Steve Atkins - Communications Principles are vital to PR success
Steve Atkins is a leading sports communications director with three decades of experience at the highest level.
He was a key figure in the world of international diplomacy, as Deputy Press Secretary at the British Embassy in Washington, D.C. during a critical time in world history.
He then spent almost 14 years at Chelsea FC, during the height of their success under former owner Roman Abramovich, before joining McLaren Racing in December 2022 as the Chief Communications Officer.
He recently spoke to the CIPR Sports Network to share his expertise and experiences.
Atkins admitted that the move from a big government role to Chelsea FC was a big change in terms of communications infrastructure at the time, but he was afforded access to the leadership team, which helped him to successfully navigate communications challenges that inevitably arose.
He explained: “In government communications, there is quite a big support network that you have at your disposal. And while you are given the authority and the space to make decisions within that guidance, there’s very much a safety net. But there’s also very strict guidance as to what you can and can’t say.
“The scope I had to work with at Chelsea at first was quite unnerving because there wasn’t that safety net and you knew that anything that went out from the club… you were really driving those comms and driving that messaging.
“I really found that quite pleasing because I’ve always felt that if you’re going to be an effective comms director or in fact an effective communications person at whatever level, you need really need line of sight of decision-making. That’s certainly something that I got at Chelsea, by and large. I argued for being in those rooms so I could raise the red flag or the orange flag and generally I got that.”
Atkins is credited with transforming the relationship between the club and media, undertaking a long-term campaign to open channels of communication and educating both journalists and the Chelsea leadership on the importance of fair comment.
He said: “When I first joined Chelsea back in 2008, it was a club that wasn’t particularly open in terms of access. It entered into a lot of litigation with newspapers and it was a club that said “No” a lot.
“It had a reputation, I think unfairly, with the media at that time, of being economical with the truth. Walking into that environment, it was something that I wanted to change.
“I saw it as my challenge to try and put that back on an even keel. There’s a saying that you don't pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel load because they're always going to have the final say.
“So I went on an education programme with the board, but also with a few of the key journalists that caused us trouble, about the fact that it was a two-way street.
“We would open up access, but we would do so because we were looking for fair and balanced reporting. That's all we can ever ask of anybody. It was an education process with the board to say look, don't remonstrate with journalists just because you don't like the way they've written something.
“If it's inaccurate, we'll get it corrected. If it's defamatory, then we'll get it taken down. If they refuse to, then we can start thinking about legal letters, but don't complain just because don't like the way somebody's written something. Opinion is fine if we're criticised for something we've done wrong and the criticism is fair, let it go.
“Don't forget in football you're working in a very competitive briefing market. It's not just players, not just agents, it's friends, it's girlfriends, it's friends of friends.
“It's very important in football as a communicator that you are credible, that you are the one authoritative voice. We needed to increase the access, we needed to be more open, be more honest, give them more information and not be so combative.
“I think it's fair to say that over the last five to 10 years Chelsea was considered one of the best and one of the easiest to work with and one of the most credible.”
Beyond the media, the fanbase is a hugely important audience for football clubs and critical to strategic thinking. Atkins added: “Football itself is inherently tribal. You play your matches in your stadiums, in the community in which the football club was born. Football clubs are theirs, they have such a huge vested interest in everything that goes on at the club
“If you're making decisions, you are almost making decisions not just on behalf of the club, but you're making them on behalf of the fan.
“There were decisions made obviously by Premier League clubs, by Chelsea and by Liverpool and Man City and other clubs, obviously where they got it wrong. One of those was a European Super League where about six clubs got it absolutely wrong.
“Had comms directors been in the room when they had said yes to doing it, I think the decision might have been different.”
While it’s vital to engage with fans, Atkins highlighted the challenge of fan misbehaviour, a symptom of society rather than sport, which bleeds into sporting fandom. But that gave the club the opportunity to engage with fans and educate them and the wider sporting world through their actions.
He commented: “Some of the bigger challenges in football would have been fan behaviour. Whether it was fan violence, whether it was racism, whether it's anti-Semitism, one of the issues that football has always had is that some of society's ills land on football clubs’ doorsteps.
“It was not a problem that was unique to Chelsea, absolutely not. These issues happen up and down the country, indeed on the continent and elsewhere in the world. Issues of racism, anti-Semitism, fan violence in and outside the stadium happen much less these days.
“Those are often some of the more difficult things that we had to deal with because they were seen as something that was culturally wrong with that club. So trying to educate supporters and supporter groups and bring them on the journey with the modern day club in terms of what is acceptable, that's the long term challenge.
“The force for good work that was done off the pitch was never done as a PR exercise, they were always done to try and positively affect a situation. Roman Abramovich could see that anti-Semitism was growing in Europe, he knew that there were instances of anti-Semitism at the club, so we put a real focus on that.
“It wasn't driven by the PR department, that was driven by him. We took supporter groups to Auschwitz on tour. We have a lot of right-minded supporters who were able to spread the word about their experiences of Auschwitz and how they understood how wrong anti-Semitism was.
“And they did a good job of helping us educate the fanbase. It was not done as a PR exercise or to deflect media attention away from what was going on, rather what we were saying we're doing this because there is an issue here.”
