They come for the football; they stay for the jokes. Or: they come for the football; they stay for the sense of civic engagement. Or: they come for the football; they stay for the idea that the future is nothing to be scared of.
In his talk, Neil Atkinson will discuss the rise of The Anfield Wrap and how the specific is universal, how bespoke isn't the same as DIY, how trying to help people enjoy a leisure activity more crosses over into endless explorations of identity, belonging and culture. He will talk about joy, curating and professionalising a culture, and how the word "podcast" is a bit mad when you stop to think about it.
He won't talk about football. Not really.
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors.
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Hiya, I'm Neil Atkinson. I'm from the Amfield Wrap. It's always lovely to be in Edinburgh. Thank you very much for joining us for us. It's great to be in Edinburgh. You're reminded that there's always another staircase, and that your devotion to Freemason iconography is second to none as far as the United Kingdom is concerned.
You're sticking it out there week in, week out. Everywhere you go around another corner, there's something else that reminds you of the Freemasons. I'm here to talk about the Anfield Wrap, but I'm also more I'm not gonna talk about football particularly. I'm here to talk about the creation of global communities and the sense of civic engagement in a specific place that that brings about.
The Anfield Wrap started in twenty eleven. It started as one podcast recorded about Liverpool Football Club on a Monday morning in Par Street. It had a couple of things going for it. Andy Heaton, Gareth Roberts, Ian Maloney, and Jim Borman came up with it between them, and they asked me to host it.
From there, we ended up in this situation where one of the things it had going forward was that everybody was in the same room, and it was in Liverpool City Center. This remains central to everything that we do. Everyone in the same room.
So many podcasts that you'll listen to, you'll find that they're done over Skype or something like that. I understand why that's the case, but having everyone in the same room offers a sense of warmth. You can see one another. You can feel one another, and what you actually create is a feeling that everyone's in on the conversation.
Everyone who listens to it feels part of the conversation. I feel that's really important, and that's underpinned a lot of what we've done and a lot of what's been successful. Another key part of the journey that we went on early on was around twenty thirteen when two things happened simultaneously.
The first of them was we went to Bray. Now Bray is to Dublin. We said we were gonna do a live show in Dublin. Bray is to Dublin. It's further away than Glasgow is to Edinburgh. And yet five hundred people came. Five hundred people came to this backwater in the middle of nowhere, the last stop on the line, the dart, and five hundred people came.
And it was then hosting that that I began to think to myself, well, we've got something here. If five hundred people will come and listen to us and we still refer to them now the Bray five hundred, the Bray five hundred who came all the way out to Bray to listen to the Amfield Rap Live.
It was a four hour live show. It was sprawling and ridiculous. We had a band, the t street band from Liverpool, who've been with us on many of our adventures. And we brought it to Bray, and five hundred people turned up. The other thing that we did in twenty thirteen, whilst we were still doing now two podcasts a week, one for Radio City in Liverpool and the one that we do on a Monday, what we then also did was launch a magazine, an online magazine.
The online magazine failed. This is really important. The online magazine failed not because people didn't work hard, not because it wasn't well executed or well done. It looked gorgeous. The online magazine failed because we were trying to get people to do something they didn't want to do.
People like magazines. People want magazines in their lives, and they understand them innately. The idea of something that sits on an iPad. Yes. There's now online magazines that are functioning and doing okay, but they tend to be related to actual hard copy magazines.
We were trying to reinvent something that didn't, at that moment, need reinventing. Maybe it will over time, but it didn't then. What we had there was we had our community, we had our audience, we had sixty thousand people listening, but they wanted to listen.
That's what they come onto the Amfield Rap to do, was to listen, not to read an online magazine. So no matter how hard we tried and tried to push people in the direction of it and create partners, it never ever ever came alive.
We were working with lots of other people by point. We'd created for ourselves within Liverpool a community of twenty, thirty, forty contributors. We have people who come and do shows with us once a week, twice a week. We had new partners. We had a shareholder who'd invested Red Touch Media.
