Player power. It’s something that’s been taking over at the top end of the football spectrum for years, with ‘super’ agents like Milo Riola able to make millions and millions of pounds by finding a way to shift his players about clubs as often as possible. Could he have tried any harder to drive a wedge between Pogba and his current club in recent weeks? The prime example from the recent transfer window was the rumour that Diego Godin’s agent had contacted Manchester United about a potential move, to have his player sign a new and massively improved contract within 48 hours.
Even at our level, player power is a highly significant thing. Every single current Ballers player has the ability to negatively affect the reputation of the Ballers leagues, which could affect our ability to attract new teams, or cause current teams to decide to look elsewhere to fulfill their footballing needs.
Reputations are important, and whichever way you look at it, they are something that are given to you by other people by what they might have to say or write about you, and are not something you can really dictate apart from by doing your best to promote the good things that you do while trying to minimise any damage that negative things might cause. All it takes is a few people to take to their social media pages to write something derogatory about your business, and people reading it will form their opinion based on those words.
Worth noting at this point that the obvious exception to all of this is Paul Ince, who gave himself the nickname of the Guv’nor and just expected everyone to go with it.
We are rapidly approaching the 2 year anniversary of Ballers, and we’re now very much at a point where all of the initial good feeling and positivity that you just naturally receive as a new business trying to give it a go in the big wide world is replaced by an expectation that you can at the very least maintain the high standards you have set, if not continue to exceed them. We are now just like any other business that has been around for a while, and certain people will just naturally look for signs that things are on the decline, whether that being in the quality of communication being received from us, or the number of times their game goes down due to a lack of teams.
There have been mercifully few major issues over these past couple of years, but that doesn’t mean that everything has been perfect. As this is my own business, that I’ve been trying to build up from scratch, every little incident hits home, and there have been the odd occasion where I have considered packing it all in and going getting a cushy 9-5 office job. I quite often have to set myself short term targets to get through difficult times, which due to the World Cup, the weather, holidays and 11-a-side pre-season’s has been most of the past couple of months. I set Ballers up because I wanted to do things my way, be my own boss, dictate my own budgets based on what money was coming in and wanted it to be a place and a business with a good reputation where groups of friends get together and come and have a weekly game.
It is a league though, so games will be competitive and things might get said in the heat of the moment every now and again, but when anything goes beyond what is acceptable, and when people see things like that they can quickly ruin any good reputation we’ve worked nearly 2 years to build up. It’s been two years pretty much none stop, and though on the face of it we just run 4 night’s of leagues, there’s more to it than a lot of people would imagine. The real pressure is on not wanting to let down teams who want games, or the referees that have shown the faith in us over these couple of years when they could easily be refereeing somewhere else. Right from the outset we worked from the idea that if we ran everything well, the money side of things would take care of itself, so we don’t get too hung up on the financial aspects as we still believe that to be the case.
When we talk about things that can get out of hand on the football pitch, and reputations, it could only take the actions of one player on a particular team to gain that entire team a reputation that affects their ability to continue in our leagues. There are players when I’m watching games who I feel need to watch themselves with how they speak to the referees and the opposition players. The referees are only human and will make mistakes, it’s nothing personal. The other team aren’t the enemy, they are just another group of lads who want a game of football, and they might mistime a challenge every now and again, it doesn’t mean they are going out to cause any of you harm. The absolute last thing any of us want or need is for any team to decide they don’t want to play against a particular team because of a level of intimidation or for fear of what might happen, because that would put us in a really difficult situation, and a situation where it might be a case of having to lose one team so we don’t lose 2 or 3 others. All things being well, all of the teams currently in our leagues will continue to play each other for a long time to come if those teams stick around, so all games need to be played in the right spirit, with no issues that could get carried into the next game. I might be being unrealistic here, but I like the idea of having a community of teams playing at Ballers who can all get along and have a laugh before and after the game, but have a good competitive game for those 50 minutes.
Most of the other small sided football operators out there that run on the same model as us in terms of hiring facilities run their leagues from a head office and through their website, and rely on their refs to collect money and report everything back to them, so they don’t build a relationship with their customers. In certain matters this way of working can be an advantage, as decisions on incidents can be made based solely on their merits, but because we would prefer to have that personal touch with our customers and know how different some of them are off the pitch compared to how some of them can be on it, it makes it more difficult for us to just deal with a situation, because we don’t really want to be telling anyone that they aren’t welcome to play anymore. Now that we’ve said that, anyone reading this should know that if we get to that point, you know we’ve not made that decision lightly……
All teams who are currently in the leagues remain in control of whether they continue to play at Ballers for however long they want to at the moment. These leagues really aren’t that important, and in years to come, the younger teams in our league might all be married with kids, a mortgage and bills to pay, and at that point they should only remember how you used to have a good game of football with their mates, and it’s highly doubtful those SK Ballers trophies will be taking any pride of place on the mantlepiece. The only trophy I have on display at my house from my small sided football years is used as a door stop on my kitchen floor…….
So the break is over, the Sunday league returns this weekend, and heading into September we only have 4 league spaces to fill across our 4 league nights and we’ll be full again! Despite a testing summer that’s still a fairly strong position for us to be in, we just now need to start making sure all of those teams play as many games as possible so we can build up a pot of money to allow us to think of rewarding those teams who’ve been with us for TWO YEARS by the time October comes around. Two years, where has the time gone……..?