Sergio Aguero : All-time Record Goal Scorer
It’s Wednesday 1st November 2017 and the clock reads 21:10 in Naples as Napoli host Manchester City in the San Paolo Stadium on match day four of the 2017/18 UEFA Champions League.
The game is on a knife-edge with the scores at 2–2 as Fernandinho wrestles back possession in the 68th minute, it would be this resulting passage of play that would change the course of Manchester City history forever as Sergio Aguero was about to become the clubs all time record goal scorer with his 178th Manchester City goal, breaking Eric Brook’s 75 year record.
As Leroy Sane danced across the San Paulo turf in another sizzling Manchester City counter attack the ball would fall kindly for Sergio ‘Kun’ Aguero who typically settled himself before drilling the ball home to give City the lead. It was this moment that we at Man City Digital and indeed the whole Man City Media team had been waiting for, this, was it! We could finally switch into Sergio Aguero record mode and the culmination of a previously devised plan was about to be sprung into action.
Timeline in full
Goals 173, 174 and 175
September 16th — Sergio Aguero scores 3 against Watford to move within 3 goals of the record
Goal 176
September 23rd -Sergio Aguero scores 1 in a 5–0 home win against Crystal Palace. 1 goal to equal, 2 to break it!
City v Shaktar Donetsk
September 26th — Sergio Aguero misses a 71st minute penalty to equal the record, not tonight!
The Scare
September 29th — This was to be a plot twist nobody could have predicted. As news broke in the early hours of the morning that Sergio Aguero had been involved in a car crash and for the first time in 13 days the record was to be the furthest subject matter away from our minds as we all crossed our fingers and hoped Sergio had not been harmed.
After a few very nervy hours we understood that Sergio had damaged ribs but no long term, serious injury had been sustained. A relief.
City v Napoli
October 17th — Aguero returns to the bench for the Champions league tie v Napoli. Unused substitute, the wait goes on!
Goal 177 — Record Equalled!
October 21st — Aguero returns to the starting 11 and equals Eric Brook’s record with a penalty against Burnley in the 30th minute.
City v Wolves
October 24th — Surely this was to be the night? Aguero scores the winner in a penalty shootout but shootout strikes don’t count! So close!!
Goal 178 — Record Breaker!
November 1st — This. Was. It! Aguero’s 69th minute strike makes him Manchester City’s leading all time goal scorer. History made.
So here it is, the story behind the Man City Media team, how we planned, celebrated and executed Sergio Aguero : All-time Record Goal Scorer
With both City and Aguero in fine early season form it simply felt a matter of time before the record was to be broken, so we needed to be ready, we needed a plan and really…we needed it quick!
On Monday 18th September we cleared the morning schedule and set out on creating the best possible plan to celebrate such a vital moment in the clubs history.
Ideas Scrum
Ideas scrum with members of the media team :
Distinct phases of discussion
- What will we do the moment the goal goes in?
- What will we do with the time we get with Sergio?
- What supplementary content can we provide that will celebrate the moment and engage the fans?
1. The goal goes in
We wanted to get people from the football world to say congrats, so we set about getting the player messages in, from Messi, Zaba, Jesus etc ahead of time.
Also we started work on putting the ‘every goal’ video together. That was a natural step, but we tried to put a twist on it by ordering the goals by when he’d scored them in the match. The added bonus here was the final goal was THAT famous goal scored on 93.20.
We reviewed stats and picture galleries ready for the moment he scored. And of course gifs and imagery for social. We devised a platform by platform plan — FB, Twitter, Insta, Snap — you name it and across our language channels too.
All content would carry an overlay/brand that was designed by our in house motion graphics team.
As a follow up piece of fan engagement we would run an ‘Aguero jukebox on Twitter’ — where every time a fan asked for a Sergio goal we we would reply directly with a video of it. Hats off to Social Media Manager Chris Parkes-Nield for that one.
2. Time with Aguero.
We planned to dress up a room with Polaroid photos of his goals hanging from the ceiling — the idea being that he walked through them and as photos caught his eye, he would talk about that goal. The aim was a good looking piece of content that Sergio would enjoy taking part in.
3. Engagement
We’re always looking for our content to bring insight — to this end we spoke to Brian Marwood MD of City Football Services, who was Football Director at the time and helped sign Sergio. What went into the transfer — did we know just how the forward would change the course of City history… we thought fans would want to hear the answers to questions like this.
The Digital Idea
Could we build the Sergio Aguero goal archive? Could we create an activation including all the goals? The digital extension of the Aguero Jukebox and Polaroid content pieces. We wanted to create something fans could explore, browse and get involved with, something that could sit separately from any CityTV or news content pieces.
What would we need?
- Footage of every goal in a friendly format
- The data behind every goal — Provider, goal type, opponent, competition etc. Our good friends at SAP helped us with that!
- Images. Lots of images.
The Challenges
The main one being the sheer amount of goals, thanks, Sergio!
It soon became clear that we had indeed been ambitious in our plans, for each goal we would need to:
- Source the game from our archive.
- Find the best angle and audio, showing enough of the goal for maximum impact.
- Quality of the footage had to be analysed, was it in HD? Although we’ve only had Sergio for 6 seasons, the media landscape has changed dramatically.
- Heavy cross-referencing! Matching the footage of the goal to the correct order in the 178, there were a few delirious moments when we suspected he’d actually broke the record and the stats we had were somehow mistaken, we’ll put that down to a lack of sleep!
- Did the footage match the data? For example — Was the provider, opponent and season correct?
Needless to say down to the hard work of our in-house City TV team we managed to get every last goal, in the correct order! (Just)
Delivery
To create the interface we used Isotope as a starting point. Isotope is a lightweight JavaScript grid layout with a strapline of ‘Filter & sort magical layouts’ — which is exactly the effect we were going for!
We began to pull all of this together and soon the memories of the forgotten goals, kits and even haircuts came flooding back! Once the footage, imagery and finally the campaign branding were dropped into the interface the outcome was even better than we had hoped.
As he came closer and closer to breaking the record, the more and more excited we became to share this work.
We released the Sergio Aguero’s goal explorer tool on November 3rd to book end our social Sergio Aguero Jukebox campaign.
So here it is, enjoy and explore!…
Win, draw or lose, up the blues!
