Back in 2021, a seismic shift almost happened in football. The - defunct for now - ‘Super League’ was first proposed as a saviour to football, headed by Real Madrid President Florentino Perez. One of his reasonings behind such a move was that "Young people are no longer interested in football. They have other platforms on which to distract themselves.”
Perez was talking about the digital age, an age where social platforms dominate the market and suck up the attention spans of the majority of the world. As of February 2025, statistics show that over 63% of the world's population uses social media - that works out to over 5 billion people. These social platforms have become integral for how the modern Football club stays relevant, connected and grows nowadays and some clubs are doing that better than others.
Step forward Serie A side Genoa CFC, Italy’s oldest club and one that is creating a blueprint for how clubs can use the full power of social media marketing to engage audiences. Like some other clubs, Genoa uses strategic brand collaborations, celebrity and cultural stars, innovative player announcements, and kit launches as modern marketing techniques to grow its presence online.
Genoa are becoming an innovative and cultural force in their own right by utilising all of those marketing techniques to the best they can. Their brand is now becoming iconic, making Italy’s oldest club one of the most modern forces of the online age.
Strategic Brand Collaborations
By choosing strategic brand collaborations, brands can leverage the popularity of each other to appeal to new audiences. Recently, Genoa has teamed up with two huge internationally recognised brands to offer something different and innovative.
The first is Genoa’s collaboration with Netflix to promote the much-lauded Korean TV show Squid Game. The dystopian survival thriller was first released worldwide on September 17th, 2021, on Netflix and became the streaming platform’s most-watched series. Ahead of its return in December 2024, Netflix teamed up with Genoa to shoot a trailer hyping up the series' return with Mario Balotelli, Morten Frendrup, Pierluigi Gollini, and Johan Vasquez all featuring in the video.
The collaboration saw the team take to the pitch against Napoli on December 21st (ahead of the Squid Game season two worldwide release five days later) wearing the iconic green tracksuit top emblazoned with the numbers on the back, just like in the show, as their pre-match jacket. For the game, the team wore an updated version of their third kit with Netflix branding on the left sleeve and the Squid Game 2 logo under the usual sponsor on their chest. Even their team photo before the game saw them flanked by two members of the pink Squid Game soldiers who administer the games in the show.
Genoa also teamed up with Red Bull earlier in the 2024/25 season to host a spectacular pre-match show, with Red Bull mountain bike riders bombing down the stairs of one of the stands before jumping off a ramp to entertain the masses. BMX and Mountain Biking superstar Kriss Kyle took part in the event to promote the Red Bull Genova Cerro Abajo, which was taking place in Genoa later that same day.
The partnerships are all intended for extra visibility of both brands. By utilising fanbases of both sides you help to stretch your pool of engagement wider and introduce more people to the other brand. This has been a well-used tactic for years, but Genoa’s use of time-sensitive brand events creates an urgency for users to engage and hopefully helps with increased traction.
Celebrity Crossovers & Cultural Relevance
In a similar vein, using popular figures themselves has helped to amplify Genoa’s global reach. Celebrities being associated with your brand creates another form of hype around it. Some teams are lucky enough to have famous figures who are fans, like Ed Sheeran with Ipswich. Sometimes, it is celebrities who become associated with who they’re dating that brings all new exposure to a team, like with the Kansas City Chiefs' Travis Kelce when he started dating Taylor Swift. All those ‘Swifties’ became de facto Chiefs fans.
Genoa have used high-profile celebrities to help them branch out even more and create a buzz around their team. Earlier this season, the club had tennis player Stefanos Tsitsipas come and hand out tennis balls to fans pitchside after taking part in some shooting practice on the pitch. They have had WWE legend The Undertaker modelling this season's third kit, while singer Rita Ora modelled the special 130th-anniversary shirt released in the 2023/24 season.
Tsistispas boasts 1.9 million followers on Instagram, The Undertaker 5.1 million, and Ora has 16.2 million. Genoa only has 432,000 at the time of writing. Looking at these numbers, it is easy to see how much these partnerships amplify the exposure that the club is normally receiving. Using celebrities who have worldwide fame too, take the team out of any sort of localisation and make them international.
Kit Launches as Marketing Moments
The collaborations with The Undertaker and Rita Ora, specifically, also highlight how marketing strategies have evolved around Kit Launches. The kits are now seen as high-fashion items that are to be worn at much more than just matches. They are streetwear that appeal to fans and casual viewers alike. There has been a massive flourish in the market for vintage football tops and people now buy tops from teams they have no allegiances to just because of how good it looks. This can also lead to teams being followed by more people because of the continued style of top the teams put on.
Genoa’s kit is made by Italian sportswear giants Kappa. Each of the three kits for the 2024/25 season brings with it their individuality. The home kit’s launch campaign was titled “Beauty of Genoa” and aimed to showcase the natural beauty of Genoa as a place and a kit. The away kit brought back the classic Griffin crest which was used from 1980 to 1985 in place of the normal Genoa crest. The third kit celebrates the cultural diversity of the city through its design with its launch campaign “The Golden Dark Side of Genoa” which is also the first black kit the club have ever had.
The chicness and style of these kits and campaigns make them must-have merchandise. Clubs can leverage the buzz around their drops to create moments that stick with people and become forever associated with that certain thing. The Undertaker and Genoa now will always go hand. Genoa has its Deadman.
Innovative Player Announcements
Whilst kits, events, and celebrities are all cool, arguably, the club is nothing without the players. The transfer windows are some of the busiest times for teams as they joust to get their desired recruits. Fans are equally as busy during the windows, eating up all the transfer rumours out there as they eagerly await a new signing to strengthen their team. Teams know this too and now go about creating innovative player announcements to unveil their new signings.
Gone are the days of the news conferences to announce the signings, now, it is all on social media. The more fun and creative the unveiling is, the more traction the posts get on social media, being shared by all fans and content hubs alike. Take Genoa’s announcement of the enigmatic Mario Balotelli for example. Nicknamed 'Super Mario', Balotelli’s announcement video was done in an 8-bit style nod to the Super Mario Brothers gaming series.
Then there were the recent announcements of Maxwell Cornet with a box of Corn(et)flakes cereal and Jean Onana overlapping Rhianna’s hit song What’s My Name where she sings “O-na-na” with Onana himself singing along. All are fun, engaging and shareable, with one fan writing on the Cornet announcement “On a social level we could win the Champions League”.
Conclusion
Genoa is a great example of how clubs are using new techniques that break the boundaries of traditional football marketing techniques. The modern football club must utilise their social media presence to showcase more than just the matches the team plays but also the cultural value of the team.
By leveraging other celebrities, brands, styles and ways of telling a story, football clubs like Genoa can spread their reach across the world and create engagement that brings increased revenue to the club. Because they are now recognisable as cool, there are more shirt sales, more tickets and bigger sponsorships.
We are still just at the start of football clubs in the digital age. Everything will get bigger and better, and not just for the bigger teams but for the smaller ones too. Each club can leverage some piece of uniqueness and individuality to create a bigger brand for themselves and head forth strong in the digital age.