Tourist rap

The idea of what it means to be a fan is up for grabs again - but it's a debate that distracts from the real issues in football.

Subcultures contain their own set of values, the recognised ways of behaving that are displayed and acknowledged to signal true belonging. As a teenager I frowned on people who bought compilation albums, and I took pride in pointing out I’d seen bands live before their first single had come out. (I didn’t say I was a likeable teenager).

Football fandom brings with it a complex subculture all of its own. As Guardian writer Jonathan Liew recently observed: “Ostensibly this is a church open to all who want to believe, and yet somehow the very idea of fandom is constantly being challenged.” His piece was sparked by Tottenham Hotspur manager Ange Postecoglou’s objection to “tourist” fans being described as “plastic” by a journalist in a press conference.

The press conference question was prompted by Tottenham Hotspur’s decision to raise the price of season tickets by 6%, and the answer of the club manager was in response the journalist’s use of the words “tourist fans” and “plastics”. It’s worth noting that none of the supporter organisations objecting to the price rise have referenced fan tourism, but the narrative of fan opinion will now no doubt be framed by the journalist’s question (that’s a quick lesson for the media studies types in how the media works).

There is a view that many clubs see regular fans as a burden because they tend to spend less and demand more. At Spurs, a club famous for finding innovative ways to generate bad PR, tending not to die off before reaching retirement can be added to the list of issues clubs seem to have about regular fans. (If you think that’s harsh, check out Kieran Maguire’s reference to Logan’s Run on 55 minutes of this Price of Football podcast).

It's true that one-off visitors tend to be a different type of customer to regulars. I’m prepared to pay more for a concert ticket or a ticket to the Wimbledon tennis championships because I don’t go every week. Many football executives seem to find this concept hard to grasp. When I co-chaired the Supporters’ Trust at Spurs, we’d often have meetings with FA executives who benchmarked the price of, say, FA Cup semi-finals with the Wimbledon semi-finals or a major concert. They would look genuinely surprised when we explained that many of the fans seeking tickets for cup semi-finals would only qualify for the limited number available because they had built up credits by attending and travelling to a good few other games. So those fans experienced a cost that was cumulative, not one-off.

The failure to properly recognise, or acknowledge, the nature of the large section of club support that attends regularly is at the root of much current fan dissatisfaction. It’s the regular fans who tend to be more likely to provide the stadium atmosphere that is such a valued part of football’s offering as a TV product. It’s those fans who are inconvenienced most often and most expensively by changes to kick-off times, who have to pay for hotels when there is no transport home, who get stung with high travel prices because they can’t plan ahead when schedules are utterly at the mercy of TV companies … and it’s those fans who stuck with it, put their hands in their pockets and even volunteered to work unpaid when their clubs hit hard times.

It's also those fans whose passing of support from generation to generation has deepened the ties between customer and product in this most extraordinary business like no other.

Now, I disagree with the view put forward by Kieran Maguire in the podcast referenced above that clubs don’t want the regulars. When Spurs moved from the old White Hart Lane to the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the number of season tickets on offer rose from 18,500 in a 36,000 capacity ground to 40,000 in a 61,000 capacity. As far as I can see, season ticket holders take up a large proportion of most grounds in the top flight. Offering more season tickets is not the action of a business that wants fewer regulars.

And if it were true that for every disgruntled regular there are scores of irregulars who would snap the ticket up, and that those irregulars spend more, then surely clubs would be reducing the number of season tickets? Let’s not forget either that season ticket income is income guaranteed over a season, income clubs can use to show the banks they are a steady concern.

‘Tourist’ has become a lazy piece of shorthand for fans who are not regulars, and it’s this group of fans that is wondering how valued it really is.

But the argument that clubs don’t want regular fans doesn’t cut it for me. All it does is play to a divisive narrative that sets fans against each other and distracts from the fact that what is needed is a new settlement for fans. One that recognises there are now three distinct sets of supporter.

The vast majority is the global TV audience. In pure numbers and income terms, that is by far the biggest. Then come matchgoing fans – that is fans who have the opportunity to go to games on a reasonably regular basis – let’s say between one and five times a season. Finally there are the regulars, those who will go to pretty much every home game and who make up the small away support now permitted.

Each group of fans experiences the game and contributes to it in a different way, and each is interdependent. One experience is not necessarily better than another – that’s a subjective judgement. But one experience, that of the regular, is more expensive, time-consuming and demanding than the others. And that is also the group more likely to contribute to the atmosphere that helps attract the other audiences, more likely to stick around if form declines or the club hits really hard times.

On that basis, there is a strong argument that the regular fans should get better treatment.

So a progressive club owner, who valued  the long-term over the short, who recognised the unique nature of the football business, who was empathetic and people-centred, would ensure the regulars’ contribution was recognised and rewarded. Call it giving something back to the fans. Unfortunately, too many in the football business are short-term, lack empathy and are greedy and arrogant.

This is the root of the problem, the cause of the dissatisfaction with the way our game is going. Not other fans, not fans who come from different places or support differently, but owners and administrators who don’t, or won’t, see the real value of fans.

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The Football Governance Bill is finally here. And the word is it could be law within six weeks. It’s a historic, and much-needed, development, and I’ve written extensively in The Football Fan about it and why it’s needed. I’m currently picking my way through the 130 pages, and doing some work around all that with other fans. When I’ve properly digested, I’ll share some thoughts here.

Of course, the words in the legislation aren’t, on their own, going to solve all of football’s problems. What will be interesting is how the regulator implements the framework, and the detail and definition of what’s required will take some time to establish. Obviously I am particularly interested in the sections on fan engagement, and the requirement for that to be meaningful.

One of the early tests for the regulator will be how to establish a qualitative basis for judging engagement meaningful. And I suspect that could come down to what a reasonable person might reasonably interpret it to be. I would apply The Brian Clough Test here. Cloughie once said that when there’s a disagreement, he and the other person would get together, discuss the issue, and decide he was right.

Already there are widely differing applications of engagement via the model of Fan Advisory Boards in the Premier League – from Liverpool, where the club board looks to be genuinely committed to what a reasonable person would term engagement, to Spurs, where the club board is using the FAB as, in the FSA’s word’s, a “PR shield” for unpopular decisions. High standards will need to be established from the off.

The Bill also says supporters should have input into their clubs’ strategic business plan. Again, how this is put into practice is going to be a key battleground. At the All Party Parliamentary Group on football event I attended last week, MP Mark Eastwood gave the Premier League’s favoured warning of “unintended consequences” another runout by expressing the hope that the Bill would not lead to fans making decisions about buying and selling players. I know of very few fan groups that want to do this, but I do know that this is a red herring that’s regularly been put about to discredit the idea of fans having any input on the business side of their clubs.

So, applying the reasonable test, I’d say that fans having the final say on ticket prices would not pass, but fans having a direct and meaningful input into ticket pricing policy should. I suspect that could prompt some debate.

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Academic papers aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I’d recommend reading one called The moral economy of the English football crowd: The European Super League and the contingency of football fan activism by Aston University’s Daniel Fitzpatrick. It looks at why the announcement of the ESL prompted such a backlash among fans of English teams, and suggests the emergence of the concept of a moral economy.

Photo by Enrique Guzmán Egas on Unsplash