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11/06/2009 by
7775 views

Pep Guardiola’s FC Barca Gladiator Viral Video!

FC Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola did this video, with the national catalonian TV help, to motivate his players moments before the Champions League final FC Barça vs. Man UTD. Pep wanted a video that evolved the best moments of the season and mixed them with Gladiator scenes and the soundtrack of the movie…

Personally I find this item one of the most special items and videos of 2009 here at ViralBlog. It’s my honour to post the item, but all credits go to my co-worker and team mate Laurens Bianchi, he spoke about the video for about one week, searched for it and found it.

The video titled ‘Els Gladiadors Pep’ brought several Barca stars into tears before the match. And when Barcelona defeated Manchester United with 2-0, the Barça players cried again. And this time the Man UTD players did as well. But Man UTD is and stays a great team!

Later Barça players stated that they felt they had already won the final, after having seen this great motivational video. The result was that Barcelona dominated pretty much the whole game and won their second Champions League within 3 years. Should we call Pep’s action; Coaching2.0?!


Most clubs use video for technical reasons, such as analyzing the squad, individual players or opponents. It’s a rare thing that a team skips 15 minutes of their warming-up and watches this kind of video content, in order to become extra motivated. Some of the TV reporters freaked-out: “Man UTD is doing their warming-up already for a while, but the Barcelona players have still not entered the pitch, where are they??!”

The video has already more than 1 million views from several duplicates within 4 days. It even inspired users to make their own versions of the video, something many brands can only hope for, when releasing their viral videos.

Main sponsor Nike took the opportunity to use some footage from this video and created a new internet commercial called “We are one”. Unfortunately this video hasn’t had a similar viral spread, like Pep Guardiola’s viral video has.

On the Nike campaign site We Are One users can make their own digital Barça jerseys with their name and preferred player number. The jerseys can be shared by placing it on Facebook, Flickr or Spanish social network Tuenti. More than 190,000 personalized jerseys are being made by visitors.

But it gets even better! You can buy a real personalized shirt in the Nike webshop. After you’ve bought it, you’re being asked to submit a photograph of yourself wearing the jersey, along with a motivation what “We Are One” means to you.

Guardiola will eventually pick some of the participants. These lucky ones can trade their jerseys in September with their favorite Barcelona player. Perhaps some brands can join the contest as well, if they win, they could try to trade their jersey with some viral skills of Guardiola!

Maybe this is a nice opportunity to explain why we love FC Barça and this video so much? Our digital marketing agency LaComunidad is Spanish for The Community.

At Grupo LaComunidad we love viral videos and we try to create viral whenever brands let us. We spend lot of our spare time to blog about virals here at ViralBlog and we have launched viral video tracking technology ViralTracker in 2004.

Laurens and I are ex football players back in the good old days, yes way, way, way back. And we have both visited FC Barca matches several times, since we love the way Barca plays.

The FC Barça fans from Catalunya are rebels at heart. And so are we at LaComunidad.

And at LaComunidad we love to play football ourselves, the We Are One as well. At the football pitch, like FC Barça, FC LaComunidad is combining creativity and effectivity as well.

Next we have done several viral and social campaigns for Nike. However played in “AS Roma Kappa” jerseys this year. Curious if we will be able to contract a new sponsor for next year 😉

We are very proud that our FC LaComunidad team has won the Dutch Lieverdjes Advertising & Media Football Tournament in 2005, 2007 and 2009. See the photo below, it shows LaComunidad team that won the big cup on June 6 2009.

FC LaComunidad

In the photo you will recognize Laurens Bianchi as our team captain. Unfortunately Laurens is several years younger and fitter than me> So 4 days after the tournament I can still barely walk, but Laurens recovered pretty well within 36 hours…

 

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