Worldwide Wycombe Wanderers Phenomenon article (feat. interview with Rob Couhig)
I spoke to Rob and others about what the club is doing internationally. Feels like a really, really exciting time! https://theonlinerule.com/worldwide-wycombe-wanderers-phenomenon/
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Great piece, @ReturnToSenda. Ultimately, finding a way to bring in global fans could put us way ahead of the curve. Imagine Oxford pushing to do this in 2028 only to find we got there first!
This is also why I think hiring Bayo (if he is willing) as a brand ambassador could potentially pay for itself.
It may be a faint dream now, but if we ended up with 100,000 fans around the world buying 50,000 iFollow packages (I am guessing an average of 1 of every 2 owing to families) and 100,000 shirts, we could be looking at an extra 10 million a year or so. (All calculations wrong or your money back).
When the Chinese leader Xi Jinping had a pint at The Plough at Cadsen in 2015 it resulted in the pub being bought by a Chinese company. If only Xi had popped a few miles down the road to Adams Park we'd now have 1.4 billion supporters and would be making £70 billion a year in shirt sales alone.
But unfortunately he supports Man City.
Brilliant article that, nice one.
Thanks for sharing
A great read, thank you
As our blue quarters are distinctive perhaps when (if) we can all travel abroad on holidays, taking an old shirt and leaving it behind in a sports bar with details of the WWWP might help spread the initiative. Or the club providing a sports bar kit for us to leave on their behalf
”If I had the ability to bring in three guys – one from Korea, one from Africa, one from the United States – the Worldwide Phenomenon would be huge."
I did wonder if that explained the signing of Giles Phillips last summer.
I also think the commitment to this "worldwide" concept explains Rob's public letter to Gareth in the depths of winter. If your business model depends on getting people with no affiliation to Wycombe watching via iFollow around the world - people who are interested in a narrative of swashbuckling upstarts taking on the elite with an exciting brand of football - there's no point giving them turgid long ball to watch. There's no pride in having frozen their bits off at Gillingham away for these new fans, nothing to keep them coming back if watching Wycombe stopped being fun. And playing as we were, why would they tune in again? I'm sure that message was coming through loud and clear to Rob via his social media monitoring. Gareth had to change the style of play or quite probably would have lost his job. Fortunately for all of us, he did.
I’d have thought that if a chairman started telling Ainsworth how his team should play then he wouldn’t need to be sacked.
Is "foreign" Ifollow about £125 or so for the season? Excellent deal if so, if we're shelling out £10 a game here, and that's most likely going to be stopped when games are back attended again.
@Malone - yes, I think it was about $140 in Yankee money last season (@floyd might remember better than me).
What letter to Gareth?
great article Tom
That’s about right I think. I remember thinking how much cheaper it was than if I’d been at home.
This could work for years we’ve been trying to build the local support and hit a ceiling of around 5-6000 people but now we belong to an interconnected planet.
On YouTube when I’ve run out of things to do I watch a guy from Barnsley trying different takeaways.
He has 280,000 subscribers.
In a world where you can get a quarter of a million people watching you taste test a kebab there is a place for developing an online support for us .
I’m an old school supporter from our non league days and watched all the highs and lows, probably standing next to a lot of you on a cold rainy Tuesday at Stanley, Cambridge etc (The Basingstoke cup game away was a particular joy) but I bloody well welcome anyone from anywhere who wants to follow Wycombe wherever they are from and however they can do it and I’ll do it as an equal.
I’m actually quite excited about the thought of people from Ulaan baatar, Oslo, San Francisco Beijing, Abuja or Port Stanley walking up hillbottom Road wearing the quarters.
Agreed, the idea of tapping into foreign support is superb.
Slightly uncomfortable at Rob's words about specifically buying someone of a certain nationality just for the viewing figures in their country!
A few clubs were rumoured to have done that years ago, but not sure if it was actually proven!
It’s all slightly surreal. I’m trying to imagine a world where going on holiday to Mexico, for example, and a local recognising the quarters and it feels slightly strange. But all for it ultimately.
Most pleasing thing in the article for me though was the willingness to help out the Spanish people. Real touch of class
I wholeheartedly agree, the more people supporting Wycombe the better, no matter where they are from.
I look forward to a time when after traipsing for three days in the Amazon village elders ask me if I prefer Terry Howard over Glyn Creaser.
Fascinating that WWFC are popular in Mexico...is that all thanks to the spectacular Wycombe career of Carlos ‘el Burro’ Lopez?
Great piece, Tom. Thanks a lot.
When can we expect the Cajun burgers?
What did happen to Sean Devine?
My friend Manolis can sometimes be seen riding his motorbike around Samos wearing the quarters. In exchange I can occasionally be seen in an Atromitos shirt. Works both ways.