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The role of the football spectator has been a hot topic in recent weeks. The most discussed issues have been the limits placed on the freedom of active fans in Melbourne and the right of the Novocastrians to have a say about the jersey for the Newcastle Jets.
The issues affecting those in the stands are often the most passionately debated of all topics as these conversations are the ones that involve the most passionate of supporters.
In any given country, there is a market for football spectators and clubs acknowledge that each group of the market will want something different from the football experience.
The person just getting involved in football will want something very different from the season ticket holder.
But who do the clubs need to target to ensure their long term survival?
In Kuper and Szymanski’s excellent book Why England Lose, the authors cast a critical eye over the make-up of the spectators at football games in Britain. They summarise that “on average, in the post-war era, half of all supporters in English football did not take up their seats again the next season.”
That includes the hardcore active fans.
They go on to suggest that the fact that 50 per cent of the hardest of hardcore fans (called Hornbyesque fans after author Nick Hornby who wrote the seminal Fever Pitch won’t come back season after season sits at odds with the idea that a true football fan is a one club man who goes to all his club’s home games.
Instead they offer up the idea that it is often the fair weather fan or the carefree casual who will, at any point in time, make up the majority of a crowd at a football game.
(For a more complete analysis of the author’s conclusions, read Chapter 11 of Why England Lose: and other curious football phenomena explained).
So what implications does this have for A-League clubs?
Admittedly these conclusions have to be taken with a grain of salt and may not be directly transferable to the Australia as the football markets in Britain and Australia are very different.
But if in the country where the legend of the Hornbyesque fan developed it can be shown to be not quite the concrete truth it has been made out to be, there is a lesson to be learned for Australian football administrators.
If the vast majority of football spectators are predicted to have a casual relationship with a club, this will impact upon a club’s overall strategy.
To paraphrase the conclusions of one of the studies used in ‘Why England Lose’, the loyalty of spectators cannot be relied upon.
If marketers look under the surface of supporter loyalty, they will find loyalty patterns quite similar to, say, supermarket goods sectors. Most fans are engaging in what is called “repertoire buying”, in that they purchase different brands at different times. In football terms, they shift from club to club over their lifetime.
Such behaviour may come as quite a shock to the active fan element of clubs, but as the global nature of football is enhanced further as a result of better and faster communication of scores and coverage of different leagues around the world, it will only be entrenched further.
Football fans will stop being monogamous and start becoming polygamists in terms of who they choose to follow.
Therefore, clubs cannot only focus on pleasing the hardcore fans in their crowds as this group is probably the minority of any crowd and with such high levels of churn from season to season, clubs will be left trying to please a substantially different group of individuals every few seasons.
Clubs need to attract armchair fans to stadiums, but they do not need to be converted to ‘diehard’ status. In fact, high levels of attrition in the individuals that make up a crowd are needed to attract new spectators to a club (although this is a problem more for clubs that regularly sell out their games).
Active fans provide atmosphere and may play an important role in attracting new people to attend games, but through their behaviour they can also turn away people from the game. And if a club has to focus resources that are grossly disproportionate to the percentage of the crowd this group makes up to ensure active fans don’t get out of hand then it is clearer to see why clubs may want to take action in this area.
It is understandable why Hornbyesque fans feel like they are the ones with the most to lose when they feel their way of watching football is threatened as they are the ones who have invested the most in terms of time, money and effort for their team.
However, this world view implies that there is a right way to watch football and a wrong way. Football is a product with many consumers and one group does not have the right to impose their views on others even if they believe they have a sense of entitlement.
All parties have to find a way to watch football together which includes the five year old seeing their first game right through to the pensioner who remembers watching a young Johnny Warren during his playing days.
As it is still early days in the A-League and the level of choice available to Australian fans who want to watch football in person is far less than places like Britain, it would be folly to predict that active fans won’t have a role in building up both existing A-League clubs and those clubs which are still to come.
However, active fans may think a little differently about their own behaviour if, as in Britain, one of the people on their left or right standing on their seat, scarf in the air, yelling at the top of their lungs professing their undying love for ‘their’ club this season wasn’t going to be there next season.
And what’s worse, they might be supporting another club.
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