They came on board as part of the magazine process. But no matter how much we tried, we could not get that magazine to work whilst the podcast was continuing to grow, continuing to be listened to by more and more people, and it had the attention of this community.
That takes us through to twenty fifteen. In twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen, we began to be aware that we had all of these people who loved the Amfield Wrap, who'd invested in the Amfield Wrap spiritually, who saw it as part of their identity, who'd taken it on board.
But we were worried that we were gonna effectively not be able to find any way to monetize it. In the autumn of twenty fourteen, I said, why don't we just give them more podcasts? They like podcasts. Why don't we give them more of them?
And in twenty fifteen, in March, we launched Tour Player. Tour Player is a subscription service. We had to write it all ourselves. The back end, Ian Maloney worked very, very **** ** it. It was all bespoke. None of it is even now, it's difficult to find ways to charge for podcasts.
Even now, there's still things like Patreon, but they don't quite do something that bespoke and gives people that sort of the podcast that they want as and when they want it. We went from doing two shows a week to doing fourteen. We had our community of people.
We had our fifty people within Liverpool able to do shows with us, and we were able at that point to expand. What's really important within this is I've used the word bespoke. There was a desire with podcasts to say that they're DIY. There's a desire with a lot of smaller media to call it DIY.
For me, the language is wrong. What we do, what we say we do, and what we do do is bespoke. We create beautiful wooden wardrobes. We do not go to IKEA and buy them flat packed. We don't flash them together. We create them for the purpose of the community that we have created.
From twenty fifteen to twenty nineteen, we were able to explore that community more and more. And what we found within it was this idea that, yes, everyone's there because they love Liverpool Football Club, but Liverpool Football Club just gives them the shared reference points to enjoy what we produce.
Liverpool Football Club allows us to come together and bring these people into our community in this way and allows them to feel part of it. The Football Club actually gave us the ability to talk about civic matters, and we were able to in curating our culture, we were able to say what our cultural priorities were.
We were able to say what the values were to the wider cultural base, not of Liverpool or of Liverpool Football Club, but just the Anfield rap. If you didn't like us doing something, well, you know where the door is. The good thing about podcasts, and another word I'll use over and over again throughout this, is choice.
Commercial radio is just ongoing. The BBC is right now broadcasting seven or eight radio stations. They're going out as we speak. Radio has to happen. Those airwaves have to be filled. The thing about podcasts is you choose to listen to them. In the act of listening to any podcast, you opt in.
And in the act of opting in, you've made a choice. That choice is really, really important. But we also make a choice when we make that sort of product. We choose what we want to give you. We don't have to give you. We don't have to turn up.
We don't have to do a breakfast show five days a week. We don't have to find something to fill. We don't have to do any of that. Whatever we talk about, we have chosen to talk about. We are under no obligation. And what we do, therefore, is bespoke.
It is not thrown together because there needs to be shelves in the room. It's making the best bookcase that we can because we want to put gorgeous books upon it. And this is a really, really key part of the Amfield Wrap, that sort of choice and that sort of community that it engenders.
So what we have with the Amfield Wrap, the people who listen to the Amfield Wrap, and I am, of course, generalizing. There are some who just want us to talk solely about football and solely about transfers, but what we have is a number of people who care for the city of Liverpool.
Because we talk about the city of Liverpool, because the people we bring in are from the city of Liverpool, because people who contribute to the Amfield Wrap are alive, are present, and now, that what we're able to do is communicate the city of Liverpool out on a worldwide basis.
In twenty thirteen, we went to Australia for a tour. I remember in Australia, someone asked me about an oven in Homebaked. Homebaked is a community bakery in Amfield that had crowdsourced its money. And he asked me about how's the oven going in Homebaked.
I donated to that. And I said, you ever been to Amfield, mate? And he said, no. I said, do think you're ever gonna go? He said, no. But he donated to that orphan. He'd heard about it through our show, and he asked me about it when he saw me.
