Soccernomics (30 page)

presents a few of United’s estimates of the past few years.

F I G U R E 1 0 . 1
Fan estimates

Year

Estimated Fans

Source

2003

75 million

Mori

2007

About 90 million

Manchester United

2008

333 million

TNS Sport

(including 139 million

“core fans”)

None of these estimates is necessarily wrong. There may well be 333

million people on earth who have feelings for Manchester United.

However, few of these “fans” are likely to be lifelong Hornbyesque devotees. Jose Angel Sanchez, now chief executive of Real Madrid, a A R E S O C C E R F A N S P O LY G A M I S T S ?

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club with its own share of foreign serial supporters, thought many of these serial fans might eventually evolve into Hornbys. He told us in 2003, “We used to say that the chances of changing your team are less than changing your partner or even your sex. But the way that people enter soccer in Asia is different: they enter through the stars. But this will not stay this way, in my opinion.” Well, perhaps.

Still, surely British fans are a lot more loyal than those fickle Chinese, right? Unfortunately, polling suggests otherwise. In 2008 Sport+Markt found that Chelsea had 2.4 million “fans” in Britain. Again according to Sport+Markt, that represented a rise of 523 percent in the five years since Roman Abramovich had bought the club. Yet even that figure of 2.4 million represented a swift decline: in 2006, when, no doubt coinci-dentally, Chelsea had just won the league twice running, Sport+Markt credited the club with a mammoth 3.8 million British fans.

Again, we are not saying that Sport+Markt’s figures were wrong.

Rather, its premise was. To serial supporters, the question “Which is your preferred soccer club?” does not make sense. It presumes that everyone who likes soccer is a one-club Hornbyesque Fan. Instead, researchers should be asking, “Which
are
your preferred soccer
clubs
?” After all, a very large proportion of people who like soccer are polygamous consumers. One of the authors of this book, Stefan, as a Saturday-morning coach of grade school children, has seen the color of the shirts switch from red to blue and back again depending on who last won the league.

Newly rising clubs like Chelsea are particularly prone to attracting short-term fans, says Tekle of Sport+Markt. Clubs like Liverpool or Manchester United with stronger brands tend to have more loyal long-term supporters, he adds. In fact, the likes of Manchester United are likely to have both far more Hornbys
and
far more casual fans than other clubs. But detractors of United tend to seize upon the hordes of casual fans and don’t mention the Hornbys.

Hornby himself recognized the prevalence of casual fans in soccer.

Many of the people who pop up briefly in the pages of
Fever Pitch
enjoy the game but are not wedded to a particular club. Hornby calls this type the “sod-that-for-a-lark floating punter,” and speaks of it with admiration: 208

“I would like to be one of those people who treat their local team like their local restaurant, and thus withdraw their patronage if they are being served up noxious rubbish.”

SPECTATORS: THE HARD CORE

We know there are, broadly speaking, two types of soccer fan: the Hornbys and the sod-that-for-a-lark floating punters. We know that the sod-that-for-a-lark people are heavily represented among foreign fans of clubs like United, and even seem to be pretty common in Britain. By 2006, if we can believe Sport+Markt’s figures, about 90 percent of Chelsea’s fans were people who had not supported them in 2003. No doubt a club like Hartlepool has a higher percentage of devoted Hornbys among its fans, but then clubs like Hartlepool don’t have many fans anyway.

One might carp that the sod-that-for-a-lark lot are mostly just armchair fans, and that “real” fans tend to be Hornbys. However, it would be wrong to dismiss armchair fans as irrelevant. The overwhelming majority of soccer fans in Britain are armchair fans, in the sense that they hardly ever go to games. In a Mori poll in 2003, 45 percent of British adults expressed an interest in soccer. But we’ve seen that the total average weekly attendance figures of all professional clubs in England and Scotland equal only about 3 percent of the population. In other words, most of the country’s soccer fans rarely or never enter soccer stadiums.

Fletcher Research, in one of the first serious market analyses of English soccer, in 1997 found that only about 5 percent of supporters of Premier League clubs attend even one match in an average season. If only a small minority of soccer fans get to the stadium at all, even fewer see every single home game for years on end, as Hornby did.

