An announcement on their website that “a spectacular name” was to sign for the club invited fans to watch the name’s unveiling on the team’s Facebook page.

Needless to say, an incredible amount of furore was generated and fans eagerly tuned in at the proposed time in their thousands. However, following a short video clip from FCB’s general manager Christian Nerlinger, fans were treated to a view of their own Facebook profile picture, followed by their own name on the back of a Bayern Munich number 8 shirt.

Cue slow clap. It’s not hard to imagine the brainstorming session behind that one. The scene: a smoky little room, the unearthly glow of a dozen iMacs lending a superhuman sheen to the bearded mugs of the creative team. Who knows what blue sky heights they tapped into to get there, but the point is that when that eureka moment came and someone threw this ‘off the wall’ nugget of media disruption into the ether, everyone was clearly too busy congratulating themselves to think for a second about the fans themselves, and the ongoing, human narrative that would arise.

A football team’s stock in trade is the illogical, desperate and oddly beautiful passion of its fans. Football is not just another consumer product, and its fans are not simply consumers. Like the release of a Morrissey album or the unveiling of a new Pope, the transfer window is something that inspires interest and conversation that transcends the rational and borders on the obsessive.

In order to keep fans onside, buying tickets and following the team after the window has closed, the most important thing that a team’s communications need to do is inspire and retain trust. If the fans trust the team through and through, then no matter what disappointments or controversies come their way, they will stick by the team with religious ardour.

Ironically, of course, this ardour and support is something the stunt was clearly trying to acknowledge, and I’m not claiming that FCB was deliberately sticking two fingers up at its fanbase. However, the main shortcoming of creative is that it gets so wrapped up in its own genius that it forgets how the great unwashed actually think. In the eyes of someone who’s skipped a class or skived off that all important meeting just to watch the announcement of a name this is not a clever stunt- it’s a sick joke.

In short, the team weren’t thinking in narrative terms. They planned meticulously up to an initial moment of shock and disruption, but failed to plan for what would come after. Feeling betrayed and abandoned, fans have lost some of that crucial trust. While 20 years ago this may not have been such an issue, they’ll now whip each other up into a frenzy via social media, and likely leave in significant numbers.

I encourage clever media thinking, but when clever become smartarse, particularly in a supposedly grassroots organisation like a sports team, you’ve got disaster on your hands. Some good may come out of this fiasco if the suits who run modern sport can be made to see that.

My local team, Forest Green, have a new chairman, CEO of Ecotricity Dale Vince. Vince is vegan – and he has just abolished all red meat products from being sold to punters during the match.

Out go meat pies, chips, curry sauce, sausages. In comes healthier food – though what exactly has yet to be announced. It’s likely to open up debate about the strange imbalance between watching men at peak fitness playing football whilst gorging on artery-clogging fast foods, positioning Dale Vince as the Jamie Oliver of the footballing world.

It’ll be interesting to see what vegetarian and vegan alternatives come in – veggie burgers never will quite cut the mustard in the eyes of hardcore footie fans. But the fight could well make for an interesting debate on the way people approach food in the football stands. Let’s wait and see if this makes its way up into the canteens of the Premier League.

Vince has lots of local interest and is building his brand locally. It’s fascinating to see the way Vince has taken his core values and woven them seamlessly into everything he does, from his green electricity company to a meat-free Forest Green Rovers. It has become a brand truth that instantly allows an audience to recognise what he and his companies stand for. It will be interesting to see how far he can take them.

Is it possible he’s worried about people discovering what he’s thinking? He should be if he is foolish enough to say it aloud and it’s newsworthy; you can’t avoid the inevitable, There’ll come a time when even King Clarkson’s brand is out of fashion. The prayers of the in-house Car PR teams will one day be answered.

If you are in public life in 2011, be you a sports commentator, a chief executive of a major company, a politician, a pop star, a journalist or an actor, you need to be on message at all times. There is no off the record any more. You are a target and anyone has the means of catching you digitally and transmitting unwanted, candid moments up on the net in minutes where your conduct will be judged. If Twitter and Facebook can start a revolution in Egypt, it can take down a brand or a celebrity with ease.

A person in public life needs trusted people around them. They also need to keep a close eye on the temptations that are thrust at the people they trust. They also need to be what they are in private in public or suppress entirely their baser urges. If you are a sexist monster or a bigot, the world will find out. Privacy? What privacy? There is no such thing any more.

