As more and more ideas get used up, there is less room for innovation in human life. After all, once someone invented the George Foreman grill (probably not old George) what’s the point in trying to think up something new to go above and beyond it.
(That said, the George Foreman is a superior version of the good old-fashioned Breville so maybe that’s a bad example.)
Regardless, as innovative ideas become more difficult to think of, it is becomes clearer to see why some ideas were never used in the first place.
On this subject, we come to Yeovil Town who took a rather different approach to the traditional pre-season squad photo.
The players did it whilst not wearing a shirt (it was a sunny day thankfully) to highlight the fact that the club have yet to pick up a shirt sponsor for the forthcoming season.
Manager Gary Johnson explains: “If we haven’t got a shirt sponsor then we can’t wear the shirt. There’s been a lot of interest but we need to make sure they are paying the right sort of money to be on our shirts. It is a little bit tongue-in-cheek and it was my idea for the staff to keep their shirts on.”
Aside from the fact that there is very little evidence to suggest that a shirt not having a sponsor on the front of it means a Bola88 Link player cannot physically put it on, there are other problems.
Notably, the opportunity for any local business to sponsor the football team in the town was probably quite well known unless Yeovil’s marketing department is run by a man with Homer Simpson levels of incompetency.
It is, therefore, rather unlikely that seeing 20-odd blokes without a shirt is on is going to make businesses think “hang on a second here” unless there is a Chippendales-style service in the West Country town that was thinking of putting in and giving the players a job on the side.
Given Johnson concedes it was his idea (and something that was tongue-in-cheek thus making his whole piece slightly irrelevant but whatever, we plough on) it was presumably a case of the manager saying to the marketing team he was going to run with this idea and the suits thinking that he wouldn’t see it through.
Either that or the ploy succeeds Johnson is a new marketing genius who might well spend most of his days drinking whiskey, making sexist remarks and staring out of a skyscraper window. Time will tell.
