Week 19: Come With Me If You Want To Go To The Match
‘I’ll be back.’
That’s my Dad’s attitude when it comes to going to the football.
He’s a season-ticket holder at an EFL club and relatively fit and well. He attends games with his brother – also a season ticket holder – and they are the sort of fans clubs love; they pay long before the new season starts, they are there week-in, week-out, come rain or shine, win, lose or draw. They don’t complain about anything (other than the odd last-minute equaliser) and the only occasion they and the club have any meaningful contact is at season ticket renewal time and then it’s usually just them getting out their wallet while someone smiles and holds up a card machine.
They are also in their seventies. So despite saying and thinking they’ll be back at matches, they might not even be allowed to go back in the foreseeable future. It’s perfectly conceivable that they might be on the post-COVID restrictions list, either enforced by the government or the club, after fans are allowed back into stadiums. They won’t not want to go back because they perceive it’s too dangerous, but some septuagenarians might.
They probably won’t be alone. Other groups who consider themselves, or are considered, vulnerable might also fall into the category of not going back. Anyone with underlying health issues, for instance, or simply those who are risk averse, or don’t want to put their family in any danger, however small the chances.
Taking it to the extreme, by the time football is completely safe for everyone to attend, there might not be many clubs left for anyone to actually go and watch.
While the Premier League talk about Project Restart – in danger of becoming Project False Start – the rest of the clubs in the country are walking a different tightrope altogether. I keep hearing people say it but I’m not sure how many are taking it seriously. While parachutes and removing relegation are the order of the day at the top, the comparative luxuries of potentially losing over a hundred million pound are not something smaller clubs are worried about. They are concerned with paying bills, paying staff and being able to still keep their players after July.
Whereas self-interest pervades the conversation at the top (a ‘brilliant’ article in a Merseyside paper last week accused the likes of Brighton, Villa and Watford of self-interest because it’s put the league’s completion – and Liverpool’s title – in doubt; I still don’t know if it was being serious or not), it’s self-preservation in the lower reaches of the EFL and at non-league levels that’s the order of the day.
A lot depends on ticket revenue. That’s the only capital they can really trade in because solidarity payments, the trickle of broadcasting revenue and furlough schemes can only go so far. If turnstiles aren’t turning in the near future – I’m thinking October – then the liquidators are going to be pretty busy in the run-up to Christmas and, as I’ve said in previous articles, even though football is so unimportant in the big scheme of things as thousands of lives continue to be lost to this virus, there will still be a huge loss felt in the local communities if clubs have to say Hasta La Vista and go out of business.
But even when the restrictions are lifted at some point – let’s call it Judgement Day – I fear that the shock of lower attendances will be felt in lots of places. And who will take up the slack of the missing hundreds and maybe thousands?
One group who will help in this are, of course, the ‘core’ fans.
These fans are somewhere in between these two extreme age groups. The 21-55 age group of men and women who probably won’t be put off by coronavirus concerns and who aren’t in a high risk group will still go to games. They will be asked – as the government is now doing – to use their good ol’ fashioned British common sense in these matters and by and large they will.
Let’s take one such fan and these purposes call him, I don’t know…John Connor.
Now, as an adult in his early-forties, John is a passionate football fan of a lower league club. He will buy a new replica shirt every summer and hardly miss a game (home or away). John brings his kids up the same way; they eat, drink and sleep football. They buy merchandise in the club shop, eat at the refreshment kiosk – John always has a pint or two as well – and never forget to take a match programme home. All in all, from his family, his club will receive not far off a thousand pounds in income each season.
He’s dyed in the wool. Nothing can come between him and his club; it’s true love and he’s a passionate fan who sees this devotion as something akin to religion. Football hasn’t got to worry about John Connor.
If someone wanted to stop him going to matches they’d have a proper job on. In fact, there is only one really effective way you’d have any chance of successfully turning him away from football.
You’d send someone back in time to when he was a kid and put him off it then.
There’s A Storm Coming
In a way, that’s the very real risk facing clubs and fans in this age bracket. The coronavirus will have an indirect impact on millions of kids worldwide. Already an age group that are difficult to engage with, this generation will need to make up the numbers if football clubs are going to reach the attendances they enjoyed before the virus but it’s a lot to ask.
Clubs can try to re-engage fans who no longer attend, try to reach new people in the community and aim their marketing at a wider audience but the generation who are at local secondary schools now are the key to their long term sustainability and they are by no means a sure bet to come through on this.
