Hello and welcome to the TFO Football Podcast.

I'm your host, Joe Devine, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Martino Simpsic from Coppa 90.

How are you?

Hello, all right?

Yeah, yeah, we're good.

Yeah, things are good over at Copa 90.

Things are going well.

Listen, I mean, the majority of people who are listening to this will know who Copern 90 are.

But for those who don't, will you just explain what it is and what you do for them?

So, Copernity is a digital football media company that was established about five years ago, six years ago now,

focused on sort of telling football vital ends of supporters and everything outside the 90 minutes of football.

So my role specifically at Copa 90 is the fan culture editor.

So everything we do involving from the Derby days that Elie Mention does to this is about

the history of football clubs to any other social content we might make about football

supporters is to kind of coordinate that relationship and make sure that obviously in a world where football supporters have traditionally felt disenfranchised, disempowered by the commercialization of football, that Copenh90's relationship with those supporters continues to keep their interest at heart over maybe the interests of commercial sponsors, which has kind of been the status quo of football since the 1980s.

How do you do that?

Well, I mean, it's a very tricky process, right?

So it's constantly managing these relationships and expectations of brands.

Because it's something that's become really commonplace now is if you look at the sort of rituals and activities that supporters have inside of a ground,

lighting flares, lighting smoke, doing a big choreography,

you know, some of the chanting that might be considered non-PC or unacceptable for a commercial sponsor.

These are very problematic things that Wafa tries to ban and repress, but there are also forms of freedom of speech in an extremely democratic space, which is the curve of the popular stand of a stadium.

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