Soccernomics (27 page)

Many other European leagues also have sharp trends in attendance over time, further evidence that fans behave much more like consumers than like addicts. French, German, and Dutch attendance rates have soared since the 1990s. In eastern Europe, by contrast, we see what Brian Clough once called the great hordes of people not going to soccer matches. These empty stadiums are a postcommunist phenomenon.

Back in 1989, Nicolae Ceau¸sescu’s last year in power, the average crowd at a Romanian first-division match was officially 17,000, nearly as many as in England at the time. Now it is just 5,800.

The least-popular league in Europe is Estonia’s, with an average attendance in the country’s top division of 184 (presumably not so hard to count). And even given that Russian men are dying at such a startling rate, it’s disappointing that only 13,334 on average bother to turn up to Premier League matches there. The English Championship (average: 17,483) is more popular, and in fact outdraws every league in Europe east of Germany. The English and Germans are the only Europeans who go to watch mediocre soccer in numbers.

However, as a friend of ours in Moscow once advised, “Never believe any Russian statistic.” In ‘t Hout admits to doubting the stats for 186

certain eastern European countries. He gets particularly suspicious when the official attendance for a game is reported as a round number—3,000, for instance—as opposed to a precise one, like 3,142. He e-mails us, “In some leagues I found figures for one game of for example 2,000 and 5,000.”

The western European data tend to be more reliable. Even there, though, there are doubts. In England, is the attendance the number of people who actually went to the game or the number who held tickets for it? After all, many season-ticket holders skip some matches. At a small club at the end of a disappointing season, they might have trouble passing on their tickets. In countries such as Italy, ticket sellers have been known to wave through hundreds of scary-looking away fans without anyone paying. Some turnstile attendants might slip the odd bribe into their pockets and click somebody through, or let in friends for free. Clubs in some countries might report a lower attendance number than the real figure, to reduce the tax they pay on their ticket income. Anyway, there’s often nobody assiduously counting butts in seats.

Still, the figures on In ‘t Hout’s Web site do tell us something. Most of them are not made up. Especially in western Europe, they probably correlate to a large degree with the number of people who actually went to games. And we can accept the general finding that eastern European crowds are low. A glance at the pictures on TV tells us that. Admittedly, we can’t make a precise ranking of average crowds in all European countries, but we can identify a few countries where attendance at soccer seems to be particularly high as a share of their populations.

The way to identify these hot spots is first to count the combined average crowds for the main professional divisions in each country.

Let’s start with the largest European countries, which typically have three serious divisions each. England has four, but so as to compare it to France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, we will analyze only its top three divisions.

The sixty-eight English league clubs in those three divisions averaged about 1.3 million spectators between them in 2007–2008. (The T H E C O U N T R Y T H AT L O V E S S O C C E R M O S T

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clubs in League Two had another 104,000 in total, too few to make much difference to the national total.) That is, over two normal match days, in which every club played at home at least once, you would expect 1.3 million people to show up in England’s top three divisions. That is by no means a precise figure, but it is probably a decent indication.

We then divided that spectator average by the country’s population.

England has 51 million inhabitants; 1.3 divided by 51 = 0.025. That means that the total combined spectator average of English clubs equals 2.5 percent of the English population.

It turns out the English are the most enthusiastic stadium-goers of all the large European countries. Figure 9.2 shows the (very rough) stats for the top three divisions of each big country.

F I G U R E 9 . 2
Total spectator average as percentage of population, part 1

Country

Total spectator average as percentage of population

England

2.5

Spain

1.9

Germany

1.5

Italy 1.2

France

0.9

Spain’s average included only the top two divisions—all that In ‘t Hout’s Web site had. However, in the other large countries the crowds for the third division added only between 0.1 and 0.2 percent to the national total.

