The Football Association (FA)

Background

The Football Association (FA) is the governing body of association football in England. Formed in 1863, it is the oldest football association in the world and is responsible for overseeing all aspects of the amateur and professional game.

The Boot Room is the FA Education’s home for learning, offering grassroots coaching support through session plans, in-depth guides, top tips, videos and lots of practical resources for running a football team.

The Boot Room gives coaches access to a vast assortment of training courses to support them with their coaching. FA Education came to Learning Pool to help them develop two short videos, the first to help them promote their learning initiatives and the second focussed on those wanting to get into coaching and guiding them on the various options available to them.

Solution

Promotional Video

Launching The Boot Room in January 2019, FA Education needed to promote it so that visitors would know what resources were available to them. We agreed to tackle this together with a one-minute promotional explainer video that would act as a marketing piece. This was to be shared widely on the FA website, the 50 county FA websites and on all social media channels, including the FA’s Twitter account and its 3.5m followers.

With Alex Scott, ex-England and Arsenal FA Women’s Super League player secured to do the voiceover, Learning Pool set about creating the content. An initial kick-off meeting allowed them to understand the FA’s objectives as well as their brand image. A storyboard of the video was created, outlining all key messages before the audio was then recorded. With the raw take, Learning Pool blended it with visuals and completed all the sound editing. We created engaging animations and combined this with FA stock video footage to achieve a rich media experience.

Get Into Coaching Explainer

Entering The Boot Room, there is a vast array of information and different paths that can be taken to get involved in youth football. The second video that FA Education commissioned was a 90-second explainer aimed at those wanting to get involved in coaching.

On this occasion, Gareth Southgate stepped in to do the voiceover, and in a similar format to the promotional video, the audio was recorded whilst Learning Pool worked on creating visual assets and engaging animations and weaved these alongside approved FA video footage. The result was an appealing piece that would assist any potential coach taking their first steps in coaching.

Response

Results

Both videos have been a huge success and the promotional video particularly has achieved enormous reach. It has been played on rotation at Wembley Stadium during matches; round the clock at the St Georges Park Hilton hotel (where the England team stay); pushed out on all county FA websites and social media accounts, as well as on the FA’s Twitter account to its 3.5m followers. It has clocked up an astonishing 20,000 views and having also been played in public places, its audience reach has been significantly greater than this.

The Boot Room itself is experiencing near to 100,000 visitors a month.

The ‘Get Into Coaching’ explainer has also been very well received by the 50 county FA’s, acting as a brilliant tool to add clarity and gravitas to the courses that they ultimately deliver. Each County FA has distributed it via its own website and it has achieved over 7,000 views.