Good and Bad PR: England football shirts at £129, Farage in Ipswich and Google and Meta's tobacco industry moment?

As a cynical, near 50-year-old PR guy who has been through the wringer of crisis comms a few times, I like to think that nothing really surprises me anymore. So, a massive well done to Crispin Blunt for making me do a double take. 

What an opening to this week’s Good and Bad PR.

Trump vs. Philadelphia senator dispute looks to have spilled over to FIFA World Cup

The football romantic in me believes that politics and football should never mix. This week’s football-dominated column proves how naïve that belief truly is. A hospitality trade body in Philadelphia revealed this week that FIFA has cancelled thousands of hotel room bookings that it had secured in the city ahead of the World Cup later in 2026.

This became a big story straight away, with headlines appearing globally. What blew the issue up even more was FIFA refusing to comment, alongside a wider backstory around Trump and Philadelphia Governor Josh Shapiro falling out over several high-profile issues.

We all know that Trump and the head of FIFA are tight and on first glance, it looks like the hotel booking cancellations could be politically motivated. It must be said, in an effort to provide balance, that FIFA breached zero policies or T&C’s by cancelling the rooms, but they have clearly opened a can of crisis comms worms.

Bad PR for FIFA.

Ipswich Town Football Club trapped between rock and hard place over Farage visit

This won’t be a popular take but, I really felt for the Ipswich Town F.C. comms team this week. They had the Reform circus turn up at their doorstep, and pictures soon emerged of a club shirt being held up by Farage, with his name on the back. It was clearly a pre-planned visit and 50% of their muggle supporters took issue with it.

To be absolutely clear, I am not a Reform supporter and I will never vote for them. I can see though, why the club was caught in a tough spot. With speculation growing that Reform stands a good chance of winning at the next election, and the football regulator (which is politically appointed) coming fully into force in the 26/27 season, Ipswich had to ignore their inner voice which I hope would be saying: “tell them to FO”.

With the next election being a maximum of just three years away, we are going to see a rise in this kind of appearance by Reform, and the associated outcry by those who don’t like Nigel’s and his gang’s populist policies. How can brands manage this? There will have to be a certain element of suck-it-up-buttercup and eventually the furore will die-down as it becomes more frequent.

I personally think Ipswich Town dealt with a very bad situation in the best way possible. Bad PR for the overall story, but Good PR for the comms team and how they handled such a political hot potato. 

As a side note, I liked Neil McKeown’s take on the story. He is a former football club head of comms and now a respected and trusted PR freelancer, who is well worth checking out.

England World Cup shirts cause outrage with £129.99 price tag

Finishing off our hattrick of football related stories, The Football Association gets the nod on the Bad PR front for the bungled launch of the World Cup team shirts. They came in at £129.99 and put them firmly out of reach of the average football fan. Even worse, the cheapest kids shirt is £100 and if you want the “match ready” version of the adult one (presumably in case you end up on the bench), it is £149.99.

I added some commentary about this on my LinkedIn and was delighted to see the football finance legend that is Kieran Maguire get involved. He speculated that by his own calculations the cost price of the shirts is 10-15% of the eventual sale price. I am not sure of the full mandate of the football regulator, but I would suggest that this is one of the first areas that they look into.

Terrible optics and a tone-deaf approach by the Football Association who made it worse by refusing to comment or put forward a spokesperson to be skewered on live news interviews. Instead it was left to the kit makers such as Nike and Adidas to try and defend the pricing. They hid behind statements about the cost of improving the tech that sits behind the shirts.

I am sure that the hugely overweight Barry from Ipswich*, who will be watching the England game in his local Duck and Fiddle will fully appreciate the lengths the brands have gone to with sweat-wicking technology when he launches his beer up in the air, as we lose another penalty shoot-out.

Google and Meta found guilty of intentionally building addictive social media platforms

Late Wednesday (UK time) the story broke that Meta and Google had been found guilty of intentionally building addictive social media platforms. This is a monumental global moment for internet and social media safety activists. I will be honest, I am amazed that Google and Meta lost this case.

They had the chance to join ByteDance and Snap and settle out of court, but they decided to fight on. I am guessing that they did so, buoyed by years of successfully longing out high-impact legal cases, until the topic had fallen off the media radar. In this instance, no matter how many appeals they try to file, the initial headlines will always state that they lost. It feels like this is social media land’s tobacco industry moment.

In the same week where the UK government announced a Wellcome Trust funded study into the effect of deploying social media bans and curfews on under-16s, and prominent voices in the space including George Nevis, founder of Tide bank and co-owner of online child-safety app Safetymode.com called for stronger action to be taken, it feels like this is a monumental moment for the online child safety movement.

Good PR for the families who pushed this case forward.

*Barry is not real!