Gordon Brown found this out to his cost during the election last year – remember Bigotgate. Gray and Keys are no more, reduced to reality TV cannon fodder. More will follow – this will get anyone who stands up and is stupid in public. Try and bury any unpalatable truth and chances are you will be caught out. A large part of the fall out surrounding the News of the World hacking story is the way they’ve got to their stories and betrayed their readers’ trust.

This is an age of brand truth and responsibility for what you’ve built. The only way to survive is to follow the three Ts: Truth, Transparency and Trust. Without them in place, there is nowhere to hide

There’s no excuse for the sort of behind the scenes off-the-cuff black humour they were indulging in, but it is surprising that this is turning into a PR disaster. With Andy Gray’s departure from Sky Sports just announced, it’s interesting to note the leeway given to comedians like Frankie Boyle. What is the tipping point between joke and PR disaster?

It’s a lesson for those in public life to never drop their guard but the clamour of media commentators who claim that their rude comments about the ability of a woman to understand the rules of football are the worst example of unreconstructed laddism in the game are mistaken. This is a rose-tinted-spectacle view of football from the comfy media and corporate hospitality boxes.

Have these folk ever actually ventured onto the terraces? They are still knee deep in racist, violet, homophobic and angry language that would make your hair curl. The terrace thuggery and organised violence of 30 years ago might have been all but eradicated, butchou can’t curb the tongues of the masses in full tribal flow.

Castigating the pair is a good move towards encouraging more women to participate in the beautiful game, but it is worth bearing in mind that Sian Massey and any other women who officiate are going to hear far worse from the terraces than they did from the leaked recordings of Gray and Keys.

Now for the next big questions; where are the Asian role models on the football field? And who, on the field, is going to lead by example and make the sport a more welcoming place for homosexuals? Do we accept that football will always be unreconstructed or do we try to change it?

The point is that this is a perfect way for Beckham to maintain his British profile prior to LA Galaxy’s season start in March, it’s not a bad way for Beckham to get fit for that purpose too and, if he does sign, Spurs will be able to turn quite some coin on the back of the fans who will want Beckham shirts.

It’s not just about money; it’s a perfect way to raise the Spurs profile, too. Harry Redknapp is playing a good game of using the Beckham momentum to keep the team in the public eye – they’ve everything to play for as the football season rumbles slowly towards the close as they’re in the running for a lucrative
Champions League place.

What it’s not about, of course, is the speculation that Spurs are trying to pip West Ham to the post over the post-2012 use of the Olympic Stadium. Beckham’s people have said that he’d never be involved in something so grubby as that sort of power play…

The decision by FIFA bigwigs is solely about where the power is in the new world order, and it’s not in quiet, dusty old England. No-one should be trying to make Panorama a scapegoat, either – this is a decision that would have been reached regardless of their investigations.

We live in an age of infocapitalists. Those with the biggest budgets are always most likely to buy up these big events – and who is bigger these days than the big, oil rich states?

The big sporting events are essentially being divvied up in a huge game of Risk amongst the new powers – and if England thinks it belongs in that pecking order, it needs to step back and think again. No matter how many prime ministers, Royals or sporting legends we throw at a bid in the future, we are not likely to ever be top of the selection pecking order (although David Beckham’s turn as a diplomat was surprisingly convincing). Never mind that no-one will find it easy to play football in the heat of Qatar; football follows the money.

Anyone who complains about the decision is missing the point – England just doesn’t have the muscle to compete creatively for a World Cup bid at this level, despite the fact that we have the infrastructure ready made to host it.

We may have invented the sport, but football has grown beyond us and the people in charge don’t anyway give a damn about the sport. These are the sorts of people who will buy a premiership club because it looks good in their portfolio, not because they care about the fans or the beautiful game.

When it comes to the big leagues and the world competitions, a relatively poor country like England just doesn’t stand a chance.

Bear in mind that what was said in Rooney’s statement a mere 48 hrs ago undermined his fellow players, the fans and, surely, the manager too. Rooney said publically that Fergie and the club had no ambition! He pointed the finger at everyone at Manchester United.

How, then, can he ever recover? It may help that people expect these duplicitous ways but that is unlikely to stop them feeling cheated by the soap opera that has played out over the last week.