So far the English have lived up to their reputation as great consumers (if not players) of soccer. But when we compare them to the smaller western European nations, their spectating becomes less spectacular. The Scots, for one, are much more eager watchers of soccer. The average Scottish Premier League match drew a crowd of 15,580 in 2007–2008, which is not bad for a country of 5.1 million people. If the English went in equal proportions, taking into account the fact that the English Premier League has eight more teams than Scotland’s, the average top-flight English match would draw a crowd of about 90,000.

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You might even say that the English are somewhat lackluster fans, given that they have the best teams on earth playing on their local fields. On the other hand, they also have to pay the highest ticket prices on earth.

The Scots are among the European spectating elite, if not at the very top. Figure 9.3 shows the European countries whose inhabitants, according to www.european-football-statistics.co.uk, are most inclined to watch professional soccer.

F I G U R E 9 . 3
Total spectator average as percentage of population, part 2

Country

Total spectator average as percentage of population

Cyprus

4.8

Iceland

4.4

Scotland 3.9

Norway

3.7

For Scotland and Norway, we counted attendance figures in the top two divisions; for even smaller Cyprus and Iceland, only the top one.

All the clubs in the Icelandic top division put together had a total average attendance of just 13,284, about the same as Bradford City all by itself. However, that was pretty good for a country of just over 300,000

people who were also busy buying up the world’s subprime mortgages and running West Ham at the time.

It would be silly to treat these figures as exact to the decimal point.

On the other hand, these are countries that tend to produce fairly reliable statistics. Norway is wealthy and hyperorganized. Iceland was wealthy until it discovered subprimes, and it remains hyperorganized.

Scottish soccer has modern stadiums and voracious marketing officials, who keep elaborate electronic databases of their supporters. They have a pretty good idea of how many come to matches. Paul in ‘t Hout says he considers the Norwegian, Icelandic, and Scottish attendance data quite reliable, because they are reported as exact figures—3,921 or 5,812

spectators. He is more suspicious of Cyprus, where the figures are reported as round numbers like 2,000 or 9,000. Also, he admits, “I only have one source in Cyprus and so I cannot verify the figures.”

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Still, we can say with some confidence that these top four nations love going to watch soccer. Their position at the top of these rankings is not a one-shot deal. When we did this exercise in 2001, Cyprus was also in first place, and Scotland’s lead over England was as large as it was in 2008. People in these countries watch in astonishing numbers, given how poor their leagues are. To quote Nick Hornby, marveling at the thousands of people who watch even the most pathetic English clubs, “Why, really, should anyone have gone at all?”

Each of the top four gets a star in our quest to find Europe’s most enthusiastic soccer nation. Two of the top four—Norway and Iceland—also appeared in our very cautious list of the countries that played the most soccer. They now lead the pack with two stars each. The other eager playing nations had unspectacular average crowds, with the Netherlands the best of the lot at 2.5 percent of the country’s population. As for the Faeroes, even In ‘t Hout doesn’t have the attendance figures.

NATIONS OF COUCH POTATOES:

THE MOST POPULAR TV PROGRAMS IN HISTORY

In our quest to establish which country cares most about soccer, one statistic towers over all the others: TV viewing figures. After all, relatively few people actually play soccer—seldom more than 10 percent of a country’s inhabitants—and even fewer watch it in stadiums. In any case, we have seen the flaws in the data for playing and spectating. But we do have good figures for the most popular way to consume soccer: watching World Cups and European championships on TV. Viewing figures are the final piece of evidence to assess before we can name the most soccer-mad country in Europe.

TV ratings have plunged over the past thirty years. Once upon a time only the BBC broadcast in Britain, and so every program the BBC

aired had a market share of 100 percent of viewers. Then television ex-panded: first came other free channels like ITV and Channel Four, and later satellite and broadband cable. Audiences in all rich countries splin-tered among the different channels. The share that any one show could 190

command slumped. In the US, for instance, thirty-six of the top forty-five shows ever aired were shown before 1990. But here’s the thing: all the top nine American programs after 1990 were sports events. Seven were Super Bowls, and the other two were ladies’ figure skating events from the 1994 Winter Olympics, which people watched because they knew that one American skater had paid someone to hobble her rival on the national team. Only sports could still unite Americans on the sofa.

