It’s been a while since we’ve heard from ex-City season-ticket holder, and now Dulwich Hamlet devotee, Andy Pearmain – but he’s back and armed with some radical suggestions as to how City’s support can be reinvented.
Also, he (brutally) reaffirms his view on the pro game in England.
Brace yourself…
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In 1953, Bertolt Brecht suggested, in sarcastic response to the East German ‘workers’ state’s repression of that year’s workers’ uprising, that ‘the government should dissolve the people and elect another’.
Now, I’m no Stalinist, but maybe he was onto something. As a thoroughly disillusioned ex-fan of ‘big football’, and an ex-NCFC season ticket holder, I’ve watched Norwich City’s season unravel from a distance (not too far – I only live five minutes from Carrow Road), and the mood amongst the fans grows uglier.
Believe me, I can hear it from our back garden as the match day atmosphere turns from sullen resignation to dull moaning and snarling anger, and finally back to the default mode of sullen resignation.
And I ask the question I found myself first asking several seasons ago: why do 25,000 people continue to attend an event, shelling out a lot of money in the process, they are plainly not enjoying?
They can’t all be idiots, though a fair few are (especially the bunch I sat amongst in the Jarrold Stand). I’ve come to the conclusion that there is something really rather odd about Norwich City’s fan base, and the peculiar emotional mix they bring to the business of ‘supporting’ what they continue to consider ‘their’ football club (it’s not, it’s Delia’s).
The average age of a Premier League football fan is now the wrong side of 50; you can see it in the crowd-shots at Anfield, Stamford Bridge etc. I don’t know for sure the age-profile of Norwich City fans, but watching them trundle up and down King Street every fortnight I would wager that it’s even higher.
The general population is certainly older round here than anywhere else in the UK. With age comes not just wisdom, for some people at any rate, but also mounting anxiety, as you realise your declining abilities and your increasing vulnerability.
That explains the prevailing feeling at Carrow Road these past few seasons, even when the club has been doing reasonably well, of nervous, fist and teeth and buttock-clenched apprehension. Even if they’re two or three goals up, you never know (especially against Liverpool or Newcastle).
The other aspect is of course money – the driving force behind the development of football for much of the modern era, but now so far out of control that commerce completely outweighs the art of our once-beautiful game.
Old people have more of it, the only segment of the population to have enjoyed rising incomes since the 2008 crash, and just recently surpassing even the working population. We (I’m no spring chicken) have more to spend on non-essentials, like meals out, holidays and football season tickets.
But there is another aspect to old age, which no amount of index-linked pensions and Tory pampering can do away with. Sooner rather than later, old people die. Before they do, they suffer increasing years of declining health and mobility and social participation.
Most sensible businesses know this, and take steps to rejuvenate their customer base. Even if young people don’t have much money right now, they will eventually, and more than likely choose to continue spending it on habits and interests cultivated in their youth. But does ‘big football’ understand this?
I’m well aware that there are lots of young men who ‘support’ their clubs with a semi-religious fanaticism (my NCFC-supporting son included), but they’re mostly online rather than terrace warriors. And getting this lot to pay for anything is the biggest challenge of the information revolution.
Their technological savvy goes towards getting stuff for free, streaming football as much as music (and if you want to see how the internet kills things off, look no further than the music scene). The obvious point is that football clubs have to do more, far more, to attract children and young people to actual games, if their own ‘business’ is to prove sustainable.
I’ve written before on this website about my own recent shift of football allegiance/’consumer choice’ from Norwich City to Dulwich Hamlet, the ‘7th tier’ semi-professional South London club currently heading confidently towards their own play-offs and possible promotion to the National League South.
There are all sorts of genuinely enjoyable aspects to following Dulwich, not least of which is that it’s not the end of the world if they lose a game or two (which, barring Cup quarter and semi-finals, they’ve not done since early January). Plus, it costs me four quid to get in.
The most notable feature of the Dulwich crowd is its diversity, in age as much as anything else. Kids under-12 get in free, and the club gives out free family tickets through local schools so they can bring their parents too.