The abrupt Rooney U turn is bad all round; a PR disaster for his brand and deeply unhelpful for his club. Using the back and front pages to play hard ball brinksmanship, the furore has produced the result his management team desired: more money and better terms.

But will we believe in these stories any more? Will we ever trust the footballing gossip mill? It will only be seen as proof of their greed and avarice from now on, surely?

I suspect we will never know the exact reasons for the U turn of the century. At least not until the next warts-and-all big-advance autobiography is released…

I might be wrong, but it all feels so fake. Certainly, David Beckham looks set to sue the US magazine for the claims that he went a bit Rooney.

Bauer – who publish In Touch – clearly did not comprehend the chaos that would be unleashed. I suspect their office must have echoed with the cry of: “Bugger the truth, the story is too good to ignore!” The fall out and collective web chatter suggests a plethora of conspiracy theories. My favourite so far is the one that suggests that it is a hoax attempting to derail England’s World Cup bid.

A close second is the theory that it’s a desperate publicity play by the fragrant model, a ridiculous attempt to generate traction at a time when she has designs on becoming governor of NYC. Can the US stomach their very own La Cicciolina, the porn star who was elected to the Italian parliament? Stranger things have started in the bedrooms of international football stars. If so, the deluded über-babe has gone to a lot of effort to force herself onto the celebrity radar.

I expected the wonderfully funny fake Max Clifford twitter account to go into overdrive, anticipating a flurry of tweets suggesting that he leaked the tale to cover up a breaking exposé concerning Simon Cowell’s affair with Goldenballs.

In a world of total lunacy please take time to read the mischievously wicked tweets from @Straightsimon and @Max_Clifford. God bless the respective camps for allowing these comic tweeters to hilariously cyber squat; they prove beyond doubt the publicist Jim Moran’s dictum: “There’s nothing so dismal as a fact!”

In the brave new world run to the tune of the ten minute news cycle, where traditional media has been reduced to merely commenting on and affirming stories that are broken on Twitter and in the blogosphere, almost at the speed of thought, and where advertising budgets have been slashed down to the stump, what else is there but PR?

I’ll be discussing Captivating Narrative and how compelling and effective stories can be utilised to unite social media, traditional media and word of mouth into one powerful, viral jet-stream of information to promote brands, stars or anything one wants to apply them to and how truth plays second fiddle to manufactured fiction.

Captivating Narrative is the next step up from the public conversation that brands must maintain in the internet age if they are to survive. Brands and stars live or die on the way they are perceived and if they can control their own narrative and make it fascinating, they are far more likely to survive. A compelling story draws people in and spreads more easily by word of mouth. They can apply to anything!

I’ll be dissecting the image and reputation of some of the biggest brands and names going, as well as looking at the people who manipulate them. The show examines brands and personalities as diverse as Toyota, Al Qaeda, Paris Hilton, Somali Pirates, the England football team, Tony Hayward Joseph Goebbels and Asda.

To book tickets, click here.

The article is desperate to get people fulminating about spoilt football players in the wake of England’s World Cup flop, on the assumption that these football “legends” are heroes and idols for the nation’s kids who are betraying their legions of fans by going out and being normal. They are doing nothing of the sort.

British football has moved far too far away from the streets to be able to be seen as the people’s sport any more, and almost nothing of the millions being poured into people like Rooney’s pockets is coming back to the street to allow a new generation of great footballers to develop.

The media, however, still need to build these ordinary, fallible, serially overpaid people into heroes. However, whereas in the past they were built up to be perpetuated as idols (just look at the 1966 World Cup team, who shall forever be used as rods to beat the backs of any English footballers with even an ounce of talent), they are now being built up to be destroyed at the first sign of feet of clay.

The media need these modern footballers to behave badly, as the stories that sell papers are the soap operas, the tales of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. These are the stories that resonate most completely with the 21st century British public; they have been created only to be destroyed for the vicarious thrill of the tabloid- and website-reading masses.

The only extraordinary thing about Rooney is the amount of money he earns for being pretty good at striking a ball towards a net – in the usual run of things, this is a man who would be down the pub most weekends, having a laugh with his mates, not buying mansions. So next time you read an article full of outrage and disappointment, please remember that the media – be it tabloid- or web-based – thrives on badly behaved sports and TV stars and will do all that they can to manufacture the conditions in which said star can fail in style so they can keep on selling you papers.