People want to care and want to identify and want to find values. They want to find those values and find them shared. Much of what we've done and why it's worked to this point, and I'll come on to a little issue that we've had recently, but so much of what we've done and why it's worked is because what we've done is we've taken the specific on our shows, we don't talk about simple generic football things.
We have a show called AFQ. And we do AFQ every single Friday, and AFQ sounds like a pub. It sounds like a gang of mates in a pub. That's what we want it to sound like. It can be rambunctious. Normally, our production values are terrific.
AFQ, we're prepared to sacrifice that. We have a drink, we have a laugh, and we answer the listeners' questions. Week one of AFQ, seventy five percent of the questions were about football. Week two of AFQ, fifty percent of the questions were about football.
Week three, twenty five percent. Now we have to have another show called AFQ Football to get them to ask football questions. They want us to talk about any one variety of things, often food, sometimes drink, occasionally politics. They throw it at us, we answer it because we bring them in.
We want people to feel part of what we do. The specific is universal. There is this fear at times, I think, in all the creative industries that if we're too specific, what we'll do is we'll drive people away. This is nonsense. The specific is universal.
People will learn the specific. They will pick it up as they go. A really good, quick cultural example is you can always tell an idiot it's the person who's got the subtitles on for The Wire. You can always the person who's got the subtitles on for Derry Girls, the person who decides that they can't watch that because they don't quite get it, because they won't quite make the effort.
We can engage, and then the specific becomes universal. It becomes funnier because it's real. Broad strokes do not help, not in anything. What we need to find is those shared spaces, and then from there, we're able to share experiences and let people into the different experiences that we can have.
The technology that powers our podcasts, that allows us to communicate around the world, brings the world closer and closer together. The idea that we start with football, that I can make a joke about a footballer that the people who are listening to will get it, means I can make a joke about other things, means I can ideally, hopefully, be insightful about other things.
That from there, we can observe. The more we widen that circle but with specifics, the more we're able to bring people in and show them different experiences and bring people closer together. I have a line that I used to say. I've got a lot of lines.
They come for the football. They stay for the jokes. It's one of the lines that I used to say. But then it could be they come for the football, and they stay for the civic engagement. It could be that they come for the football, and they stay for the company.
They come for the football. They stay for the identity. They come for the football. They stay for the culture. We found ourselves I've used AFQ. I've mentioned it, so I'll tell you a little story. I started to want to get rid of it, to sit in the same room on a Friday at six PM, take questions.
The questions are of differing standards, shall we say, in terms of how good the show will end up, you're a little bit out of control. And I wanted to say, maybe phase it out, do one a month or two a month, make it more special, make it more of a treat.
And we had a few chats in the office, and we went to the live show in Dublin, two hundred and fifty people there. And ten people separately came to talk to me and John. So we had separate conversations, ten separate people, and they came to talk to us about AFQ and about how it what it meant to them.
One guy said to me, I'm in my late thirties now, and I don't really I've got kids, and I don't really have friends anymore to go out with over the weekend. And I listened to that show at some point, and I might have a drink while I listen to it, and I feel like I'm listening to my friends.
Someone else told me the story of how it helped with their mental health after being gone through really, really difficult times. And this thing, this weird little thing that I always thought and still do think in a sense is quite self indulgent, this thing had helped get him through.
We had lots of conversations that worked like this. And I said to John, we can't get into AFQ now, can we, mate? We're gonna have to stick with it whether we like it or not. And we do like it. It is a fun thing to do, but these things matter.
And all of this, I'm telling you, is an example of how we built the community that we have. We have now in twenty nineteen. We have over a hundred thousand people listening to the two free shows we still do a week. Of our other offering, we've got about thirteen thousand people paying us money to subscribe.
That varies now from five pounds to seven pounds or ten pounds. But we've got those people who power the Amfield Wrap. We now have a team of thirteen who work every single day. They're in the office right now. Four is in Liverpool. We've got a hundred contributors who come to the studio across the course of a year.
