Sergei Palkin: Tour of Brazil – event in club’s history

12-02-15 17:23:42

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Futbol magazine has released an opinion piece by the CEO of FC Shakhtar. Sergei Palkin revealed the particulars of the team’s first trip to the South American continent. We bring you the full version of this material.

- The idea to organize a trip to Brazil emerged about four years ago. We paid attention to the fact that the leading European clubs began to fly frequently to China, Thailand and the USA. At the same time, we understood that our television was not developed enough. They do not watch our championship games that much there and, as a consequence, they do not know our players well enough. While in China, Thailand and the United States, people watch top European leagues. So at that stage, it was difficult for us to compete with them – primarily, in terms of organizing a tour in those countries.

Shakhtar tried to find a niche. Two years ago, while playing Chelsea, we met with the CEO of the London club, and discussed the possibility of our joint visit to Brazil. Subsequently, the joint trip with Chelsea to South America did not happen. Because we had to go there in January, while European clubs make such tours mainly in summer, as they have a longer holiday that time of year. However, in our case, everything could have turned out perfectly well: we have a lot of Brazilian players, the winter holidays are long enough, and the Brazilian league season resumes only on February 1.

It became obvious: Brazil is the destination for us to move towards. To start with, we carried out a comprehensive study regarding the awareness of Brazilian fans of European football. It turned out that 30% of the fans knew about the FC Shakhtar brand. Then we did a lot of preliminary work in social networks. At the beginning of 2015, we already had 598,000 Brazilian subscribers to our Facebook account.

When a major decision regarding the Brazilian tour was made, we faced another issue: it was necessary for us to find a partner who would organise the training camp for us and cover all costs. And those are, I can assure you, some serious expenses. After all, we had as many as 10 flights during the tour, having covered the distance of 30,000 kilometres! It was clear that only the partner who can assume all costs, will be able to organize a tour to the top standards in terms of the match selection, the training process, the PR campaign and so on. Had we done all that on our own, we would not have achieved success then, because we did not know the peculiarities of the Brazilian market.

We were looking for a partner for a long time. We succeeded in our search only in November 2014, when the club established contacts with the company Granada Eventos Sporting Marketing. Given the fact that we had only two months left before the tour, we had to do everything very quickly. There were a lot of risks, but finally the organization proved immaculate. In Brazil we played five games, with all the opponents being very strong ones. You can judge it yourself: Atletico Mineiro - the Copa Libertadores Winners 2013 and Cruzeiro – the two-time Brazil title holders. The same Flamengo and Inter are worthy teams. Our matches in Brazil could be compared level wise with the Champions League encounters. And some meetings even essentially surpassed the group stage games.

The atmosphere in the stadia was amazing! Aggregately, our games have been attended by some 103 thousand people. On average, we had 21,000 spectators at each meeting. This is a fairly high figure: it is 20% higher than the Brazil league’s average attendance and three times the attendance of the Ukrainian league games this season. We enjoyed the peak attendance at Shakhtar’s meeting with Internacional – the friendly match was attended by 35,000 fans!

As for television ratings, the reality has exceeded all our expectations in this regard: Shakhtar’s encounters were watched by more than 8 million people, the average of 1.8 million spectators per game. The most popular was our team’s meeting with Flamengo. It was watched by 3.2 million fans! For comparison, the match-up between Shakhtar and Dynamo in Ukraine has no more than 2.5 million TV viewers. The videos from Brazil got about 1.6 million views on Facebook. The goal by Alex Teixeira against Cruzeiro was interesting for nearly 250 thousand users of social networks – the all-time record in the history of Shakhtar. And the official FC Shakhtar community on Facebook increased by 37 thousand fans over the period. This means absolute success of our club. Especially in the country where football is the second religion, with the fans passionately supporting the local clubs virtually since their birth.

Besides, I would like to note that such tours bring forth a huge incentive for young players. It is in those encounters that a true athlete gets seasoned. The games we played bring some invaluable experience to our youngsters. And for the rest it’s a serious preparatory process.

Of course, the main reason why we do all that is promoting Shakhtar globally. The global brand will allow us to make money on the international markets, which is particularly important in light of the financial Fair Play, introduced by UEFA.

This tour is not cheap, it is justified only when you feel that your club is able to attract the attention of fans and the media. As our stay in Brazil revealed, we have become one of the major newsmakers during the three weeks of our tour. Honestly, I did not expect such a success. Therefore, today I am very pleased with what we did. This is a historic event in the development of the club. The first step is always difficult. It takes all the stars to align. We were lucky since it happened.

It is clear that some comprehensive and structured approach is required in this case, which is not built within just one year. But as for the plans, I think, we will definitely work in the Brazilian direction  in the future. If not every year, then once in two years we will definitely fly there! And the next training camp can be held to even higher standards. Perhaps this is the first impression, but what we have heard and seen in Brazil has had an effect.

Most importantly, we’ve been there for the first time, watched by the local fans, the national press, international television companies and online publications. As early as on the third or fourth day of our stay, we already had some invitations for us to visit the United States next year ... Major interest and daily attention to Shakhtar encourages us to make new plans. Therefore, I am confident that in January 2016 we are facing another challenge. In the meantime, Obrigado, Brasil!

FC Shakhtar Press Office based on the materials of Futbol magazine of 12/02/2015