Most soccer fans are armchair supporters. If we want to unearth the Hornbys, we need to concentrate on the elite of fans who actually go to games: the spectators.

We know that in the Premier League at least, most spectators now watch every home game their club plays. Often they have to: at the A R E S O C C E R F A N S P O LY G A M I S T S ?

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most successful clubs, only season-ticket holders can get seats. Many of these regular spectators may be sod-that-for-a-lark punters at heart, who have been enticed by ticketing policies to show up every week.

However, it’s among this group of week-in and week-out spectators that we must look for the small hard core of lifelong Hornbys in En -

glish soccer. At moments of high emotion, the TV cameras like to zoom in on spectators in the stands—heads in hands, or hugging their friends—as if these people incarnated the feelings of the club’s millions of supporters. They don’t. Rather, they are the exceptions, the fanatical few who bother to go to games. Some of these spectators presumably support their club “through thick and thin,” watching them unto eternity like Hornby does.

At least, that is the theory. But we studied attendance numbers in English soccer over the past sixty years, and found that even among the actual spectators, a startlingly high proportion appeared to be sod-this-for-a-lark types.

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Nobody seems to have tried before to calculate how many British fans are Hornbys. Yet the figures required to make some sort of estimate do exist. Paul In ‘t Hout’s marvelous Web site, www.european-football-statistics.co.uk, has statistics on attendance rates and league performance for all clubs in the top four divisions of English soccer from 1947 through 2008. Using these data, we can find out (a) the annual mortality rate of soccer spectators; that is, how many of the people who watched last season don’t come back the next? and (b) the sensitivity of new spectators to the success of teams. Do most newcomers flock to Chelsea when Chelsea wins the league?

Our model itself reveals some of the logic of soccer fandom. Generally speaking, teams cannot both have very loyal Hornbyesque Fans (that is, a low mortality rate) and at the same time be capable of attracting large numbers of new spectators when they are successful. If most of the crowd consisted of Hornbys who never gave up their seats, then when a team did well, there would be no room in the stadium for all the new 210

fans who wanted to watch them. So floating supporters can get tickets only if the mortality rate of the existing spectators is high enough.

Previous studies have shown that a club’s attendance tends to rise and fall with its league position. (The rare exceptions include Newcastle, Sunderland, and the Manchester City of the late 1990s.) In our data for the sixty-one-year period, there were 4,454 changes in clubs’ league position. In 64 percent of the cases where the club rose in the league, its home crowd increased, too. In 74 percent of the “down” years, home attendance fell. This means that 69 percent of all cases confirmed the simple hypothesis that fans respond to performance. Simply put: there is a market in soccer spectators. The few academics who study fandom—

most of them in the US—explain the fans’ motives through the psychological phenomenon of “BIRGing,” or “basking in reflected glory.”

To account for the ebb and flow of English soccer fans, we have constructed a very simple model. It consists of two elements. First, there are the “new fans” coming into the game. New fans are estimated as the difference between the total attendance for the season and the number of loyal fans left over from the previous season. We divide new fans into two groups: the BIRGers, who come to watch the team depending on its success, and those who come for reasons we can’t explain. We will treat these reasons as random factors, although each person probably had a good reason to come to the game at the time—a friend invited him, a girlfriend left him, or some such.

The second element of our model is the “loyal fans”: those who came back from the previous season. Loyal fans are estimated as the difference between the total attendance for the season and the new fans entering the game. Of course, the difference between the loyal fans plus the new fans and last season’s attendance is the “lost fans.” We can think of these lost fans as falling into two groups as well: the BIRGers who were lost to the club because its performance declined, and those who were lost for other reasons that we cannot measure (got back together with girlfriend, took up DIY, or whatever).

Now, we are not claiming that we can identify new fans, loyal fans, and lost fans
individually
. However, we can identify these categories
in
A R E S O C C E R F A N S P O LY G A M I S T S ?

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a statistical sense
, as groups. We know how many people are in each group, even if we do not know their names.

