Soccernomics (31 page)

England may be a nation of fans, but it’s scarcely a nation of Hornbys.

CALL YOURSELVES “LOYAL SUPPORTERS”

In 1996 Alan Tapp, a professor of marketing at Bristol Business School, started to develop a relationship with a struggling club in the Premier League. Over the next four years he met the club’s executives, got to see the data they had on their supporters, and assembled a team of researchers who conducted hundreds of interviews with the club’s fans.

Tapp eventually published two papers about his work in academic marketing journals. Together they add up to a rare, marvelous study of how 214

the spectators of one club actually behave. Tapp titled his second paper, published in 2004, “The Loyalty of Soccer Fans—We’ll Support You Evermore?” with a very pregnant question mark. What he found was that fans talk loyal, but don’t always act it.

The club Tapp and his colleague Jeff Clowes studied—based in a Midlands town that is quite easy to identify—was not very good. It wasn’t the sort of outfit to attract many BIRGing glory hunters. Most of the club’s spectators lived locally. In a survey in 1998, a massive 87

percent of them agreed slightly or strongly with the phrase, “I would describe myself as a loyal supporter.”

Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they? Tapp cautions that many of those 87 percent might have been engaging in “socially desirable responding.” After all, almost nobody in English soccer calls himself a

“sod-that-for-a-lark floating punter.” That would be socially taboo.

Most fans told Tapp and Clowes that they regarded sod-that-for-a-lark types as “pariahs.” As Rick Parry said, English fans pride themselves on their loyalty.

Yet when Tapp studied how these spectators behaved, he found a peculiar lack of loyalty. To start with the most basic fact: the club’s average crowd during the four-year period of study slipped from about 24,000 to just 16,000.

The average across the period was about 21,000, which broke down as follows:

• About 8,000 season-ticket holders

• Another 8,000 places typically filled from a group of 15,000 or so regular attendees

• 5,000 spectators who came from “a ‘revolving door’ of perhaps 20,000 ‘casual fans’”

Tapp came up with three labels for the different groups: “fanatics,”

“committed casuals,” and “carefree casuals.”

The “fanatics,” or Hornbys, were mostly season-ticket holders. Tapp said some of these people were veritable “‘soccer extremists’ who had A R E S O C C E R F A N S P O LY G A M I S T S ?

215

commitment to the sport and the club that is arguably unparalleled in other business or leisure sectors.” There was the man who, when asked by Tapp’s team what he would save if there were a fire in his house, replied, “Oh my [match] programs and tapes. No question. And my wife and kids of course.” Many of the fanatics came from the local area, and had supported the club since childhood.

But even some of the fanatics were less fanatical than they claimed to be. Tapp found that each season, on average, 1,000 of the 8,000 season-ticket holders did not renew their seats and were replaced by new people. “Even at the fanatic end, the loyalty bucket had significant leaks,”

he remarked.

The team was playing badly. In one season, a mere 2 percent of fans proclaimed themselves “very satisfied” with performances. However, it was not the bad soccer that was driving them away. When Tapp’s team asked people why they were letting their season tickets lapse, the lapsers usually talked about their lives away from the stadium. Fans were much more likely to give up their season tickets if they had children aged under five, or if they described their lives as “complicated.”

So it wasn’t that the lapsers felt less loyal to the team than the people who kept going year in, year out. They were simply at different stages in life. Some regular fans admitted that at one point in life “they had simply lost interest, often in their late teens and early 20s.” Others had been “triggered” by a son or daughter to return to the stadium.

Older people, whose lives were presumably more stable, were the most likely to renew their season tickets. Tapp surmises that they “have simply settled into some form of auto-repurchase.” In other words, showing up to the stadium year in, year out is not a good marker of loyalty.

Rather, it is a good marker of age.

At the far end of the scale from the “fanatics” were the “carefree casuals.” Few of the carefree casuals claimed to be “loyal supporters.”