And that’s not counting the hipster contingent attracted by the craft beers, the organic burgers, the Guardian articles and the chance to network with other start-ups…
Unsurprisingly attendances have increased from a few hundred five years ago to an average of 1,500 (nearly 3,000 for the recent FA Trophy game against Macclesfield). If the latest ground development plans go through, the club will also soon be handed over to its growing band of fans, to join Portsmouth, AFC Wimbledon and FC United of Manchester in the only long-term sustainable business model in football – even mooted recently on this website for NCFC.
It all just feels strangely sensible and grown-up, and free of all the hype and hysteria of ‘big football’, which I just can’t watch any more. It’s actually crap football played by robots at supersonic speeds, at least in this country. And that’s why they always fail in the Champions League and the international competitions against teams with the wit and the skill to improvise.
I can honestly say that I’ve actually started enjoying watching football again, played at a pace where I can see and understand what’s going on, by footballers who are motivated as much by pride and enjoyment as the reasonable monetary rewards (£400 to £500 a week at this level).
So there you go; don’t ‘sack the board’, or even the manager (Dulwich have had the same, the highly regarded Gavin Rose, in charge for eight or nine seasons). Sack the fans, or at least the most anxious, and get them to give their precious season tickets to their grandchildren.
After all, Delia seems to be planning something similar with young Tom…
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Thanks, as ever, to Andy for his no-nonsense thoughts and for sparing us the sugar coating!
I’m on board. People hold into season tickets way too long, but that is also countered with stadium expansion which is long overdue.
Interesting article. But will continued success for Dulwich mean the erosion of the current way football at Dulwich is enjoyed?
Having reached my three-score years and ten (twelve, actually), I’m one of those older folk hanging on to my season ticket, because I’d miss the chat with those I meet at the ground and sitting round about me. However, my planning for future support extends to my son, son-in-law (converted from a Coventry fan), and three of my grand-children also having season tickets (as does my wife), so sorry Jeff (1), I don’t intend to give up yet.
As for Andy switching his support to Dulwich Hamlet, why go so far to pay your four pounds? Why not go to Kings Lynn, or Lowestoft Town, and keep your support local, since you live in Norwich? I guess the cost of travelling to South London to watch games must significantly add to your admission price.
It’s certainly clear that the crowd at Carrow Road has been getting older, and quieter, for a long time. Do people just hang on to their season tickets much longer these days? It would seem so.
If they didn’t, would there be enough younger fans to keep up the current attendance levels?
I’m not sure I completely agree with the premises of this article.
In the late 90’s and early 00’s, NCFC made a concerted push to bring in young fans. Cheap season tickets, frequent “kids for a quid” promotions and the like, which helped draw in families and new fans. Between the mid-90s and mid-00’s, crowds swelled from the 11,000-14,000 to 25,000 or 26,000 sell-outs.
It’s tempting to say we need to go back to those kinds of initiatives, but there are several challenges. Running a football club is not cheap, and ticket revenues are the vast majority of revenue for any club either not in the PL or not in receipt of parachute payments. Furthermore those young fans (of whom I am one) of the 90’s are now adults, many of us continuing with the support of the club we came to love in the days £20 season ticket for U-12s. This means there is a huge demand for tickets. Because Carrow Road has not expanded greatly to cope with the demand, high demand outstripping restricted supply is what leads to the high prices.
Like the comment says above, changing the culture begins and ends with stadium expansion. With less pressure on season ticket seats you will get less “presentee-ism” amongst season ticket holders (people who don’t want to give up their seat for fear of not being able to get one again in the future, rather than because they enjoy having the seat now) and the majority of fans coming through the gates will be people who actually want to be there – as opposed to people going mostly out of habit and with lofty expectations because they are paying high prices.
There are wrinkles to this view, though. The article mentions “internet warriors” and I think this is apt – the internet focuses and concentrates discontent greatly. I personally think the information age is responsible for much of the dissatisfaction due to social media, where people can shout into the ether unthinkingly and get angry when anyone questions their assumptions.