Of them, about twenty of them were able to pay, not a life changing amount of money, but just a a contribution to the to them as part of what they do for the Amfield Wrap. We're pleased to be able to do that. And we've got people who ring in from other clubs.
We are used as the exemplar of fan media, rightly or wrongly. I would say often wrongly because what we do, I think, is unique and it comes back to that word bespoke. It's difficult to copy what we do because what we do is so centered in the community, the shared cultural values of the contributors.
The trite thing to say and we've recently got a book that I've gotta run back and sign tonight. We've got a book out after the after season that's just gone where Liverpool won the Champions League. And the trite thing to say is that we're nothing without our audience.
That is true. It's always true. It's true of anything any of us produce. We need the people who are gonna take what we produce. But, actually, the Amfield rapper is nothing without its contributors. There are people who come in, share the values, who share the jokes, who set that cultural sort of line along with us, who say that this is what this thing's about, who are our harshest critics at times who give us the feedback that we need, and we work with them quite consistently on producing the
best content we can for wider Liverpool supporters. These aren't professionals. Some of them are. A smattering of them are journalists, but on the whole, these are people who have other jobs. People who are aren't professional communicators, but people who we trust to bring into a room and trust that they will offer something of themselves.
We don't ask them to be remarkably clued up about football. We want them just to watch the football match that they're talking about. We don't ask them to be experts in the field. We ask them to be themselves, maybe plus ten percent, but to be themselves.
And that's what we do, and that's what it's about. That's the sense of mission, the sense of belonging, the line that we used to have on the wall before we moved offices because we ran out of space was about telling the story of supporting Liverpool Football Club from the heart of the city.
There's key things in there. We're not telling the story of Liverpool Football Club. Liverpool Football Club can do that. Journalists can do that. We're telling the story of supporting Liverpool Football Club, and the heart of the city matters. We want people to feel as though they're engaged within Liverpool's civic life, and we're committed towards Liverpool's civic life because we think that there's an audience of people out there who both love Liverpool Football Club and love Liverpool the city.
Combining those two things is a huge positive, and it's a huge positive for them. And we hope it's a huge positive for the city as well. So far, this just sounds like I'm giving you a list of the reasons why I think we're boss, which, you know, I obviously do.
I get to work there, and it's nice. And you know what I mean? I get to talk about football for money. But there's a lot of things that go on in the background as to how we run this business. And one of the things that's recent and maybe of use for the TuringFest is we launched an app.
We had two, three years of people saying to us, You need to do an app. You need to do an app. You need to do an app. We also wanted to start to do video content and move away from audio content, but we had issues around delivering video content, the best way to go about it.
So we decided that we'd launch an app. After speaking to two or three companies, I'd say about twelve months ago now, we found ourselves in a position where no one was really moving along with us. There was people who weren't listening to us.
They were trying their best, but we were trying to sort of make them aware of our strangeness, the closeness of the community, the way things had to work, the way in which our people will give us feedback at the drop of a hat.
And field rap listeners are not shy of telling you whether they liked or certainly disliked something. One of the things about building that community and saying it's a back and forth and saying it's a conversation is you have to live that value. It is a back and forth, and it is a conversation.
And people will say if they don't like something. We ended up with an app company who we spoke to, and I said I just needed to work. I needed just to play the podcasts and play the videos. They had lots of ideas, and I know many of you work in that sector or will have worked in that sector.
And they still have lots of ideas now, this app company, but I just needed it to work in the first place because I was aware of our community and what their reaction would be to it. I was also aware that I was doing this from moving us from five pounds a month to moving us to a different amount of money, putting the price up in effect.
We'd had the price the same since twenty fifteen, and we decided we needed to be priced in a way that was keenly priced for the following four years. A lot of what I now currently see as the role of the my role within the Amfield Wrap is to protect the future of the Amfield Wrap.
I'm not gonna be there forever. So what we need to do is this thing that in twenty eleven we started has weirdly become an institution. It's not a copper nineties style business. Fair play to them, but instead it's become this little cultural civic institution, therefore we needed to protect it.
