Maybe it is because here in Europe we are living the final of the most important football leagues and nothing is really decided about which team will win. Maybe because I am a great football fan and the World Cup is just around the corner (next June/July), but more and more I see similarities between a football team and a web marketing agency. And I think that to understand football can help a web marketing agency to be a better one.

I will try to do my best in order to be understood also by the readers not so fond about football. If I succeed with that, I will consider this a success.   What's football?  Football is not just a sport where 11 vs. 11 guys are kicking a ball with their feet (and sometimes hitting it with their heads) trying to score a goal. Nope. Football is a sport were creativity, genious and art have to be married with organization, rules and respect for the roles any player has on the field.  

The Players' roles  

In a football we find three main playing zones:

• defense (plus goalkeeper);
• midfield;
• attack

The defense... the base of a winning football team. 

I know my British and Spanish friends are going to tell that the title reflects my Italian way of looking at football. But there is a reason to that title: to win a match means also to receive less goals than your opponent.

In a web marketing team the defense should be the IT and Devs team.  

In fact, it is useless to have great marketing ideas or a wonderful SEO in your team if the basic – the architecture of your site – is not well covered. If you don't have every technical aspect solved of your website (e.g.: good server response and latency, choosen the right development frame of the site, structured a perfect internal navigation, designed it with both users and bots in your mind, but also robots.txt, sitemap.xml, canonical and 301 and so on...) your web marketing strategy can be like a giant with feet of clay. You maybe are going to have success in the short term but be won by your competitors on the long run.   That's why the first web marketing action is to have a perfectly done website.  

This – as a good defense in football – will give you the security you need in order to plan a winning strategy without worrying constantly about tech issues that may affect your SEO and web marketing strategy.  

The midfield... the team who own it wins the match.  

In the football star system the celebrities are usually the attackers.

But who really counts in order to make the team a winning one, are the midfield players. It is in this part of the playing field that a game is won and, apart from few remarkable cases, the team with the best midfield organization wins the leagues.  

The midfielders are the ones who create the occasions for the attack to score a goal and who have to duty to break the game of the adversary.

In a web marketing team, this role should have to be assigned to the SEO team. In fact, he has the vision of the game (the Serps Panorama) and knows which keys to use in order to make the site reach the top position and score its goals. He foresees the strategy of the competition and he's able to counter attack it and use it to his own advantage. He is the playmaker who draws the passing (link building strategy and on page optimization) that can free the strikers.  

The attack... because you have to score more goals than your adversary.

The main purpose of a football striker is to score goals. The more the best.    

They are beloved by the fans and teams usually pay them more than the other players. They are the superstars of football.  

And who could be the strikers in a web marketing organization? They are the content providers, the great bloggers able to create link bait opportunities. They are the people who create those great widgets and tools that makes your link invade the website. They are those social media specialists that are able to make a community a vibrant one.  

But remember, without a great midfield who plans and prepares their attacks and a defense which is able to make their goals useful, forwards can be useless.  

And remember another secret of the greatest football teams: a striker helps the defense, and a defender can be the one who score the goal, as the midfielder has to be a good mix of both. And this versatility has to be present in all the members of a web marketing team.  

The man  backstage: the trainer  

No football team can be a winning one without a great trainer (or manager as named in the UK).

Without him, a team would be just an ensemble of good players, but not that different from a amateur team playing soccer in the park. 

The manager is the one who decides the main strategy of the game the team will play, the one who is able to change the playing scheme on the run, who knows the moves the adversary will do before actually playing against it, the person who motivates the players making them feel proud to be part of the team, and the one who is able to change the ones who are not offering what they are supposed to offer in his role with a fresh substitute.  

The analogy with the web marketing agency are quite obvious here: couldn't the paragraph above describe a Web Marketing VP, could it? I could easily give the face of Rand to that manager I portrait, as he fits in it perfectly.  

The 13th player: the tifosi.  

In football there is an element that can be key in the success of a team: its tifosi (aka: fans).   There are football teams that are well known for how difficult it is to play in their stadium, because of the pressure that their fans create against the guest team. Liverpool, Roma, Barcelona, Marseille amongst others are good examples.

The passion and the force of the their tifosi, expressed by chants and coreography can give to their teams that boost of confidance that will make them win even if they are objectively weaker.    

But, as good as they can be, tifosi can also be a tremendous force against their own teams if something is not welcome by them. The fans with their force and pressure can oblige the football institution to change the trainer or not to sell a player.  

In a web marketing strategy the tifosi are your followers, your clients, your facebook fans... serve them and you will have your 13th player. Disenchant them and you will have your worst enemy.   If the players are good, the manager is brilliant and fans are one with the team, then a great football team is there ready to offer moment of joy and pure art.  

The final note

The guy insulted by all: the referee  

No... I did not forget him, just is more an outside element even if always present in a team life.  

Everything in human life is subjected to rules. It's a human need, or anarchy should be reigning.

Also football has its rules, some absurds, but they are the rules and everybodies must obey to them.   And the referee is the poor guy who is in charge to make respect them in the playing field. Everyone complains his job: faults seen or not seen, penalties that had to be and were not... 

Who is the referee in the web marketing field? Wouldn't it be the loved/hated spam team of Google?  

And you know... sometimes also the best referee can fail.