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Football woes begin for England before they have even got on the bus

With weeks still to go until the start of the 2014 World Cup, England has already gotten off to a bad start after the team’s official slogans were revealed.

With the slogans, chosen in a  FIFA-sponsored competition presented by car manufacturer Hyundai, being carried on each team bus, England’s strap line was considered as unimaginative as it was uninspiring:

“The Dream Of One Team, The Heartbeat Of Millions!!”

However, this was not considered the worst of the team’s taglines. For example, Australia’s banner read:

“Socceroos: Hopping Our Way Into History!”

The collective groans of the country were summed up by one hapless footy fan taking to Twitter to say:

“Whose mum came up with that ultra cheesy slogan?”

The slogan also seemingly got the thumbs down from the Australian Football Federation (AFF). Despite each country’s football association ultimately agreeing to its bus slogan, the AFF boss, David Gallop, said:

“Don’t worry too much about the other slogans that you might have read about. Just say, ‘Go you Socceroos.”

The England and Australian slogans are certainly among the worst on offer, but are far from the most derided. With mention of ‘painting the World Cup blue’ from Italy, ‘playing like heroes’ from Greece and Russia’s surely tongue in cheek, ‘No One Can Catch Us’, the stance taken by FIFA has confused one sport business strategy and marketing guru.

Saying that there is a huge move in global and national football to engage more with the fans, Simon Chadwick from Coventry University commented that while it seemed a good idea to hold the competition, by using such slogans the teams were “positioning [their] country as a brand in a particular way”.

Conceding that the idea needed a more coherent approach, at least the Dutch went for the tagline “Real Men Wear Orange”, which inserted some humour into the whole process.

Steven Morris

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