This week we’ve seen the two faces of football. Manchester United, in the face of one of the biggest and best organised supporters’ trusts (MUST) in the country, not to mention huge numbers of Manchester United fans and other fan groups, deciding that a pensioner and an under 18 can pay the same prices for a match as a fully grown adult on a decent salary. Meanwhile, Bronze Fan Engagement Award winners Brentford have decided to guarantee that travelling junior fans watching Brentford home or away (that is, fans of either home or away team) will pay no more than £10 to watch them. And then in Scotland, there’s Celtic selling things that don’t really exist in the physical sense, offering bits of their pitch in digital form for fans to (ahem) ‘own’. To monetise, or not to monetise. That is the question.
Brentford’s announcement was something of a bright spot in a succession of let’s face it, quite grim news about ticketing and access of late.
Brentford’s announcement was something of a bright spot in a succession of let’s face it, quite grim news about ticketing and access of late. Near neighbours Fulham are pursuing what appears to be a quite aggressive approach to pricing, advised I understand by one of the big PR & marketing agencies (which shall remain nameless), and others in London like Tottenham have already made deeply unpopular decisions about concessions but don’t seem to be turning back. There’s been plenty of chatter in the industry for some months about ‘surge pricing’, and you can bet that everyone who is up for this horrible idea is watching very closely what happens at Valencia.
If I was advising a club on how to behave, I would remind it regularly that here are no disruptors who can challenge norms, no challenger brands who can build a stadium across the road from, say, White Hart Lane, Edgeley Park or Old Trafford (if they could even get planning permission) and take them on.
With the Football Governance Bill moving along fairly briskly in the Lords, and including a right to consultation on ticket pricing for fans (something myself and Rhion Jones are paying very close attention to), this all seems a bit like clubs are either putting their fingers in their ears and pretending it isn’t happening, or maybe, trying to recast the landscape before the regulator arrives to make it difficult or impossible to unwind the changes. Take your pick. I’m not really sure it matters. I’m certainly not a believer in organised conspiracies as a rule.
Whether Brentford’s move heralds anything other than just them deciding to do things a bit different or whether others follow suit isn’t really something I can divine at this moment in time. Taken together with the other, negative changes to ticketing that I outlined above, it does hint at one thing: some clubs believe that football needs to be recognised as the complex, multi-faceted and wonderful tapestry that it is, whereas others prefer to look to monetisation as an end in itself, driving value, increasing revenue. Always increasing revenue. If it moves, market it. What does happen is that everyone gets drawn into this way of behaving to some extent, and we’re all worse off as a result.
All of a sudden, as you might have noticed, there’s some soul searching going on, people wondering whether aggressive monetisation is actually a very good way to run clubs. One of the briefings this week from ‘Off the Pitch’ contains just such a soul-searching piece. But for me, what it all ultimately comes down to is where you get your advice from and how that advice (or at least, those giving it) sees football clubs and football.
On the one hand, the investment/marketing and monetisation crowd believe that football clubs are essentially underpriced assets that can sweat more than they do already. The fact that they can see that fans still pay out to express their love for their clubs is to them a dynamic to exploit. This is understandable, because lots of these people do this for other businesses and sectors, and they don’t see anything weird or wrong in it.
Except it’s based on not actually understanding the businesses they’re advising. The alternative take, and one that I advocate, is that football clubs are businesses, and there is a business opportunity, however, this oddity about football has both an incredible benefit to the business model, but also places limits on what you can and can’t do.
It needs to be understood that every single club in English football is in fact a localised sporting monopoly. As a result they must be properly regulated and sometimes, told to behave better (hence the regulator). It gets forgotten when football and those who advise it get carried away with themselves. Think about it this way: If I was running Aldi and my marketing advisors came up with a plan to market my supermarket like Waitrose, or the other way around, I’d think they were unqualified or stupid, and I would tell them to leave my office very quickly. These two chains have uniquenesses that can’t be ignored, and make the two very distinct. You can’t be counterintuitive or contrary when it comes to gravity.
Except this is essentially what a lot of people who claim expertise in the field or set out a focus on monetisation are doing to football clubs: they’re ignoring that football clubs are very distinct, individual monopolies there by dint of history and luck, who play as groups of cartels (in league and cup competitions). They forget that access to those cartels is prohibited to all but those already there, and that if you want to get in, you have to start a local monopoly under the authority of the FA and build your business that way.