They were “soccer fans” rather than “club fans,” they preferred to see a good game than a victory for their team, and they treated soccer as just one of several possible activities on a Saturday. Tapp noted, “Being club supporters is not part of their self-image.”

216

Many of the “carefree casuals” sometimes went to watch other teams. Tapp reckons that it is probable that some regulars at Derby County, for instance, also occasionally show up at Nottingham Forest, even if this flies in the face of everything we are always told about En -

glish soccer fans.

Tapp adds that these people are mostly not “brand switchers,” who switch from supporting one club to supporting another. Very few people love Derby one year, Forest the next, and Carlisle the year after.

Rather, these adulterous spectators are engaging in what marketing experts call “repertoire buying”: they purchase different brands at different times. In normal consumer markets in almost every country, “repertoire buyers” are thought to outnumber both “brand-loyal” and “price buyers.” In soccer, too, repertoire buyers seem to be fairly common. Tapp says, “Repertoire fans took a lot of pleasure from a multiplicity of aspects of the game itself, while single club fanatics were less interested in soccer, more devoted to the club as an entity.”

Tapp’s middle group of spectators at the Midlands club was made up of “committed casuals.” These people didn’t go to every match, but they did tend to describe themselves as “loyal supporters.” They rarely watched other clubs, and were more interested than the “carefree casuals” in seeing their team win. However, they too treated soccer as just one option for their Saturday. Tapp said they “perhaps have their soccer support in perspective with the rest of their lives.”

In short, through close-up study very rare in English soccer, he has gotten past the cliché of “We’ll support you evermore.” Instead, he found the same thing that we did: there are some Hornbys in British soccer, but even among the self-proclaimed “loyal supporters” of an in-glorious club they are outnumbered by casual fans who can take it or leave it. Tapp ends by cautioning sports marketers that for all the rhetoric of undying love pervading English soccer, fans’ “loyalty cannot be relied upon.” He urges marketers to “look under the surface of supporter loyalty,” where they will find “loyalty patterns quite similar to, say, supermarket goods sectors.”

A R E S O C C E R F A N S P O LY G A M I S T S ?

217

HORNBYS, CLIENTS, SPECTATORS, AND OTHERS

It turns out that few British soccer fans are either Hornbys or BIRGing glory hunters. Rather, most have a shifting relationship with the club or clubs that they support. Of the 50 percent of spectators who do not show up at their club the next season, the largest group may well continue to be monogamous fans of that club. They just can’t afford to go anymore, or are busy raising children, or have moved to another part of the country, or simply care less than they used to. The object of their love might not have changed, but the intensity has. Many of them may once have been Hornbys who fell for a team as an eight year old when their father took them to their first game. However, by the time they are twenty-eight or eighty-eight they are no longer the same fan. For many people, fandom is not a static condition but a process.

Other lapsed fans will have lost interest altogether. Others still might be shifting their allegiances to another club or clubs, because they have either moved to a new town, started to follow the team their kids support, or simply fallen for better soccer elsewhere. Rachman, for example, explains in his
Prospect
essay that he stopped supporting Chelsea

“because they were a terrible team, followed by violent cretins.”

Instead, he made a two-and-a-half-mile journey within West London and became a QPR fan. In the rhetoric of English soccer, the choice facing the supporter is often presented as stark: either he sticks with his local team, or he becomes a BIRGing glory hunter. However, reality is more nuanced. England is so densely stuffed with professional soccer clubs—

forty-three within ninety miles of Manchester, as we saw—that many people can find a new local side without going to the trouble of moving.

Then there is a dirty secret of English soccer: many fans support more than one team. If you live in Plymouth, say, you might support Plymouth Argyle, Chelsea, and Barcelona, and have a fondness for a half-dozen other clubs, even though if Plymouth ever makes the FA Cup final, you will travel to Wembley decked out as a “lifelong Plymouth fan.” Hornby himself, in
Fever Pitch
, supports Cambridge United 218

as well as Arsenal. In fact, whereas the usual analogy for soccer fandom is idealized monogamous marriage, a better one might be music fandom. People are fans of the Beatles, or the Cure, or the Pixies, but they generally like more than one band at the same time, and are capable of moving on when their heroes fade.

