The game versus the crowd

There is a tension in football that is bubbling under, and smart leadership is needed to deal with it.

Tension between the game and the crowd is set to intensify this season. It’s an issue the game needs to deal with better.

The roots of the tension lie in the different types of audiences the game has. On the one hand there is the vast global audience for the planet’s most popular sport. On the other is the comparatively tiny audience that attends games live, and in doing so contributes to the product. Football has not dealt with this tension well, and that matters because the disaffection of the smaller number of people could have a significant impact on the value the larger number place on the ‘product’.

Some of this, quite a lot of it, is down to the relationship between football and television, something I’ve written about here before. Put simply, the times that are best for TV schedulers – a robust breed I remember well from my time working on UK national TV listings magazines – are often not the times that are best for the fans who actually attend the games.

Fans get that TV wants something for all the money it puts into the game, but they don’t need the late fixture changes and kick-offs at times that make using public transport impossible. TV’s increasingly evident lack of concern about all this doesn’t help.

Next season’s Premier League fixtures are out (the Football League publishes its schedule today) but while the fixture list gives a general idea of the order games will be played in, it’s unwise to make any firm plans beyond the first month or so. Games will be moved for TV and because of European competition commitments, and because of how each affects the other.

Of the 380 games in the Premier League, 215 will be shown live just on Sky – more than ever. Add in TNT Sports and that’s 267 games shown live. You can read a thorough and thoughtful analysis of the TV deal and what it means by Stefan Borson on his Substack. As he observes, the fact that none of these 267 fixtures will be played at Saturday 3pm means “there is an unavoidable conclusion: the Saturday 3pm fixture is in terminal decline.” As it stands, any fixture that remains at Saturday 3pm is almost advertising the fact it is not particularly attractive.

Borson makes another key observation. “It will be increasingly ridiculous for clubs to expect season ticket holders to commit to attend games that will rarely be played at the time and date stated when the fixture list is published.” But this is football so guess what? That’s exactly what a number of clubs are doing, bringing in schemes that punish season ticket holders if they don’t attend a given number of games. It’s utterly crass. And a great example of the tension I’m talking about.

With demand so high, setting up schemes that enable fans to make their ticket available if they can’t go to the game without attaching punitive measures and minimum attendance requirements is not difficult or costly. As long as season ticket holders don’t block other fans, what difference does it make how many games they actually attend in a season? The seat is available, the club doesn’t lose any money (in fact it gains from resale), and the awful PR of punishing loyal fans who may be experiencing the kind of life events we all face would be avoided.

But the TVcos are not solely to blame. The Premier League hasn’t helped with the choices for the four Wednesday night rounds. Of course the fixture list is a difficult thing to compile, with various provisos meaning some teams cannot be at home at the same time as others (the Manchester, Liverpool and North London teams, for example). The Premier League says it takes “half a year” to put together, but in that six-month period some very basic issues seem to have been overlooked.

Both the games between Tottenham Hotspur and Newcastle United, and between West Ham United and Manchester United, will kick off on Wednesday evenings. Leaving fans who have to travel any distance – which means not just away fans – no way of getting home, and therefore requiring at least a day’s leave. The first Wednesday round sees Spurs travel to Newcastle, West Ham to Old Trafford and Manchester City visit Fulham.

On Wednesday 7 January, Liverpool fans have been presented with a trip to Arsenal, Sunderland fans will be at Brentford, and Brighton and Hover Albion visit Manchester City. But Wednesday 11 February is a humdinger. No fewer than six fixtures involve long trips that increase road traffic, require some time of work, and probably have an impact on workplace productivity too. They are:

• Spurs v Newcastle;

• West Ham v Man Utd;

• Everton v Bournemouth;

• Chelsea v Leeds United;

• Crystal Palace v Burnley;

• Man City v Fulham.

The final Wednesday round is much better, with Aston Villa v Chelsea and Leeds v Sunderland probably the biggest distances involved, but the selection of so many such games for the midweek rounds – including three double headers involving six teams – does not suggest fan convenience was much of a consideration.

But the game’s apparent contempt for fans goes beyond the issue of kick-off times and TV’s influence over a game whose soul it has bought. Throw in the raft of football-only laws that prevent football fans from doing what most other customers in most other entertainment industries can, the pettifogging and inconsistent restrictions on what you can take in to grounds and what you can and can’t do, the apparent prioritisation of one-off visitors who spend more in the club shop over long-established fans and fan communities, and the frustrations of regular matchgoing fans are easy to understand. Especially as they pay top dollar.

Those frustrations helped the FSA’s successful #stopexploitingloyalty campaign gain traction last year, and will see it extend in the coming season beyond simply the core issue of ticket pricing. When we started talking about setting the campaign up, we wanted to break the narrative that said football fans were treated poorly because we allowed ourselves to be, through the loyalty we showed by continuing to turn up. Hence stop exploiting loyalty. We’ve made a lot of progress in changing the narrative, but dealing with the issue of how to balance the interests of different sets of fans is going to be trickier.

A crude breakdown can split fans into four groups. The first, and smallest, is regular matchgoers. Let’s say “regular” means more than 20 games a season home and away – but already you see the potential issues. Then we have occasional matchgoers, fans who may well be members of club ticketing schemes, who attend enough games to be a part of the crowd but are not as all in as the regulars. Then there are the irregular visitors and one-off visitors –who clubs see as both lucrative and undemanding. Finally, there is the vast TV audience, including fans who will never go to a live game.

Each group has different ways of consuming the product, each group has different needs that cut across the others. It’s the regulars the game needs to rebalance its relationship with. These fans stump up large amounts in advance for season tickets. As a result, they demand a lot. On top of this, they don’t spend on a match-by-match level at anywhere near the rate of other fans. And there are not many of them, compared to the other groups. But it is this group that is getting alienated, and if that alienation leads to a deeper break, then the product changes. Because the traditions and the regularity and the devotion are what helps create the atmosphere that is one of the Premier League’s most compelling draws.

Already the English game experience is changing, flaking away. Ask fans in Germany or Sweden, for example, if they’d swap the atmospheres they create for what passes for atmosphere at many Premier League games and they would laugh. But if this set of fans is pushed out, there’s a loss at a greater level.

These are not new arguments. Writing for Sporting Intelligence 11 years ago, I said that: “Community is at the core of football, and with it notions of identity and place.” That’s part of what makes the ‘product’ so valuable. So football needs to do better in balancing the interests of the regulars who are the heart of what football is with the interests of its other audiences. It would be foolish to say everything would come crashing down if it doesn’t, but it is legitimate to ask if what we end up with will be as valuable – in a financial or emotional sense.

Photo by Terrace Grain on Unsplash