Client Story: Aston Villa FC

The Problem:

Aston Villa creates content for millions of supporters across social, brand marketing, commercial partnerships, recruitment and internal communications.

As the demand for content and commercial growth accelerates, football clubs are responding by producing more and more. But volume doesn’t guarantee impact. In 2025, average engagement per post was just 3.7% on TikTok and 0.48% on Instagram.

Without a shared approach to storytelling, communications can become inconsistent or transactional, weakening the emotional connection between the club and its supporters.

Aston Villa wanted to give its teams the skills and confidence to tell better stories while ensuring everything reinforced the club’s positioning as The Heart of Proper Football.

The MindField Thinking:

Football is already filled with great stories. The challenge is knowing how to find them, shape them and make people care.

A good story needs more than information. It needs an audience, a desire, an obstacle, change and meaning. Most importantly, every Aston Villa story should be told through the same narrative lens: a club built on decency, honour and respect, where people are humble, courageous and team players at heart.

The aim was to create consistency without making every department sound the same.

The Answer: The Aston Villa Storytelling Playbook

We began with an interactive storytelling workshop for teams from across the club, exploring the principles behind stories that persuade, inspire and stay with people.

We then turned those principles into a practical, club-wide storytelling playbook.

The playbook provides a shared storytelling framework, clear narrative territories and themes, proven story structures, practical writing templates, real Aston Villa examples and a checklist for reviewing future content.

It gives every team a simple, repeatable approach to telling stronger stories across different audiences and channels, while ensuring they all lead back to one consistent idea:

Aston Villa. The Heart of Proper Football

If you’d like us to run a storytelling workshop for your team, get in touch at hi@mindfieldadvertising.com