So we wanted to shift the price points as well. We went through this, and you can download our app, and please do do so after this. I think it's great. It looks gorgeous, but there were issues, and there are always going to be issues.
This is really important. I'm not at all annoyed with our app developers. We're gonna continue to work with them. And to be honest with you, we love them. I'm almost at the point now where I see them as like being part of the team in a strange way.
Anyone who the Amfield app comes into contact to, I'll eventually put you to work. I'm going get Brian doing stuff later on. The way in which we go about our business is that we want because what we do, as we brought in in twenty seventeen a head of operations called Emma Johnson, She's been absolutely priceless.
One of the things that she says all the time is we're not junior doctors. She's talking about football. If you can't enjoy talking about football, if you can't take the joy from that, then what exactly are you in it for? What we don't have and we try not to have with any of our suppliers is negative relationships.
We now have we still have a really strong relationship with our app developers, but, of course, it launches, and there are problems. There are problems with the new payment page, trying to move people from five pounds to seven pounds and ten pounds, which has caused a floor an understandable force within the community.
Why are you putting the price up? People don't like the price going up. Supportive as many of them are. There's some of them that aren't, and then those people get noisier and noisier. And they're well within the rights to do so, moving from five pounds to seven pounds for the audio or five pounds to ten pounds for all audio and video, having done the video for free for a year on YouTube, it was always going to be controversial.
It was always going to ruffle some feathers. And I'm absolutely fine with that, and I'm fine with people who feel as though moving from five pounds to seven pounds is a significant lift in in terms of the amount of money. There's a lot of people who say, oh, it's only two quid if the price of x.
You don't know what two quid means to people, and you have to bear that in mind. We didn't make the decision lightly to make the move, but it was the one that we felt set the company up moving forward. But need to have a new launch page as well in order to be able to sort those subscription models out, and so much of what we've done, which I mentioned before, was bespoke.
When we pulled this thing together in twenty fifteen, we went in a position to go out and get someone to design as a beautiful e commerce system. We had to build something with a series of plug ins and work with people, so we pushed all of these partnerships to the limit.
These people aren't really set up for thirteen thousand subscribers with regular payments. One of the great surprises too is when we get in touch with PayPal, and PayPal are always like, oh, you're a good customer. We presume because we're just a football podcast that knocks around, that's not what they're going say.
They're constantly saying, oh, we'll help you out. We've now got specialist manager for us at PayPal, where we just rang them one day to ask them if they could help us out with something, and three conversations later, there's a guy who we can now go to for a chat.
But the point is we never had something that was set up for us absolutely perfectly because we didn't know if it succeeds or not. So all of this, our app developers had to deal with and plug in and pull together. The website is still, for instance, run off the back of WordPress that has to talk to the app.
All of this was difficult and complicated and it created issues, but those issues that would have been present in any normal launch were absolutely exacerbated by the fact that we've got a community. You can't have a community and say community is a good thing and not be able to the issues that develop from it as well as the strengths.
You can't say to people, we feel as though you're part of all of this, and then have them respond negatively about something you do and say, oh, no. We didn't really mean that. You're just a customer. You can't have that journey. You have to keep that engagement up.
And this came as a massive shock to us because up until twenty nineteen, broadly speaking, people would just say the AMP field app's great. And it also came as a bit of a shock to Pixelbeard because now they've now got us on the phone every twenty minutes going, there's been another complaint about this not working and this not working.
And they're like, that's not how our processes work. That could just be a bug. That could just be user error. And we're like, well, he's having murder on the Facebook subscribers. We just need it fixed. They are understandably a bit like, well, don't we don't understand this.
This isn't normally what happens. You normally don't look. A soft launch, then you go and you spread out from there. But the only way we could do it was to launch to thirteen thousand paying customers and God knows how many else, free users.
So we had to live this little journey, and this journey has been bumpy. When I was originally asked to do this talk by Brian and even a couple of weeks ago where he was saying, know, how's the app gone? How's it going? Oh, yeah.
