As anyone with even the slightest interest in football will undoubtedly know by now, last week saw Newcastle announce the unexpected (to say the least) appointment of Joe Kinnear as their interim manager. And like an man happily throwing a lit match into a fireworks factory, Joe Kinnear yesterday gave what will undoubtedly go down as one of the most amazing press conferences ever.

You can read the transcript here (although if you are offended by bad language I suggest that you avoid it): suffice to say that within 2 sentences Kinnear had called a correspondent for the Daily Mirror an absolutely terrible name, before going on to do the same to the Express correspondent as well. And, to use football metaphors, it was if this was merely a warm-up as he then proceeded to eff & blind his way through the whole event.

The reason I mention this, other than the fact that it has been making me chuckle all day, is that at one point Joe Kinnear suggests that he won’t ever talk to the press again and that he intends to:

speak to the supporters. I’m going to tell them what the story is. I’m going to tell them.

Whilst this is obviously a very noble thought (if rather spoiled by the language that surrounds it) it also strikes me as a rather naive one. For whilst Joe Kinnear might feel that the fans will give him the fair hearing which he obviously feels the press is failing to give, he might be surprised if he wanders online.

Because just as the game has changed massively over the last two decades, the ability of fans to make their feelings known has also increased, in no small part because of the rise of the internet. Fan forums and blogs now litter the web like empty burger wrappers outside a stadium on a Saturday afternoon (with over 1.7 million results on Google for the phrase Newcastle United forums), and most of them feature language that makes Kinnear look like a Mormon.

And whilst many of those fans may well feel that Kinnear is being unfairly targeted by a media only too happy to wallow in the tragic-comedy that is Newcastle United these days, many more of them will undoubtedly have very strong feelings on the appointment of a man who quite obviously isn’t Kevin Keegan. Certainly, I’d guess that not all of the blogs referencing Joe Kinnear over the last month (as demonstrated by the graph below from ICEROCKET) will be singing his praises.

Before Kinnear does try to talk directly to the fans he might want to research Godwin’s Law and check out some of these fan forums. For just as brands that attempt to influence consumers with no thought for the potential backlash this sort of activity can have if handled badly can suffer, so Joe Kinnear may find that trying to argue with an anonymous fan on an un-moderated web site might kill his career quicker than losing to Accrington Stanley would.

Image by Akuppa on flickr

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