As usual, it was Arsène Wenger who put this best. In January 2009

he gave Arsenal’s Web site an untraditional account of how he thought fandom worked. “Soccer has different types of people coming to the game,” he said. “You have the client, who is the guy who pays one time to go to a big game and wants to be entertained. Then you have the spectator, who is the guy who comes to watch soccer. These two categories are between 40 and 60 [years old]. Then you have two other categories. The first is the supporter of the club. He supports his club and goes to as many games as he can. Then you have the fan. The fan is a guy between 15 and 25 years old who gives all his money to his club.”

Obviously, Wenger’s four categories are not exact. Here and there they even conflict with those of Tapp and Clowes, who found that many fans
lose
interest between fifteen and twenty-five. But Wenger agrees with them that there are several different categories of spectator, of varying emotional intensity, and that people move between these categories depending largely on their time in life.

Ties in soccer fandom are much looser than the rhetoric of “We’ll support you evermore” suggests. In that regard, they resemble ties of real existing marriage in Britain today. People still get married promising “till death do us part,” but in 2000 there were 141,000 divorces in England and Wales, six times as many as in 1960. About half of all adults in England and Wales are not presently married. A lifelong monogamous marriage has become almost as rare as a lifelong monogamous love of a soccer club.

THE INAUTHENTIC NATION

Against all evidence, the stereotype persists that the typical British soccer fan is a full-on Hornby. No wonder it does, because the tiny perA R E S O C C E R F A N S P O LY G A M I S T S ?

219

centage of fans who are Hornbys dominate the national conversation about fandom. Of course they do: they are the people who are most motivated to join the conversation. For them, following soccer is not just a hobby but an identity. Also, they make up a disproportionately large share of the soccer economy—“the most valuable customers,” Tapp calls them—and so clubs and media listen to them more than to the sod-this-for-a-lark punters. And the Hornbys have a compelling story to tell. Most of the best stories are about love, and these are people who proclaim their love in public every week.

Yet there is a deeper reason the Hornby account of fandom has been so easily accepted in Britain. That is because it tells a story of roots, of belonging—a lifelong love of the club your father or grandfather supported before you—in a country that is unusually rootless. In transient Britain, the story of the rooted Fan is especially seductive.

Britain was the first country on earth where peasants left their native villages to go and work in rootless industrial cities. It was among the first countries where the churches began to empty; a tie that helps root people all over the world has long been extraordinarily weak among native Britons.

Even after the Industrial Revolution, the British never settled down much. The average Briton now changes his residence about once every seven years, more often than all other Europeans except the Nordics and the Dutch, according to a Eurobarometer survey for the European Commission in 2005. Many Britons emigrate. About 6 million of them now live outside Britain, as do another 50 million–odd people with British ancestry. Probably only India and China have produced diasporas that are as large and as widely spread, says the British government.

It is hard for people this transitory to build up deep ties of any kind, even to soccer clubs. Admittedly, Tapp and Clowes found that many of the “fanatical” supporters of the club they studied had spent their lives in the local town. But it was the club’s “casual” fans, who “had often moved to the area as adults,” who were more typical of British migratory patterns. For instance, Tapp and Clowes identified one group whom they called “professional wanderers”: “people (mainly managers/professionals) 220

who have held jobs in a number of different places who tended to strike up (weakly held) allegiances with local teams, which they retain when they next move.” Like most Britons, the professional wanderers were too rootless to become Hornbyesque Fans.
None
of the casual fans interviewed by Tapp and Clowes “felt a close part of the local community, in contrast to the fanatics.”

And Britons have suffered yet another uprooting: as well as leaving their place of birth, many of them have left their class of birth, too.

This upheaval began on a large scale in the 1960s. As the economy grew, and more Britons stayed on at school and went to university, a mostly working-class nation turned into a mostly middle-class one.