Is the bubble slowly bursting?
Do not let today’s record Premiership attendance at Old Trafford fool you. The health of the nation’s top league may not be as zestful as its marketeers portray.
A global brand such as Manchester United will always attract fans from far and wide to fill their cavernous stadium, especially when they are riding high at the top of the league.
But, it is when you look beyond this rosy facade that you realise all is not so well at England’s top table.
United’s local rivals, Manchester City, only filled 2,000 of their 5,000 available seats at Wigan yesterday with fans citing extortionate ticket prices as being the crucial factor.
Although the £35 Wigan are charging is a massive £10 hike on last year’s ticket price, it is still far off the £47 demanded by Chelsea and Arsenal for the privilege of visiting their salubrious stadia.
The game was televised and City are going through a torrid time on the pitch (exacerbated by the 4-0 thrashing they were subjected to at the JJB) but these elements should not have dissuaded a normally fervent support to make one of their shortest away trips.
Even more alarming news came from Newcastle last weekend when their lowest home attendance in over 6 years watched the capitulation against Bolton.
Again, there are several factors to explain this anomaly, with the most convincing being the amount of home games the fans have to fork out for. Fenerbahce visited St James’s Park in the UEFA Cup just 4 days later.
The poor football that Newcastle and Manchester City are serving up right now will also make fans think twice about reaching into their wallets again. But what has happened to fans turning up to support their team when they most need it?
What we need here is a paradigm shift. It is clear now that the “magic” of the Premiership cannot sell tickets alone. Fans are becoming wiser and voting with their feet.
Cheap European flights mean that it is now better value to go and watch football at the San Siro or the Camp Nou rather than Stamford Bridge or Craven Cottage.
This was definitely the case during my time spent in Germany when I could easily get tickets for the Bundesliga’s top games, such as Borussia Dortmund vs Bayern Munich, for as little as £7.
What I also regularly encountered were armies of teenage fans surrounding me at the games, who regarded football as a cheap afternoon’s entertainment.
This all resulted in full stadia (the Bundesliga sets Europe’s highest average attendance figures every season), a more diverse crowd and thereby a more electric atmosphere.
The campaigning David Conn revealed in the Guardian last Wednesday that only 9% of the Premiership’s live viewers are below the age of 24.
White middle-aged men are the only people who can afford to regularly afford to visit football grounds which used to be the stronghold of this nation’s working classes.
By catering for this market Premiership clubs are entertaining an aging attendance without enthusing a new breed of younger fans, who are increasingly becoming accustomed to solely watching football on television.
If clubs continue to tread this path they are threatening to turn this week’s surprising figures into an uncontrollable trend.
Let us hope then that our clubs soon acknowledge that the fans are the lifeblood of their sport and even the TV money may dry up if Sky repetitively have to broadcast games from deserted stadia.
Unfortunately the only way that the the Premiership will get this wake up call and drastically reduce ticket prices is if people stay at home en masse.
A sad state of affairs.
Painful puns and shoddy scapegoats
Just as autumn follows summer, hyperbolic headlines follow a shambolic England performance.
Despondent England fans arose this morning, perused the popular press and would have had no doubt as to who was to blame for last night’s debacle in Zagreb.
The red tops all decided to wheel out puns along the lines of The Sun’s “It’s up to you MISSES Robinson”, thereby firmly pinning the blame on Tottenham’s shot-stopper Paul Robinson.
The tabloids love to over-simplify matters by selecting a scapegoat (this has in recent times been a position reserved for Sven Goran Eriksson) but picking on Robinson is a step too far.
Yes, Robinson was at the heart of the game’s most calamitous moment, taking a fresh air shot at Gary Neville’s back pass and conceding the second goal, but I fail to see what he did wrong.
The ball wickedly bobbled over his swinging foot and would have been firmly cleared had it not done so.
If any one person is to blame for this goal then it has to be Gary Neville, who should have aimed the back pass wide of goal.
