Sport as catalyst?

All my life I’ve loved sport. As a child it engaged me fully and there were moments when I thought that I might become quite good at rugby or cricket or athletics.

I still love to watch sport, both on TV and in the flesh, especially when it is played well. And the final of the Euro 2012 football competition last night between Spain and Italy was outstanding in terms of the skills on show, the creativity of the players and the teamwork displayed.

Where I draw the line is when pundits suggest that winning the Olympics, or the World Cup, or the World Series, or whatever, will lift the morale of a nation or city in ways that will impact either the economic performance or the net quotient of happiness of the inhabitants. It doesn’t. Although politicians often pretend that it does (and consequently plough billions of our money behind massive schemes, when the resources could be so much more effectively targeted elsewhere).

The only exception to this in my lifetime is the way in which Barcelona planned and implemented a strategy to transform their city, with the Olympics as a keystone. (I wrote about this in the blogpost of 14 November 2011.)

But this is not going to happen with Spain winning last night’s competition. The country’s problems will be just as great today as they were yesterday. Nor, I sense, with London’s Olympic Games, now just a few weeks away.

Can Manila do a Barcelona?

Last week I gave a masterclass on Brand Renovation for a group of senior managers from diverse backgrounds in Manila. And at the heart of it was a case study on the transformation of Barcelona in the years running up to the 1992 Olympic Games.

I was lucky enough to be consulting for the International Olympic Committee through several Games and later I was able to research the impact and heritage of Olympic cities for this masterclass. I interviewed a range of personalities who had been involved in various capacities, with Barcelona emerging clearly with the “Gold Medal”.

Historically, in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, that city had been substantially passed by – a sleepy, scruffy, post-industrial conurbation, full of traffic jams.

Under the leadership of its mayor, Pasqual Maragall, a comprehensive new strategy was developed which involved:

the cleaning up of the historic parts of the city, including the wonderful and unique boulevard, Las Ramblas;
the redevelopment of the port area;
the upgrading of the airport and the transformation of the city's main road system;
the building of new sports stadia of various sizes, with the main one earmarked as a major venue for gigs, and home for the city’s second football team, Deportiva Español;
the positioning of Barcelona as a centre for creativity and the arts, with the great architect, Gaudi as the figurehead, plus the artists Picasso and Miró;
a hub for design, fashion and the advertising industry.

At the heart of the strategy, the city competed for and won a whole series of major international events – sporting, entertainment, business, expo and so on. The cherry on the top of the cake was winning the Olympics and the city used that as the lever to get all the urban renewal done.

The consequence of this exciting project has been that Barcelona is no longer a place to be avoided. In fact, for many years now it has become the number one city in Europe for “quality of life”, in the Top 5 for “doing business”, and a Mecca for tourists and (especially) honeymooners.

In post-Olympics research, visitors have described the city as “enchanting”, “exciting”, “cosmopolitan”, “my favourite”, “vibrant” and “oozing style and culture”.

At the masterclass in Manila, we used the Barcelona story as stimulus for thinking creatively together about how their own capital might be similarly transformed – in its own particular way.

So fifty fine minds brainstormed a wide range of possibilities, from which they selected eight ideas as being of particular promise, developing each of them into draft parts of a new strategy for the city.

Hopefully, these will be presented some time soon to the newly-appointed Secretary for Tourism in the Philippines, Ramon Jimenez Jr. There are high hopes for this visionary appointment – unusually Mr Jimenez is regarded as something of a guru in creativity and marketing communications. He was with Saatchi and Saatchi before founding his own creative businesses.

Manila has such enormous potential – if it can be tapped!