It is the same in Germany, where seven out of the eight highest-rated programs of all time involve the German soccer team playing in a major tournament. In Britain only the 1966 World Cup final and the 1970 FA Cup final replay between Leeds and Chelsea make the top eight. Still, here too big soccer tournaments provide some of the communal glue once supplied by trade unions, churches, and royal weddings. Possibly the best chance English people get to bond with each other nowadays, unless they are weeping over the passing of a reality-TV star, is during a World Cup.

Big soccer matches have that sort of unifying role in most European countries. Their appeal goes beyond men. Forty percent of the global audience for Euro 2004 was female. In fact, it is the long-term rise in female viewers that has made televised soccer more popular than ever before.

Before we can work out which country watches most soccer on TV, we need to separate the reliable viewing data from the false ones. Organizations like FIFA and the International Olympic Committee report the highest numbers they can. The more TV viewers an event attracts, the more advertising that will flow to the event, and the more that broadcasters will pay to screen it. Hence the improbable tallies that organizers sometimes cite for their games. According to FIFA, a cool 715 million people watched the World Cup final in 2006. Even this claim looks modest compared to the 1.5 billion who supposedly saw the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. What to believe?

This is where Kevin Alavy comes in. Alavy is head of analytics at Futures Sport & Entertainment. His job is to sit in London working T H E C O U N T R Y T H AT L O V E S S O C C E R M O S T

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out how many people really watch different sporting events, though in fact he is far more charming than that description implies. This is how he defines his work: “Very simply, are these sports events worth the massive investment that they typically cost, and how can my clients get even more value from their association with sport?”

Alavy can both explain how the inflated numbers were invented and give advertisers (and some of the rights holders) the more reliable estimates they need. He also extracts trends from the mountains of broadcasting data that exist nowadays. For this book, he gave us some insight into the data he has been gathering on World Cups and European championships since 1998. Using it, we can identify the most fanatical soccer nation in Europe.

Around the world, TV data are extrapolated from the viewing habits of a sample of the population—in the US, about 10,000 people. Individuals used to get paid a small fee to keep a diary of their TV consump-tion. Then came the “people meter”: a little electronic box attached to a TV set that allows each person in a household to indicate when they are watching. Invented in Britain, the people meter is now used in most wealthy countries to measure viewing. Alavy calls it “the gold standard of global media research.”

To see how “people meter” data differ from the inflated data, consider the Super Bowl. It is indisputably the most watched event in the US. The last ten Super Bowls have been the ten most watched American TV programs of the last decade. But exactly how watched were they? Figures of 750 million to 1 billion global viewers per game get cited. Instead, using the “people meter” data, Alavy puts a typical Super Bowl’s average live audience at about 100 million viewers, or about one-third of all Americans excluding the under-five set. (That is a mammoth figure, except when compared to the viewing figures for big soccer games. For instance, six matches at Euro 2004 drew a larger live global audience than that year’s Super Bowl.) The inflated figure of “750 million to 1 billion” is not an outright lie. Rather, it is a reasonable guess as to the number of people in the world who could have watched the Super Bowl on TV because they subscribe to the right channels.

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Using the “people meter,” Alavy has collected verifiable viewing figures for sports in fifty-four countries. Thirty-one of the countries on his list are in Europe, twelve in Asia, ten in the Americas, and only one (South Africa) in Africa, a continent where there is almost no serious measurement of viewing habits. Many poorer countries still use diaries rather than people meters. Sadly, there are no reliable viewing figures either for Cyprus, Iceland, or Scotland, three of the four European countries with the highest relative attendance rates in stadiums. Cyprus and Iceland are too small for Futures Sport & Entertainment to have bothered to measure their viewing habits, and the Scottish figures are lumped together with Britain as a whole. Even so, for thirty-three of Alavy’s fifty-four countries, we have figures for at least four of the six major soccer tournaments covered since the World Cup of 1998.