A question for you Jeff (although in true Monty Python style it’s actually two questions)
How you are nearly always the first to comment on these posts? And
Why don’t you normally respond to follow up questions? And another, so that’s three questions now, but this is probably the most important.
What is the break-even point at which increased ground capacity starts to result in a reduction of season ticket holder numbers? If, and it remains a big if, stadium expansion happens, some existing season ticket holders will decide that they can start to pick and choose the actual games to go to, rather than buy a ticket for all of them? Numbers will go down rather than up and that’s the conundrum.
Answers please, and that includes you Jeff.
I’m with this. When my nephew, now 22, first watched NCFC regularly with me and his dad at the age of seven, we’d sit in the lower Barclay block A where a good few rows would be given over to local youth football sides. Always a good atmosphere, the kids were excited and it was just close enough yet far enough away from th snake pit to get the atmos without hearing the swears in too much detail.
He’s now travelling back from London every week to watch us – and he loves it, because the ups and downs for the last decade or so have been what football is all about – unpredictable and therefore entertainment.
I recently took my four year old to the family stand in the hope I could replicate my nephew’s experience and perhaps, albeit vicariously, regain some of my own enthusiasm lost since I gave up my season ticket after too many years next to gorrillas with an overblown sense of entitlement. There were some kids there – not that many, ironically – and they were trying to sing and have fun but eventually it all got drowned out by a few moaners loudly swearing about Alex Neil, Delia, etc. I was genuinely upset that, having thoroughly enjoyed himself for 60 minutes my son then started worrying about ‘those angry men daddy’.
And it’s everywhere at Carrow Road. Pockets of idiots who don’t understand the line between expressing rightful disappointment or just spewing whatever nastiness comes out of their heads like we all need to share in it.
Football used to be exciting because for 90 minutes anything could happen but at the end of 90 minutes it didn’t matter. Now it seems to some people that it’s all that matters. But those people hate it. And they’re spoiling it for the rest of us.
Interesting, thoughtful responses – thanks. I actually think Big Football is living on borrowed time – mainly the stupid amounts of TV money – and that the bubble will burst, perhaps sooner than you might think. Then we’ll have to rebuild the game from the bottom up, which is how fan-owned clubs will prove their sustainability, much on German and Spanish lines. Who knows – maybe Dulwich Hamlet will be the next Barcelona or Bayern Munich…
As for supporting our own local teams (Jim D., 3), I very much take the point. I did try Lowestoft for a season, but they’re just not very good! It also involved spending longer in Lowestoft than I could easily cope with! The club itself is one of these outfits owned by local business people for their own prestige – all too common in the lower leagues – which can be just as unsavoury a carry-on as the Premier league oligarchy, just on a smaller scale. Plus they’ve had their own problems with dodgy dealings recently… Kings Lynn might be more promising, especially with Culverhouse in charge (though I suspect they’ve had to push the boat a long way out to afford him – it may just disappear over the horizon). Incidentally, with advanced rail tickets and a senior railcard, and a pleasant bike ride from Liverpool Street to Peckham, my ‘away days’ cost me around £20, a lot cheaper than watching your lot… Anyway, let’s keep talking. Oh, and (Paul C. 5) let’s shut down the internet too…
I agree with much of this, but is there not a bit of an artificial generational divide being put forward? I hear and see as much of the rancour from ‘younger’ fans too, be it expecting results, abusing players or bemoaning a lack of excitement. But I too would be happy to see big football crash. For me football is a culture, cerainly not ‘entertainment’ or business.
I’m an old fart who may even have been one of Andy’s “neighbours” in the Jarrold.We are a pretty tolerant bunch on the whole and accept that football supporting is a cyclicle
process -all we want is to live long enough to witness Norwich City’s “Golden Age” (they had it down the road in the Robson era-what must be continual disillusionment now-tough!)
Mind you this year’s renewal was a close run thing -even our tolerance was put go the test in the Moxey/Neil debacles (post Wembley of course which was a brilliant appetiser )and the Deliagate Times interview.
However, hope, and thus renewal of season tickets, springs eternal.There are reasons for optimism at present -who knows that” Golden Era” may be just around the corner……