After 14 years, it felt like the end of an era for Atkins at Chelsea, and he decided to look for a new role.
“I probably had to deal with everything that football could throw at a fan base, so when Chelsea won the Club World Cup back in Abu Dhabi last year, that completed the trophy set,” he added.
“Fourteen years anywhere is a long time, but 14 years at a Premier League club could be a lifetime (so) I decided to start looking at something else.”
Having steered Chelsea through their change of ownership, Atkins accepted the opportunity to join McLaren Racing as Chief Commercial Officer.
Moving to a new company and a new sporting environment may provide challenges, but, sagely, Atkins believes it’s important to stick to your core principles.
“The media audiences are quite different (but) the mechanics of communications actually stay the same. If you stick to some principles, it stops you getting in trouble that some others might do,” he said.
“You'd be surprised to see how many communicators don't have a set of principles. I was very fortunate to work for Sir Christopher Meyer, former British ambassador to the US, who sadly passed away last year. One day before going down to see Wolf Blitzer and do a live interview with CNN, he asked me what my media philosophy was.
“I was a bit of a deer in the headlights with that question. So we grabbed a pen. He grabbed a piece of paper and we wrote out the 10 Commandments that we would aspire to keep to when we worked together so that I could trust him and he could trust me.
“And that's still 10 commandments for the work today. So it is: ‘Never lie. Your credibility will be destroyed immediately.’ ‘Don't waffle if you don't know the answer.’ ‘Don't lead them up a garden path. You'll embarrass yourself. You'll say something you shouldn't.’ ‘Always respect the tyranny of the deadline and the insatiable appetite for editors.’”
McLaren Racing has more than a thousand staff servicing five different teams, including Formula 1, IndyCar, Formula E and Extreme E and an eSports team, each with its own comms team.
It’s quite a contrast to football and Atkins said: “I'm very lucky that I've got a communications team in each series and at any one time those communications teams are in the four corners of the world.
“We have communications directors in each team with a number of staff which are also connected the social and digital for those teams also. So I am very lucky in that I sit across communications teams who are absolutely excellent at the top of their game.
“They know their race series, they know their teams, they know their team principles, they know their drivers and the social and digital teams know what their fan base is.
“I'm really here for strategic guidance to make sure that they've got some sort of oversight and control, but also advice, guidance and steering from centre here at McLaren headquarters.
“The key principal people in the race teams, again, goes back to that line of sight decision-making – being there to offer counsel, offer advice , but also on any policies and strategic moves that they want to make.
“Whereas at Chelsea, I was very much at the coal face most of the time, here I can take a more elevated, more strategic view.”
Without their own stadia, or the catering and ticketing income that comes with that, motor sport relies on its sponsors and partners to support them, as Atkins explained: “One of the surprising things for me at McLaren race is just how commercial it is. Pretty much everything we do is with the focus on partners and making sure that they are getting value for money. Sponsorship allows you to race, so without partners we don't race.
“Because motor racing isn't born out of the communities the relationship with motor racing fans is very different than it is with football fans. Motor racing is quite different: it's no less passionate, but it's certainly different.
“My primary aim is making sure that McLaren's story gets told. It's our 60th anniversary year, so a lot of …the focus has been on been about telling our story, being the second most successful team in Formula One.
“In terms of audience, we've got to think about what we're doing for the avid fan, but also what we're doing for the trend fan. Talking to Zak Brown, the CEO, we were both very keen to get McLaren into places where you might not necessarily expect to see them.
“Lifestyle, tech media, somewhere where we felt we could really make a difference. That includes places like the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal and working more closely with titles like the New York Times and Washington Post. That's one of the initial pieces of work that we're trying to do in my first year here.”
Atkins is clear that McLaren want to stand out, with huge interest growing in its eSports team, as he explained: “We’ve been doing our racing here on site, in our shadow McLaren studio. Next season, we will be going back to live events in cities in and around the race series, and that is a great opportunity for eSports and race fans to get back to seeing these things live, which is really quite exciting. It's another way of connecting with our fan base, providing another offering.”
What has struck Atkins, though, is the difference in focus from media between motor sport and football on the technical aspects of the sport as opposed to the personalities, with crisis communications having very different focus.
He said: “For each rate series we will have a crisis communications plan and the main philosophy behind that won't change for each race. My experience in motor racing so far, and certainly Formula One, is that it is not as personality driven as I thought it might be. It is certainly very technical and the interest from the media is much more on cars, performance upgrades and results and much less so on personality.
“There are so many more crises in football because it's personality. The football media, bless them, love them, but they did seem merely to exist sometimes to drive a wedge between a player and his coach, the coach and the board, the board and the fans, the coach and the fans. Therefore you always faced with some level of crisis.
“The motor racing media are not interested in causing those kinds of cracks and schisms. They are more interested in performance and why you're not performing. It's a very different media pack here, which lends itself to less crises of a personal nature and a personal nature.”
Atkins’ talent and adaptability have seen him navigate some of the most challenging scenarios in domestic and international communications.
It will be fascinating to see his successful approach bear fruit at McLaren Racing over the next few years as the team compete for more podium placings.
To watch the video of this interview, please click HERE
Thanks to Fran Campbell for her help in arranging this interview