Interview of Jean-Pierre Rivière, the President of the OGCNice

We realized an interview of Jean-Pierre Rivière who is the current President of the OGCNice Fottball Club, the professional club of Nice who is playing the 1st French division.

Unfortunately we couldn’t have talk to him more than 30 minutes to go deeper on all the aspects and challenges of managing a football club, however here are interesting answers about managing the uncertainty, the community of fans, the fan experience and the relationship with partners.

What are for you the key aspects when managing a football club, like you are doing with the OGCNice ?

I think that it is firstly a human adventure because the core of the company is not to work on products or service but on the team performance. 

Here at the OGCN we can’t compete with the most financial powerful clubs such as Paris Saint Germain or l’Olympique Lyonnais, so instead of buying the best players to improve the team’s performance, we implemented a strategy based on the formation of players with investments on the Youth center. 

This strategy has a particular aspect that we need to be really careful with managing people since we are forming kids that arrive from 11 years-old at the Youth and are isolated from their parents. Moreover, we know that only a few percentage of them will succeed in becoming professionnals. So, we invest a lot on the psychological support of those kids and the academic formation. We are proud that for the last 5 years, 100% of our young that took the High School diploma, passed it.

The 2^nd aspect is managing the community of fan.

We know that us, the direction of the club, are just passing and are a small part of the club history. We try to implement set of actions in order to make the club grow but it takes time to do it and sometimes it is hard to make the fans understand some decisions. 

The major issue is that fans tend to believe that the club is theirs, so everytime an decision is made and does not please them they express their opinion and sometimes anger toward the direction, by either throwing banners or songs in the stadium or by throwing objects on the buses of players and managers.

Another aspect of managing a football club is that we can not control the performance of the players on the game day but we can not control the image we want to convey. 

Unfortunately, with the incidents of the supporters’ invasion of the stadium (that came fighting Bastia players for having unfold and waved a Corsican Flag in front ot the Supporter Kop after a recent legislation that intended to forbid to express any particular regional objects in the stadium), we had a really bad image of the club in the media. 
The key is not to comment on it, because we can’t react to all those type of stuff that impact the club image without having any control of it. We stand still behind our initial strategy and try to anticipate those damageable events in a better way in order to minimize the risk of having them to happen.

How do you try to maintain and improve the OGCNice community of fans :

From last year we are playing in a brand new stadium, the Allianz Riviera, which is a Connected stadium, with access of the internet everywhere and technology available in some part of the stadium.

So, based on what we ‘own’ we try to enhance at the maximum the fans’ experience when coming to the stadium but also at home when going on the internet.

We implemented the Social Screen which allows fans to ask questions through social networks on our official pages and account (facebook and twitter) and some questions are selected then a player of the team answer them before or after a game when playing at the Allianz Riviera. The player reads the questions on digital screen and answers it. The answers are recorded by a cameraman and then uploaded on the social networks and the Web Tv of the club.

Another action was to take 360 degrees photos of the stadium’s bleachers when the team is playing at home and make this 360 photo available on our website so that from the halftime of the game and afterwards the supporters can upload the part of the photo they appear on their stadium seat and sometimes post it on their facebook account and tagging themselves or posting it on their twitter account.

The last action we implemented for fans, in partnership with BmyTeam, is to offer them the possibility to put their photo on the back of the game player’s jersey. All the pictures are combined and appear on the number of the player’s back. For 15 euros they will have the chance to be on the jersey of Cvitanich on its number 9 in the back of it’s jersey for one game during the season.

Thank you Mister Rivière. Can you tell us more about your strategy concerning the partners ?

Football is the most popular sport in France and therefore a great way for brands to be visible through sponsoring deal with football clubs and competitions. However, it is important for those brand to share the same values, ambition and vision and not only to gain in visibility but also by making business thanks to it.

So what we implemented for the last few years is to allow our partners to meet each other 2 times a year during a day here at the Stadium. Most CEO and managers are crossing each other every 2 weeks in the stadium VIP loges without knowing each other. So what we decided is to invite all of them twice a year in the Saloon of the stadium to meet during round tables and cocktail and the innovation was to set up a Speed Business Meeting. Based on the same model of the speed dating concept, CEO’s and managers of brands that are sponsors of the OGCNice have the chance to meet each other and discuss about their company, what they do and thanks to the Speed Business meeting develop their network and generate partnership and business for them.

This particular strategy was very successful and is helping us being more attractive for brands. We attracted many companies that were thinking about sponsoring the Club but were hesitating because of the return on investment between visibility and Business generation. This innovative strategy convince them with the argument that its strengthen their capacity to generate business not only with the great visibility we offer them but also with the availability to approach all of the OGCNice partners and make business with them.

Source : Jean-Pierre Rivière, President of the OGCNice