Hays is currently running video interviews with Manchester City footballers Joe Hart, Vincent Kompany, Pablo Zabaleta and Gaël Clich talking about their careers on its website.
“The most powerful content that we put out is where there’s some really clear synergies between a player and their own career, and how you can kind of compare and contrast that with everyday people in that in their professional careers,” Douglas-Home told Roth.
“The environment, the organization, that Manchester City create for the players has a lot of resonance of how people should look at their own organizations and their own career management, so that’s really probably the thing that struck us most in terms of how people engage with our content.”
Hays doesn’t look for a single return on investment figure for its sponsorship, but Douglas-Home said social media shares and likes as well as client and staff engagement are tracked.
The future for the partnership? It could be Chinese, according to Glick, with a private equity consortium from China investing $400m for a 13 percent stake in City Football Group in 2015. “China is an area that we’ll be spending time together, it’s a big sport. It’s a big market for football right now. And both of us have identified this as an important market for us.”