For a start, most will depend on parents for travel, financing and even taking them to matches. If those parents feel it’s too risky, they won’t take them or allow them to go with others. Some will have lost interest after months of not seeing live football and some will have found other things to do on Saturday afternoons. It’s a different battlefield to the one I grew up in; football or no football. That wasn’t really a choice to make for me, but these days (or at least when we get back to some sense of normality) it might be football, Fortnite (or countless other options), friends, bowling, cinema, Laser Quest, one or more of countless other sports /pastimes or even just hanging around in Starbucks or McDonalds.
And there was already a major problem with engagement of the 11-17 age group before anyone even heard of COVID-19.
Like so many parts of modern-day life, the world doesn’t cater for this age group especially well. As a small experiment, try buying a pair of jeans for a fourteen-year-old boy in the shops when they reopen. The age tags stop at 13. After that, you have to look in the adult aisles or else try online.
They aren’t adults but they aren’t quite kids either; they will act and think older than their age. They want to be cool, they don’t want to be seen within 200m of a parent, never mind 2m, but they can’t drive and they are in that very sticky area when it comes to financial independence; they have none.
So, and this is without COVID throwing its ugly hat in the ring, what happens is that clubs cater very well for younger fans up until they reach secondary school age and then there is nothing until they reach adulthood at which point it is hoped they’ll remember the fun they used to have and come back to football again.
In the meantime, they’ll have lost touch with the game to a lesser or greater extent. They might be football fans but few will go to matches. That’s not to say they’ll lose touch completely but that they might consume the sport in a variety of other ways. They will participate in fantasy football competitions, they might occasionally watch highlights on their phones; they might play on FIFA instead or they might play real football themselves at weekends. But none of that puts them in stadiums at three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon. Or in the stadium vicinity or on concourses at two o’clock, and that’s where clubs need them more than ever.
It’s not costs that are necessarily prohibitive. Most clubs have offers and packages that are attractive to younger fans and a lot include children up to at least the age of sixteen. There are also lots of activities and entertainment that clubs have introduced to their match day experience but the vast majority are aimed at kids in the younger age range (typically 5-11) who will be attending games with parents/carers or as part of a larger family or friendship group. But what becomes a memorable magic moment for those fans – engaging with the mascot, inflatables, face painting and such like – will also be the opposite of what a teenager wants to experience at that age, when even a parent asking a question can be the height of embarrassment.
Although gaming and small-sided games with a ball go some way to address this, even that is more a bridge for the 11-14 age range. But there is still a steep cliff after that until they reach adulthood and can make independent decisions and pay their way. And it’s unrealistic to assume they’ll just put their passion for their club on hold for a while. This of course already happens to students who study and live away from home for three or four years. I’ve seen some clubs with student offers and even dedicated areas of the stadium, and this is a sensible ‘home from home’ move that suggests that if you can’t watch your club, at least watch a club. It’s not the same, of course, but in a world where bums on seats rule, it’s crucial.
But that doesn’t alter the bigger question. Is football attractive enough and welcoming for a teenager audience? If a Mum or Dad said they didn’t want to go any more, how many teenagers would want to continue attending on their own? And if they hadn’t been introduced at a younger age, would they find it appealing when they reached that moment of more independence?
A significant part of football going forward rests in the hands of the young John (or Joanna) Connor; the fifteen-going-on-sixteen-year-old who is trying to establish their place in the world right now while a thousand thoughts, distractions and decisions – not to mention hormones – rush past at breakneck speed.
They might not be aware of it but they are pretty important to the future of the game right now, and clubs need to get on board with this very quickly. Because there will be future where the current older generations of football fans just won’t be there any longer.
Arguably, football is years behind the curve as it is and this particular battle is already almost lost. Action ideally needed to begin much, much sooner.
That sending people back in time idea might have come in handy in other ways.
But we are where we are, so we’ll have to make the best of it.
No problemo? Or maybe a much bigger problemo on the horizon than we realise?
words Darren Young, D3D4 columnist
P.S. There is too much lack of clarity in the world as it is, so to avoid any doubt, when I said in last week’s column that the current season should not be completed, that didn’t mean without any promotion or relegation. I meant with the current points (or a similar or fairer way of calculating it) used and with possibly some play-off games to decide the close calls. After nearly forty league games, a team’s placing in the table has to mean something. Sorry if that wasn’t clear.