Football fans are unique; they keep on coming despite the crap football
If you ever wanted proof that football outside of the elite big teams really matters to people, look no further than the attendance figures for Saturday’s games. What else would attract 24,000 people to Bradford?
The popularity of football throughout the country is totally taken for granted. I don’t usually meet anyone who follows football – I live quite remotely – but it is clearly the country’s favourite activity. Sometimes you’d think it’s only important to a few teams at the top because they soak up so much attention and money, but do you think anything else would attract 8,000 people in Grimsby, 16,000 in Plymouth, or 13,000 in Port Vale? Let alone 20,000 in places as diverse as Bolton, Charlton and Bolton. 32,000 were at a 0-0 draw at Derby!
The lowest attendance across the four leagues was 1,591 at Northampton v Wigan and if you’ve ever been to Northampton, you’ll know there’s nothing of interest which attracts that number of people. Most venues would consider that a healthy number. And it isn’t as if it’s a one-off; recent figures showed just over 18 people out of every 1,000 attended Scottish Premiership matches. And the scenes at Falkirk for example suggest huge passion lower down the leagues.
I think these extraordinary numbers accidentally reveal the sheer popularity the game enjoys without any great promotion or advertising. There’s no marketing for Reading v Barnsley, but 21,000 souls were there all the same. Even at the King Power, 31,000 turned up for El Crapico v Southampton. Surely a triumph of hope over experience. If you can get 60,000 to watch Arsenal in what is often near silence, that’s pretty good going. Quality of football entertainment is quite clearly not the most important factor. Football is popular per se.
These numbers, if reproduced by any other cultural event, would be routinely celebrated but for football, it’s taken for granted, and I think even we probably don’t realise what a massive, important and widespread sport we have in England.
So collectively, we’re a lot of people who do not use our power to better our conditions and persuade the authorities that we matter. Things like kick-off times are routinely changed at short notice or are placed at impractical times without any consideration for the thousands it affects. We’re not just incidental. Ticket prices are, in real terms, way higher than they once were. The reason football is such a lucrative industry is because of our passion and emotion, even though this is often ignored.
The other thing which interests me about these numbers is what it says culturally. It’s such a force and involves so many people, it can’t be ignored (though it often is).
Football, often between perpetually unsuccessful teams, must be providing something to all those people. A civic pride perhaps. It makes you feel more than you normally are. It is the centre or wellspring of your roots in an otherwise often rootless world. It offers the chance to be with others of like minds. To sometimes enjoy the community aspects of a common cause. Basically, it offers a myriad of psycho-social satisfactions.
This wide and deep phenomenon has been boiled down for betting adverts to just people shouting. That’s it. In these corporate days, that’s the only thing they can tap into because the real driving forces are so existential, complex and societal. The proof that it’s more than the sport is that it often doesn’t matter if it’s a terrible game. Going to a match is so much more than that at all levels and the attempt to turn it by some owners into a leisure experience – with all the money-earning opportunities that brings – is so wide of the mark.
Making clubs into big brands that belong to nowhere, that can be taken anywhere, is going against the very thing that drives interest in the game and is why 3,969 people went to see Accrington Stanley. Clubs like Manchester United want the tourist money probably more than the real fans’ money, because they spend more, seemingly unaware that if the gloss wears off and the tourists go elsewhere, the real fans are what you’ll rely on. That’s just good, sensible business, not that Jim Ratcliffe seems familiar with that.
It does often feel that supporters of big well-supported clubs are taken for granted by owners who know that their inability to stay away means there is no interruption to their income stream, so they feel no need to change policy. Certainly Manchester United’s awful form doesn’t seem to have emptied their stadium yet.
Supporters’ ability to see the ownership as separate from the club, protects the owners from direct action, no matter how autocratic and oppressive they are. This isn’t like anything else. Lower-league clubs’ attendance is crucial to those clubs. Other industries work hard to get an audience but football just attracts one without really trying, apart from heating a few pies.
We focus on the big crowds and the big games, but football is followed by thousands of people, almost regardless of anything. The roots of the game should be in good financial health, the fact it isn’t shows the degree of mismanagement and unreasonable pressures. Football is incredibly successful; nobody should be struggling when you can attract 20,000 people to a game every fortnight. It survives almost despite itself as bad actors pollute and exploit the game.
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