Our model produces two results. First, it gives us an estimate of the BIRGers: the fraction of new fans that a team can expect to attract as a result of the position it achieves in the league. Looking at the annual changes in attendance figures, we found that spectators are only mildly sensitive to a team’s performance. Our estimates implied that the club that won the Premier League would attract 2.5 percent of all new spectators entering the league the next season. However, a team that finished at the bottom of the Premier League, or at the top of the Championship (English soccer’s second tier), does almost as well: it attracts 2 percent of all the league’s new spectators. Teams in the middle of the four divisions (that is, those ranked around forty-sixth in England) would attract 1 percent of all new spectators, while teams at the very bottom of the fourth tier would attract almost nobody. In short, while new spectators do like success, the vast majority of them are not simple BIRGers, glory hunters. Judging by the ebb and flow of crowds over the sixty-one years, most people seem to go to a plausible club playing near their home.

That is the profile of the newcomers. But how many of last year’s crowd do they replace? What is the mortality rate of the existing spectators?

We know how many spectators each club lost or gained, season by season for sixty-one years. We also know how many spectators the league as a whole lost or gained. That means that for every club we can calculate the average percentage of last season’s fans who did not come back for the new season. And the percentage that fits the data best: 50.

Yes: on average in the postwar era, half of all spectators in English soccer did not take their seats again the next season.

Here’s an example of how the model works (for the sake of simplic-ity, we have rounded up all numbers):

Bristol City finished the 2006–2007 season in second place in League One. The team’s total attendance that season was 295,000. The total attendance for all four divisions was 29.5 million.

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The next season,

(a) The total attendance for all four divisions rose by 400,000, to 29.9 million

(b) Bristol City came in fourth in the Championship—a rise of twenty-two places

So to calculate Bristol City’s expected attendance in 2007–2008, we estimate their numbers of loyal “returning” fans and of new fans: (c) Loyal fans are 50 percent of the previous season’s total: 148,000

(d) New fans are calculated by estimating Bristol City’s share (based on league performance) of new fans of the entire league:

(e) We predict 15.1 million new spectators for English soccer as a whole. That equals this year’s total attendance (29.9 million) minus loyal fans from last year (50 percent of 29.5 million = 14.8

million) = 15.1 million

(f ) Given that Bristol City finished twenty-fourth out of ninety-two clubs, we estimate its share of all new fans in the country at 1.7

percent. Its number of new fans should therefore equal .017 x 15.1

million = 257,000

(g) So Bristol City’s loyal + new spectators = 148,000 + 257,000 =

405,000

(h) Bristol City’s actual number for 2007–2008 was 374,000, so our model overestimated their support by 31,000, or 8 percent

Obviously, the model does not work perfectly for every club. However, taking all ninety-two clubs together, the estimate that fits the data best is that 50 percent of last season’s fans do not return. To quote one analysis of the English game: “One Third Division club in the London area, for example, has an estimated ‘hard core’ support of about 10,000; this rises to 20,000 according to the team’s success and the standing of the visiting team.” These words were written in 1951 in an economic study of soccer published by the London-based Political and Economic A R E S O C C E R F A N S P O LY G A M I S T S ?

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Planning think tank. They remain a good summary of English fandom as a whole since the war.

The discovery that half of all spectators—supposedly the hardest of hard-core Fans—do not bother to return the next season conflicts with the Hornby version of loyal one-club fandom. Yet it has to be true, to explain the churn we see in attendance numbers. Even a club like Leeds, noted for its devoted fans—while stuck in League One it draws significantly larger crowds than Juventus—has seen attendance fall from a peak of 755,000 in the 2001–2002 season to only 479,000 in 2006–2007.

Nor is this high mortality rate a new phenomenon. The sixty-one years of attendance data suggest that habits of English spectators have changed little over the years. While there has always been a hard core of Hornbys, it seems it has also always been the case that the majority of people who go to English soccer matches go only once in a while, and are often quite fluid about whom they choose to watch. And given that spectators are the fans who commit most time and money to the game, their devotion is in most cases really rather limited. The long-term devoted spectator of the kind that Hornby described in
Fever Pitch
, far from being typical, is a rare species. Committed one-club lifelong fandom is a beautiful theory—or as Gandhi supposedly said of Western civ-ilization, “It would be a good idea.” The reality is that in English soccer, the loyal Hornbys are a small shoal in an ocean of casual Rachmans.