Mark Bradley. We are not the same!
16 December 2011
Last week I took a call from a friend who was taking her kids to their first football match at a local non-league Club. She wanted to know what time the game kicked off. I told her ‘3 pm' as it was on a Saturday. ‘Are you sure?' she retorted, ‘Have a look at their website.'
I went straight to the fixtures page and found the information. What was the problem? The fact is, as a new supporter, she'd looked on the home page of the website, couldn't find the information, so looked under tickets but couldn't find it there either. It wouldn't have occurred to her to click 'match', then 'fixtures', etc. Why would it?
A friend who works in football was chatting to a family he'd seen at a few games. ‘Why not get a season ticket?' he suggested, ‘it'll be cheaper in the long run.' The Dad's response was as surprising a comment he'd ever heard. ‘I couldn't commit to attending all of the away games, so decided against one.' Where does it say on a Club website that season tickets are just for home games?
It's easy to poke fun at people who haven't been ‘sheep-dipped' in football since an early age, but we ignore these comments at our peril, because they reveal the hidden barriers that are preventing football clubs from growing their fan bases.
The more obvious barriers are visible to anyone: the recession, indifferent performances on the pitch, high quality competing leisure activities, negative perceptions of football, concerns about price, value for money, etc. However, until you expose a ‘new' fan to the live football experience, you're only just scratching the surface.
Football tends to think of its product as the football on the pitch and, as a consequence of this, it regards its core match attending supporters as the ‘customer' (possibly extending the concept to encompass those who got cheesed off and don't come any more). The possibility of a huge untapped, self sufficient, enthusiastic entertainment-seeking potential fan base out there is all but ignored.
It's not simply a question of objectivity, but a reminder that new fans may have different expectations. They may all not know when the game kicks off, what a season ticket is and why a certain song may be sung on the terraces. The realisation, when it dawns, can create a real catalyst for change at Clubs, because, as we know, it's tough to fix the football on the pitch for the core fraternity, but you can create a fan experience that acknowledges a wider and possibly more lucrative range of needs.
When clubs engage with new fans, they tap in to some surprising barriers. The lack of help on most website home pages is only the start of the difficulties faced by new fans (where it's often the less engaged parent who's trying to get their kids to their first game). Where's the safest place to park? If it's an evening game, will we catch the last train back home? Why don't midweek games kick off early enough to make it possible for the kids to come? Where should we sit to avoid bad language? Why can't you buy a programme inside the ground? Why do they offer family food deals but make it impossible for us to consume the food by not having any places to rest it? And just in case we are managing, then why remove the bottle top from the kids' drinks?
These are just a couple of the ‘stresses' faced by first time families, but they reveal how little football clubs often understand about the needs of their customers and partially explain why growing attendances has been such a challenge for many.
