"Kom och hugg oss" : En studie om idrottsklubben AIK:s kommunikation i samband med det uppmärksammade hockeyderbyt den 22 december 2010

Sammanfattning: In December 22, 2010, the hockey clubs AIK and Djurgården played against each other in front of an audience of more than 11 000 people in Ericsson Globe Arena, Stockholm. Although it was one of the biggest games of the year, afterwards no one was talking about the actual game on the ice. The reason; several times during the game, hooligans from both sides started big quarrels and the hockey dome felt more like a war scene than a place for a hockey game. From a branding point of view, and along with similar incidents from the past, the night in December did not create a good situation for AIK and their image.   Therefore, in this essay I want to investigate how AIK communicated through the crisis. I also want to evaluate whether their communication was good or bad from the perspective of different crisis communication theories. The essay’s research questions are: How did media describe the crisis and AIK´s part in it? What effect did AIK´s previous history of similar problem have on the ongoing crisis? How did AIK communicate through the crisis? How was AIK´s image affected by the crisis? What did AIK do well/what could AIK have done better? To be able to answer these questions, several news articles from the sports paper “Hockeyexpressen” has been analyzed as well as a text from AIK itself. The answers from the analysis has then been weighed against Hearit´s and Benoit´s theories on apologia as well as Coombs theory on the impact from previous crisis. An important conclusion is that AIK protects its image during the crisis by using the strategy “shifting the blame”. AIK also redefines the picture of a true supporter by questioning the acts of some of their so called “fans”. AIK´s redefinition also serve to correct the news papers misleading use of different epithets on the same category of people. However, although their image stays more or less intact AIK fail to communicate the need of a broader responsibility from the society when it comes to the problems caused by sports related hooliganism.