Hate This Club
Marketing magazine has released its annual Top 50 Most Loved Brands in the UK, and the related Top 50 Most Hated Brands. There’s also a separate survey covering the Top 5 most loved and most hated football clubs, both based on a random sample of 3000 respondents.
What does it tell us? Manchester United are the only football club to show up in the wider survey, coming in at #12 on the most-hated list, between Lidl and Sky Sports. But the depth of consumer hatred for Man U seems to be waning - it was named by 12% of respondents, compared to 14% last year. This suggests that hatred is rooted in sustained success more than in the club’s ownership structures or personnel - take away the trophies and the ardour dies.
Within its sector though, Man U dominates - 33% of all football-related hatred was directed its way, with its closest challenger - Chelsea - getting only 16.5% of the hate votes. Arsenal get 13.5%, Liverpool 4.5%, and the fifth-most hated club in Britain, somewhat surprisingly, turns out to be Wigan.
Money has gone some way to buying Chelsea hate, but it can’t buy love, only getting 8% of the more spread out “love” votes. Man U is the boss here too, with 18.9%, though Liverpool on 17% are closing the gap, and were apparently the only football club to improve its consumer reputation last year. Arsenal have 12% and Newcastle come in 5th with 6.6%.
All meaningless, probably, but an intriguing look into the way clubs are working as brands. The rest of the survey was pretty depressing - the Daily Mail is Britain’s most loved newspaper brand, for instance.
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