It's gone alright. And it has. It has within any normal standards. But when there's that intensity of response and when you felt only as though you're part of this thing that uplifts and moves and creates, that suddenly there's this negative feedback over what is.
Three things happening at once, launching a video product, paywalling it that's the same thing, sorry increasing the price point from five pounds to seven or ten, and trying to, within all of that, launch this app. It was the only way it could be done, and, yes, I wouldn't recommend it to anybody.
If I could go back and change it all, I wouldn't change a thing, but I'd wanna change everything. This is the way in which we had to do it, and we've had to live this out. And I've been saying within the team as much as possible when I haven't had my head feel feeling like it's gonna fall off.
I've been saying it's four, five, six weeks of pain for four years. Four years to move forward from this point. Four years to continue to work and grow this community and feel part of it. We're over the worst of it now, he says, remarkably, hopefully.
We found that a large number of people have taken the increase in price. They've gone to seven or ten, which we're really, really pleased about. It's at about seventy percent of chosen two so far. We've had a bit of pushback on reducing what's at the five pound level, but we had to do that, and we wanted to give them a show a day, including AFQ on a Friday.
What you discover there is that people can't quite understand why why haven't we put the shows I like on? And there's a couple of reasons why we haven't put the post match show on. It does drive subscriptions for us more than any other show.
That is true. But we've actually chosen other ones, and people are always surprised. Well, my favorite show, the one I think is the reason why people subscribe, well, that should be on here. And it doesn't work like that. We wanted to give them a show a day, and we've had to, wherever possible, try to explain that.
Try to say to people this is what this is about and that that we want them to still feel part of it. We don't wanna take people who can't afford to pay the extra two pounds. Don't wanna take a show we wanna make sure they've still got one show a day that they can listen to along with our free video and our other free shows.
It's gone well. It's been a shock for Pixelbeard, but we love them to pieces. It's been a shock for some of our customers, but we love them to pieces as well. And it's a real reminder for us, this area where commerce comes in alongside the technology and alongside what is effectively just talking into microphones, and that's where we ended up with our app development.
Bespoke isn't the same as DIY. I've said it before and I'll say it again. I'll say it are all things that I come and do like this. Bespoke is not the same as DIY. If you're making something special for people and you know who those people are, we've got thirteen thousand paying subscribers, and I reckon I could write you the Twitter handle down of a thousand of them.
I reckon I've had conversations with two thousand of them. We know who our customers are. We're so fortunate to get that. We know where there's fifty five thousand of them nineteen times a year as Liverpool play home matches. We know who they are. We drink in the same pubs as them.
Again, that's a double edged sword. They'll tell you if they think you're talking ****. They'll tell you to your face if they think that's the case. But what we do, therefore, has to be bespoke. We know the customer. We know them inside and out.
And we're fortunate to do that. Lot of you in these sectors come into a conference like this. I've looked at the other speakers, and I know that at times you're creating something that you hope. You'll be able to find that, and you'll never possibly get to speak to many of the users.
We put a market research survey out within about four days. We've got over two thousand responses from people who are very, very eager to give their views, and we're so grateful to them. Around all of this and what's been so important to us is the creation of our culture.
That culture is both inside our business and outside of it. We are part of a wider sense of fan culture around both football in general and Liverpool in particular, and we have our own niche within that. We've had to create our own culture within our workplace.
We have to exceed to the rhythms of football. We can't force that. We can't change that. The matches happen when they happen. The aftermath of them is what it is. So we have to find a way to make that work. Emma, who I mentioned earlier on, has led, as far as we're concerned, with an asset based coaching model.
She improves members of our teams. She finds what they're good at and finds a way for them to to demonstrate it on a regular basis. It's been absolutely priceless for us. But within all of this, and the most important part of this is the model that it's about joy, that what we're lucky enough to get to do forget the football.
I've barely talked about it. I haven't even referred to one man kicking one ball in one goal. What we get to do, what we're lucky to do, what we choose to do is to talk about joy, is to talk about a celebration of something, is to talk about what it is to be alive.