If I was advising a club on how to behave, I would remind it regularly that here are no disruptors who can challenge norms, no challenger brands who can build a stadium across the road from, say, White Hart Lane, Edgeley Park or Old Trafford (if they could even get planning permission) and take them on. There is no ability to poach playing staff except through a very structured and regulated market for talent. I would remind them – and this is the key – that the customers they have are never going to leave and go elsewhere, and that even if they don’t go anymore because they can’t or won’t pay the prices, they still retain a loyalty – a love – of the business, and will still pay for things connected to it.
It’s not that owning, leading or working in a football club isn’t difficult or tough sometimes – often, especially when form has dipped and fans have turned. I’m coming to the end of my two years on the board of the owners of AFC Wimbledon, and it’s been everything I expected in terms of the pressure-cooker nature of the sport, and then the flooded pitch and other crises appeared from nowhere and added to it. Our staff are incredible: dedicated, supportive, helpful, generous, even when the fans aren’t appreciative of it. It’s the same pretty much everywhere in the game.
It’s the combination of money being handed to clubs upfront, their existence as monopolies, within cartels, and an absence of competition off the pitch (along with the need to have rigorous competition on it) which makes sport – and football clubs particularly – very distinct, and their customers – the fans – so weird, misunderstood and exploitable by the wrong people.
No. What too many football clubs – in some cases owners, but especially those externally advising growth and monetisation – forget is that there is much less genius going on than they think. We’ve all heard of the industry events where sports executives and owners all tell each other of their extraordinary achievements. Again, I’m not belittling the efforts they go to, but I want to put it in context, and it leads me to think of my local corner shop owner. He really exists, and I’m a little bit in awe of him, as we all are on our street. He took over a shop that was on its knees and on its way out, and has turned it into a thriving local mini supermarket, parcel delivery and collection hub. He spotted an opportunity and he went for it, taking risks and doubtless, getting in debt to do it. Except he’s always a few bad decisions or bad luck from disappearing. He has no right to exist, he can’t object to the other shop down the road competing with him and taking away his customers, he has no protection if he fails except the usual safety nets available to all businesses, and certainly not HMRC being forced to bend to his will because he can’t possibly be allowed to disappear for the damage it would do to the local community. Oh, and he certainly doesn’t receive £xm a year before he even opens his doors of a morning (for twelve hours minimum a day).
It’s the combination of money being handed to clubs upfront, their existence as monopolies, within cartels, and an absence of competition off the pitch (along with the need to have rigorous competition on it) which makes sport – and football clubs particularly – very distinct, and their customers – the fans – so weird, misunderstood and exploitable by the wrong people. I don’t think enough people in and around football and those who advise on it, appreciate that enough, often enough.
If you keep trying to pretend that down is up and that left is right, eventually you either punch yourself in the face or you fall over. Eventually, for your own sanity but also for the sake of reality and fairness to yourself, you need to take a step back and consider whether what you’re doing is a good idea, and whether it might be a good idea to change it.
I’m not suggesting we all turn the clock back to some golden era of football that never really existed, and I’m certainly not hoping for a return to literal death trap stadia and maltreatment of players as chattel. I am in love with Wimbledon partly because of the old Plough Lane, but I recoil from some of my experiences of dank, piss sodden toilets and dangerously overcrowded terraces that left me winded when the crowd surged. I am in love with the club because of the wonderful players who we were blessed to have, but who were treated less as talent and more as property. I loved the unity of our relatively small fanbase, but wince when I think of the way we just did what we were told far too often (until we decided we could take no more, of course!)
There are many good, quirky qualities about football clubs that are more important than increasing the revenues at that moment in time, or acquiring one more full-back on loan in order to finish mid-table again. I want a little more of the sparkle of Brentford’s ticketing initiative. A little bit more of the grit and determination of Everton’s fan engagement team and their dogged work to stay connected to their fans during a tough time on and off the pitch. More of Brighton’s understanding of fans as unique customers. A little bit of Carlisle’s near relentless desire to stay connected with their fans, and a bit more of Stoke City trying to make fans the centre of their universe. Is that too much to ask?
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- Brentford’s ticketing announcement can be read via their website.
- Kieran Maguire’s Celtic virtual pitch response is on the Celtic Way website.
- You can subscribe to industry news Off the Pitch via their website.