This, however, clearly went unnoticed by the tabloid sub-editors who were already having fun photoshopping Robinson into a clown and toying with their “Misses Robinson” headlines.
What also went unconsidered was the distinct possibility that England, already 1-0 down, would have probably lost the game regardless of this blunder.
Croatia are arguably the strongest team in England’s qualifying group and have not lost a game at home in over five years.
It was therefore highly unlikely that Steve McClaren’s depleted side, deploying an experimental 3-5-2 formation would have left the Maskimir Stadion cauldron with three points.
Yet the popular print and broadcast media (Rupert Murdoch’s Sky and Sun being chief culprits) continue to promote the Premiership as the undisputed “best league in the world” and continually demand stellar international performances from its English stars.
When this fails to materialise, as it so often does with England, easy excuses are rapidly sought.
When we take England’s limp performance at the World Cup and Saturday’s insipid stalemate at home to Macedonia into account, the rational person would undoubtedly think that England could well be on a hiding to nothing away in Croatia. And so it proved.
This considered approach does not sell (tabloid) newspapers or expensive satellite subscriptions of course, so these outlets have to distort the truth for financial gain.
As Public Enemy’s Chuck D would have proclaimed, “don’t believe the hype!”
A distant, belated cry of “Gotcha!”
Yesterday’s news that TalkSport had finally broken the BBC’s stranglehold over live Premiership radio commentary may well have riled media mogul Kelvin MacKenzie.
The man whose marketing acumen brought The Sun unparalleled success throughout the 80s had mercilessly criticised the Beeb in recent years over its monopoly of the radio rights.
At the helm of TalkSport from 1998 to 2005, MacKenzie tirelessly complained how the BBC’s vast cash resources effectively priced his commercial outfit out of the market.
This even led to the station getting highly creative during the 2002 World Cup. It decided to offer a renegade alternative to the stuffy “official” Five Live coverage by sitting commentators in front of high definition TVs in their London studios to undertake “as live” commentaries.
This, along with countless other MacKenzie-esque publicity stunts, definitely placed TalkSport in the nation’s consciousness but had little effect in gaining those all important rights.
MacKenzie subsequently left the station in June last year selling his stake to Northern Ireland’s UTV plc and therefore leaving his ultimate ambition unfulfilled.
But now, all of a sudden, and largely thanks to a new EU initiative to dismantle monopolies of football broadcasting rights, TalkSport has now been awarded 32 Saturday games each season from 2007 to 2010.
It may pale in comparison to the 192 that will be aired on Five Live and Five Live Sports Extra but this is a substantial achievement considering the previous seven barren years.
It is highly similar to Setanta Sport’s contract to broadcast a handful of live TV games from next season with the important difference being that the punters will not have to fork out yet more money to hear the TalkSport coverage.
So let us spare a thought for poor old Kelvin. The timing of this new EU directive was a bit unlucky but the fact that he failed in his tenure at TalkSport to get this far only serves to underline how nightmarish his career in the broadcast media has been.
He was regarded with disdain during his brief stint at Sky News in 1994 and then did little to enhance his reputation at the ill-fated cable operation Live TV!.
This is perhaps why he is now back as a columnist on his beloved “Currant Bun” (The Sun).
Wherever there is a loser there has to be a winner and in this instance it is the avaricious Premiership.
This radio deal was the final piece in the complex broadcasting rights puzzle that has netted Richard Scudamore and his cronies a preposterous £2.5 billion for the coming three seasons.
Who says that there’s no money to be made in football!?
Another load of ballacks!
Having finally emerged from the post-World Cup black hole it is high time to get back to a bit of idle blogging.
For those of you who do not know, I am now studying a broadcast journalism postgrad at the University of Westminster. So you could say that my fledgling career as a football journalist has begun in earnest.
There could not be enough reasons to resume my musings on our national obsession, with the BBC bung allegations, Lord Steven’s corruption report and England’s customary woes already pumping this season flush with colour.
So sit back and enjoy the ride as I once again get on my virtual high horse and survey the ruins of the not-so-beautiful game…..