That's what we get to do when we do the Amfield Wrap. That's what we bring people in for, and that's the culture that we're looking to cure to curate as much as possible. The outside has an influence. It has a huge influence around that for us.
But as far as we're concerned, football should be joyous. And as far as we're concerned, and I'd like to think that any of you who are looking to work in any industry, most people in this room, I'm gonna hazard a guess, because you're here on a Thursday at eleven ish.
Most people in this room are probably in a position where you're able to choose what you do to an extent. None of us have complete freedom. None of us ever will. None of we all have responsibilities. We all have bills to pay. But everyone in this room, to an extent, is fortunate enough to be able to choose what you do.
Choice is so, so important. You opt into every single day of your working life. Every day you get up, you choose to go to work. The jobs that you do, the start up you work for, the company that's been going for ten years you work for, you've chosen it.
You've chosen to be there. Does it share your values? That's only a question you can answer. Can you change those values? If it doesn't, you'll you may wanna know the answer to that as well, but you choose it. And that's why that underpins so much of what our culture is about.
We want people to come and share our culture with us, but our values are our values. And if it doesn't suit them, then this working for us doesn't suit them at all. If the idea of being part of this huge, mad football thing that we do isn't right, then it just isn't right.
We need people who are going to come in and exceed the madness of the Anfield Rap. We have a ring chart of what's the maddest thing that's happened at the Anfield Rap. One day, someone came on and said that we could do a live show in a prison.
That was pretty mad. But strange things happen all the time when you work where we work, so you have to be able to cope with that. You have to be able to enjoy that. You have to be able to take the positives from that.
I'm gonna end with one football story, and it's not to do with Liverpool. It's to do with Manchester United. I heard Damien Hughes, who's an excellent writer, tell this story once, and the story was this, that Alex Ferguson was his Manchester United manager, he was struggling to deal with millionaire footballers millionaire young millionaire footballers as the game changed.
And so what he did was he drew a white line outside the dressing room door. Drew this white line white line at the dressing room door at Carrington, the Manchester United training ground. And he got all the players, and he said, if you step over that line, you accept our values.
You accept humility. You accept that you're gonna listen to the coaches. You accept all the things that we expect of a Manchester United player. Before you cross that white line, you're you. You're you in the changing rooms. You're you doing whatever it is you wanna do.
But if you cross the white line, you've accepted, and so you're ours. It's a wonderfully simple way to make choice clear. If you don't wanna be someone who has those values that day, don't cross over the white line. And with the Amfield Wrap, if we don't wanna make the podcast that we don't wanna that we want to make, let's not make them.
If we don't wanna give our customers something that we feel isn't up to standard, we won't do it. We won't just tick a box. Excellence is one of our core values, and it's what we want. And excellence is hard, and every day you've got to want it.
But that's what we've chosen to do. And we've chosen to do it because and this is the core thing. If you cannot find the joy in talking about football, then genuinely just go and find another job. All of our contributors opt in. There's a line I used to put on emails when I'd invite them to shows, which is no is always a valid answer.
If you don't wanna be there, don't come. Don't come out of our obligation. Sometimes it makes booking shows quite difficult when I don't wanna do it on the Sunday of a bank holiday weekend, but that's alright because I know that the people who are in the room have chosen to be there.
And that choice from our contributors is what is what got us to thirteen thousand paying customers. That choice from those customers to come and be part of our journey because they like our values. They like how we express ourselves. They've come with us when we've highlighted issues within the game, and they haven't said, why aren't you just focusing on the lads kicking the ball?
That choice from them is why they're prepared to pay the money. This is what I take from all of this when I talk about this cultural thing is all we can do, I think, is offer choices. Choices internally within our cultures, within our working cultures, and externally out to the wider public.
Be open about those choices. Accept that no is always a valid answer. And listen. We're all lucky here. Enjoy what you do. I've been Neil. Thank you very much.
