona as the most globally social media active side, by launching eleven foreign language and international accounts.
“The first stage is to launch twitter accounts because it is immediate. They are run out of the country so we have someone in Jakarta in Indonesia running this account, then we have someone in Bangkok in Thailand running the Thai twitter account. We can quickly get talking to people in their local language, delivering them news and player interviews.”
“The second stage is global Facebook pages, so we can replicate our success on Twitter, and the final stage would be to launch localised websites. Our plan is to launch a Thai website and an Indonesian website as we have a massive fan base there and we’re going to do it in a different way to other football clubs.”
As well as marketing themselves differently, Rogers knows the differences between Liverpool Football Club and any other club in the world run much deeper than just social media.
“I work for the football club that I grew up supporting. My Dad is from Liverpool and I had a Liverpool kit as soon as I could walk. I was a season ticket holder before I worked here so this is the team that I love.”
“There is something special about Liverpool Football Club. We were very successful in the 1970’s and 80’s, when lots of countries started to see football on TV. Liverpool were one of the dominant teams, but the reason why I think Liverpool remain massively popular in Asia is because, even though we haven’t had success of late, fans are loyal to the team. The team is different, the club is different; our relations are different to what other clubs do. Family is very important all over the world but in that part of the world, they are very big on family. Wherever you go, the club is like a family: welcoming, inclusive and the morals and values of the club resonate well with fans in that part of the world.”
“You’ll Never Walk Alone, in my eyes, sums up the ethos of the club and I think that is what people associate with. That means when you are not successful or you have barren runs and you are not top of the league, they don’t switch their allegiance.”
Rogers recognises that the hunger shown on the pitch is more than matched by those off it. The drive displayed on a weekend mirrors what goes on behind the scenes to make all the cogs in the enormous machine of Liverpool Football Club work better to drive the club forward; closer and closer to heralded success.
“What I like is that everyone is hungry to make the club better; there are people here who work over and above the hours that they are supposed to work because people are passionate about the football club.”
“If we are a success, the club becomes a success. The bigger Liverpool can become, the more fans we can have, the more people who buy the shirt, the bigger deals we get, then that money gets invested into the team, and then we buy better players; and when we buy better players, we will win more games and trophies.”
“My starting position is ‘is what we want to do going to make supporting the club better?’ If you are going out to enhance supporting Liverpool Football Club, then that is a good place to start.”
