Supporter loyalty and the football club commercial imperative
Football clubs need to make money but how far are you willing to let yours go?
Another Premier League weekend, another barrage of VAR tedium and apparent ignorance of the fact that football is about goals and re-refereeing every conceivable incident to find a reason to disallow them is fundamentally anti-football.
Correctness is usually impossible. In fact, I would argue that it’s almost always impossible in football and I include offside in that.
I won’t bore you with the details because I’ve written about it before but I believe only half-jokingly that offside doesn’t exist.
Draw inaccurate lines across that and smoke it.
Supporter loyalty and the football club commercial imperative
Aston Villa’s ticketing regulations for the 2023/24 season were received with some hostility by the club’s supporters. There shouldn’t be any controversy. Aston Villa Football Club is a business and is entitled to maximise its profitability and, more pertinently, to protect itself from the threat of lost revenue.
Villa’s measures seek to reduce ticket touting and there’s nothing shocking about them. But everything has its context, and the mood into which Villa planted the updated policy has become increasingly hostile
It’s hardly surprising that explicitly outlining the bans that will be handed out to supporters committing the heinous acts of “passing on a match ticket or a season ticket without re-assigning this to the correct named user” or “Passing on your Fan ID for the purpose of unauthorised home match ticket purchasing” should be seen as somewhat draconian, logical though they are from a business perspective.
Most supporters understand the need for clubs to make money and adhere to regulations but Villa’s new commercial regime has the misfortune of overseeing the club at the confluence of the team’s return to European football and the crippling cost of living crisis affecting supporters.
Discord has been growing. Season ticket price increases yielded an icy response. Villa’s choice to sneak one last gambling shirt sponsorship deal under the tape before it’s banned – and with one of the most rancid organisations to boot – split supporters still further.
Perhaps worst of all, the introduction and construction of the Terrace View in the iconic Holte End gave the impression, rightly or wrongly, of allowing wealthy supporters to jump the queue in the season ticket waiting list if they’re willing to pay a premium for not very much in the way of matchday value. That it’s a literal scar on the Holte End merely exacerbates the rancour.
Herein lies one of the great dividing lines of modern football supporter culture. In the red corner, supporters who value only victory. In the blue corner, supporters who think their relationship to their clubs should run deeper than that. Even the right balance, if it exists, pleases few.
The logical, rational choice is to advocate for a club to pursue its commercial imperative even to the financial detriment of the supporters. The only reason this position can survive contact with air is that supporters desire, expect, demand success – often to an unreasonable degree.
On the other hand, some supporters (often but not always those with an historical or current attendance record and an active interest in wider football supporter culture) want to be treated properly and fairly even to the reasonable detriment of their club’s prospects on the field.
Every football supporter is situated somewhere on the continuum between one and the other. That continuum exists purely because of one enormously complicated human construct that cannot be separated from football supporter culture.
Loyalty means that supporters will put up with a lot that “customers” would not. It also gives us an elevated sense of our place in the game. We are not consumers. We are participants. We matter.
The loyalty of football supporters is fascinating not only because it enables clubs to both reward us and take advantage of us, but because no two interpretations of it are alike. When it comes to clubs prioritising their commercial imperative, we each have a different tolerance level.
But if we broadly lump football supporters into two camps, the division is between one group that see clubs as financially exploiting the loyalty of their supporters and another that believes that spending money on football is a choice; a football club is a business that has the right to set prices as it sees fit.
One of the complaints among Villa supporters was about an increase in season ticket prices. Ticket pricing and other revenue sources such as replica shirts and merchandising are commercially useful for clubs but are overshadowed at the top level by television income. Match-going supporters understandably see price hikes as unnecessary tests of their loyalty.
Fan bases are divided here, too, and the basic arguments are the same. Season tickets are too expensive and match ticket prices are too high but a football club is a business involved in competitive sport. Ultimately, individual supporters have no right to attend or buy a shirt if they can’t afford whatever price tag is placed upon them.
My suspicion is that the latter view is motivated by personal economic politics as well as obsession with on-field success. Football’s financial fair play farce exacerbates the issue, forcing even wealthy and well-meaning benefactors to squeeze every penny out of supporters and iffy sponsors in order to compete.
Wanting your football club to succeed isn’t wrong. We all want that. What differentiates one supporter from another is the extent to which they’re willing to swallow the cost of that success themselves financially or in terms of moral compromise. In a cost of living crisis, clubs mismanaging that balance – Villa have repeatedly done so of late – is a near criminal abuse of their supporters.
Football clubs are businesses, yet not. They’re not typical or normal but absolutely unique in their cultural role and their place in our lives. Boiling it down to sheer numbers is wilfully stupid, an indicator of politics or a fixation on success or both.
What it misses is fundamental to the entire football experience: supporters are more than customers and they have power, rights and a connection with their clubs that outstrips any other brand loyalty on earth.
Pursuit of the commercial imperative at the expense of supporters breaks down that connection, gradually eroding it as football becomes too expensive or too morally questionable to tolerate.
Supporters do understand the reasons. While some feel an increasing distance from their clubs as a result, others are willing to watch it happen in order that some people they’ll never know might win a trophy they’ll never touch.
It’s the clubs who can afford to lose supporters who behave in this way and it’s noteworthy that Aston Villa have spent a great deal of the last decade practically begging supporters to buy tickets.
Now that demand is bigger than supply, prices have gone up, the Holte End has been vandalised and despicable sponsors are welcome as long as they pay. The disregard for supporters is brazen. They are expendable and it shows. It’s no wonder people are annoyed.
If you enjoyed the main piece, please share this week’s newsletter using the button below.
“It is too easy for fans to claim corruption on social media and clubs have a responsibility not to incite more of it.”
Daniel Storey responds to the news that Nottingham Forest (his own club, mind you) had lodged a formal complaint about refereeing in their recent match against Manchester United. It’s not a Forest issue or a Liverpool issue – see also the i link below – but one that needs addressing by the game as a whole.
We can never stop arseholes being arseholes, not least on Twitter, where the arseholes are a special breed even by social media standards. But we can expect clubs to act in a professional manner and avoid stoking the fires of conspiracy theory and paranoia.
Salty beef extracts
Gareth Southgate, England’s most polarising figure, is ‘just sticking to football’ (The Guardian)
The Lewes Dilemma (Unexpected Delirium)
Here come the men, doing their manly things again (Unexpected Delirium)
A Tangled Legacy (Kult)
South American Portraits (Terrace Edition)
Dessert
I’ve always been a sucker for black football boots with orange details. Bravo, Umbro Tocco 3 Pro.
By the way…
High Protein Beef Paste is a free newsletter.
However, if you’ve enjoyed my writing over the years you might consider purchasing a Systematic Decline art print.
I’m open to writing commissions and artistic collaborations. Get in touch if you’d like a chat.
That’s your lot. Thanks for reading. Please subscribe if you enjoyed it and haven’t done so yet.
Don’t be shy when it comes to sharing the newsletter. If I can get a decent handful of subscribers I can sack off Twitter and isn’t that the dream for all of us?
Have a week.