The latest in the three part Financial Times series on ‘football in crisis’ focuses on the supporter, but in particular on ‘the organised supporter’. What is an organised supporter? No definition is offered, but presumably it means someone whose involvement goes beyond attending games and then moaning on message boards and football phone ins about the manager or their favourite scapegoat player.
The latest in the three part Financial Times series on ‘football in crisis’ focuses on the supporter, but in particular on ‘the organised supporter’. What is an organised supporter? No definition is offered, but presumably it means someone whose involvement goes beyond attending games and then moaning on message boards and football phone ins about the manager or their favourite scapegoat player.
Dave Boyle, the chief executive of Supporters Direct, reckons that there are about 250,000 of these active fans so it’s very much a minority taste. There is certainly a need for organisations to articulate the views of fans either at an individual club level or nationally.
There is always a risk that such organisations will become unrepresentative of fans in general, that they will represent the more educated or articulate and/or the more obsessive anoraks. Nevertheless, the national organisations do make a systematic effort to find out what supporters think, a task that is easier in the age of the internet.
Fans keep coming through the turnstiles: the Football League is enjoying the highest aggregate attendances since the 1959-60 season. But against a background of economic belt tightening, Dave Boyle reckons that fans are paying too much, their money either wasted by club boards or spent servicing player wage inflation, or both.
Dave Boyle also draws attention to how important the global market is becoming to Premiership clubs, a theme we have emphasised on this site. In the 1990s clubs began to pander to the more affluent consumer and now there is an increasing fixation with the global market, especially the emerging countries of Asia. That all makes economic sense, but Boyle points to a scenario where the Premier League’s international rights dwarf the domestic ones.
One other point made in the article is that sponsorship is not the revenue driver it was. Shirt sponsorship is becoming a buyer’s market. Jim Wilkinson of Sportingbet, currently shirt sponsors for Leeds United and Wolves, reckons that away from the very top clubs rates are down by a half or two-thirds from five years ago.