Today we unpick the recent incident involving England footballer turned media pundit Karen Carney and Leeds United, the newly promoted Premier League club.The story starts out as just another Premier League matchday, with football pundits lined up to give their opinions ahead of the game between Leeds United and West Bromwich Albion which was being aired on Amazon Prime. One of those match analysts was Karen Carney, an England international with 144 caps to her name. She offered view the Leeds social media team didn’t like, so they clipped the video to the club’s official Twitter feed. Up in the director’s box, Leeds United’s owner Andrea Radrizzani saw this and retweeted the clip a couple of times, and which remain on his feed today.What happened next was depressingly obvious. Karen Carney’s Twitter account was trolled by hundreds of anonymous Leeds fans hurling some really vile misogynistic abuse, to the extent that Carney later deleted her Twitter account, cutting off her valuable communication platform enabling her to talk directly to her 67000 followers.So this podcast is an opportunity to ask some questions about what just happened. First up, we talk to Laura Weston, a board member of the Women’s Sport Trust and a former director of the sport and entertainment agency Iris.Second is Dan Johnson, former Director of Comms at the Premier League, because another thread running through this story is the question of how club social channels coexist with other forms of comms, each of which have different agendas and incentives, and particularly in this case the role of corporate comms given the role of the owner of the club.The final bit of the jigsaw is to get in the heads of the people running those club social media channels, so we talk to Dan Ayers, consulting partner at Seven League, who has advised several Premier League clubs including Newcastle, Leicester City and Fulham.
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