Reach out – we’ll be there by Adam Boyle

There are foreign Béticos in every corner of the world, but the club does almost nothing to help them follow their team. Adam Boyle of English-language blog Ooh Betis has some ideas…

Our president Miguel Guillén is fond of saying that the club is only achieving a tenth of its potential as a brand – and it’s hard to disagree. Take this as a simple illustration. Although by any measurement Betis are among the six biggest clubs in Spain, us foreign fans spend many hours trying to convince our ignorant fellow countrymen of this (wherever in the world we are). “Real Betis, that’s right….in Seville…yeah, down in the south…actually they’re one of the biggest clubs in Spain…almost 40,000 season-ticket holders…well, they’ve just spent two years in the Second Division – but they’re good now!”…etc.
It shouldn’t be like this. A football club of Betis’s size, with such a great story, based in one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, and whose games are such damn fun to attend, should be way more famous than it is.
So, how to spread the word? It strikes me that not a bad place to start would be to start connecting with the existing foreign Béticos around the world. There are thousands of them, from Alaska to Australia, but until very recently the club didn’t even want to acknowledge their existence, let alone talk to them, help them follow the team or even sell them stuff. I get the impression things are changing, but it’s a slow old process, so here’s a handful of suggestions of things Mr Guillén and his crew could do to reach out to their ample foreign legion.

1) Carnet de Simpatizante
This would probably translate as “membership card”, and I mention it first because we know the scheme is almost ready. At the moment, one can only become a card-carrying Bético by buying a season ticket, which costs from about €300 a year, but a C de S would enable fans both elsewhere in Spain and abroad to feel part of the family – and, it’s assumed, claim discounts on tickets and merchandise whenever they happen to be in Seville. But believe me, there are Béticos all over the world who would happily pay €30 or €40 just for the privilege of putting an official verdiblanco card in their wallets.
2) An English-language section on the club website
You can read the Sevilla FC website in Spanish and English. Espanyol’s has Catalan too. Real Madrid give you four options: Spanish, English, Japanese and Arabic. FCBarcelona.com has all the above – plus Chinese. You get the idea – Betis have a lot of catching up to do.
Actually, I have to admit the new website is excellent. It’s stylish and easy-to-use, is updated with news several times a day, and has plenty of useful information – but it’s all in Spanish. For many thousands of foreign fans – not just in the British Isles and America, but Scandinavia, Germany and Eastern Europe, too – life as a Bético would be a lot easy if at least some content was in English. At the very least there should be information about how to buy match tickets. Readers contact me at Ooh Betis every single week asking how it’s done. (The answer? Go to the stadium; buy tickets; enter stadium. It really is that straightforward.)
3) Worldwide shipping from the club shop
As anyone who’s ever sold anything on eBay will know, working out postage costs to any country in the world is worth doing. You just never know where the desperate buyer for your limited edition Evil Knievel doll in its original box is going to be hiding out.
It’s the same for Betis merchandise – people want to buy this stuff, so why don’t they make it easier for them to do so? At the moment, to find out about foreign shipping you have to ring a Seville number – the idea of which terrifies me, and I live here. It really isn’t that hard to work this all out in advance. Amazon wouldn’t have lasted very long if you’d had to ring a number in New Jersey every time someone wanted a copy of The Da Vinci Code delivered to Europe.
4) Hotel/match ticket combined packages
On a similar note, I don’t think people at the club realise how anxious foreign visitors with very little Spanish get about buying match tickets. So why not get together with a travel agency to offer weekend hotel deals – with tickets for the game included and delivered to reception for you? Flights are not important, as we’re all able to find our way to Seville on Ryanair these days, but it would relieve a lot of visiting fans of a lot of uncertainty if they knew they had their Betis tickets before they arrived in town.
5) Get someone else to run the Liga BBVA
Pie in the sky? Well, maybe – but the best single thing that could happen to foreign Béticos (European ones, at least) would be to have the season’s timetable published further in advance. (Just as they do in every other major European league, I need hardly add.) Right now, if you want to guarantee that your weekend in Seville will include a game at the Benito Villamarín, you have to arrive on Friday night or Saturday morning and leave on Tuesday, just in case. Or you can wait till kick-off times are announced and pay through the nose for last-minute flights. Meanwhile, there are English fans who are even season-ticket holders in the Bundesliga because it’s so cheap and easy to plan a year’s worth of flying visits to Hamburg or Munich. Everyone in the world thinks the Liga system is mad – except, apparently, the handful of people responsible for keeping it going.

Noticia por Manquepierda

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