Any Given Saturday

I recently presented some data to clubs at an end-of-season seminar. There were graphs and percentages and lots of diagonal lines, on a screen that was both the best I have ever seen when it came to resolution and clarity, and also the most head-ache inducing one after spending thirty minutes standing next to it.

The simple message behind all of the numbers? If you improve the experience for fans, more of them will come. Who knew?

The reception was very positive on the day. Lots of people commented but one club in particular approached afterwards and what they said also said a lot about why we will have plenty of empty seats in stadiums throughout the season. The person from the club, who I’ll not name, said they found it fascinating but that their club’s owners felt ‘what happened on a Saturday at 3pm was the only thing that mattered’. I’ve possibly paraphrased them slightly, but that was the gist of it.

This can be loosely translated into ‘we are only going to put budget and resources into the team’ and can probably be best described as a short-sighted viewpoint. Unfortunately, it’s also quite a typical one in my experience.

I sat with a CEO once who said – and this time I quote  - ‘we’ll be alright as long as we win on Saturday’ after the previous home game was beset with problems of a ‘I’m not coming back again’ magnitude from the fan’s perspective. When the said win was achieved, he almost said ‘I told you so’ because there had not been anywhere near as many complaints.

I decided not to focus on the fact that the reduction in complaints was as much down to the fact that there weren’t the same off-field problems as fans had encountered in the previous game, as it was to the narrow win on the pitch.

Instead, I went more longer term to make the point and asked if he knew how many times the club had won at home in the previous five years. He did not. I did – I’d worked it out – and the number came as quite a shock.

It was 25%. Put another way, was he happy if fans went home happy a quarter of the time?

Now 25% was pretty bad, and they’ve improved since I should add, but the point is that no club should not be building a strategy that revolves around winning, performances and league positions. To begin with, none of the above is in the club’s control; if it was then every club would win every game and always finish top and football would be pretty boring.

But most importantly, it’s simply not accurate.

The club I refer to – the CEO has moved on now; this conversation took place in 2021 – are a great case in point. They, thankfully, decided not to risk their future on winning and instead improved the experience for fans, turning it from average at best in 2021/22 to one that is now regarded as best practice in their league.

When they did this, gates went up by around 10-12% in the next two seasons, and by 9% the season after that. That’s quite a lot of new fans, and also quite a lot of added revenue. But the really interesting thing to note was that the league position did not get much better and even more eye-opening, the attendances went up more when they finished lower. By contrast, when the club enjoyed some rare success and climbed the league in 2024/25, the increases in attendances were far more modest (5%). What does this tell us?

Clearly, we place too much emphasis on winning when it comes to attracting and retaining new fans. I’m not suggesting that it doesn’t matter, and fans aren’t going to watch successive 0-3 defeats and say ‘well, at least the fan zone was great’ but a lot of club owners and senior management think that it’s results and climbing the table that makes the biggest difference.

And that’s plain wrong. It helps if it happens, but this club proved that it was the longer-term view that the fans wanted - and deserved - a great experience (regardless of the result) that bore fruit. They added indoor and outdoor fan zones, recruited a team of helpers outside and generally improved every facet of the experience in some way, focussing on their people to make it happen. They could control this, and they just had to hope the team could also do their part.

The above case study wasn’t unique. In fact, almost all of the clubs (over 100) I looked at showed a similar pattern when it came to the correlation between the fans’ experience and the attendances. Changes of ownership made a difference too. By comparison, the league position was almost irrelevant. This is also the same in women’s football where fans have always been more likely to attend if results and performances aren’t great, but the experience is generally better. This makes sense as there is a bigger proportion of younger fans and families making up the crowd, so as the average age of fans in men’s football begins to fall, this trend was always likely to go the same way.

Orlando City FC, in the MLS, had also provided a blueprint for this when they suffered two successive bottom placed finishes prior to the pandemic and just five home wins altogether in those seasons, yet didn’t see any negative impact on attendances. And guess what? Their matchday  experience was consistently great. But you had probably already worked that out.

I’m not anticipating any old-school owners and CEOs suddenly becoming enlightened. But anyone new or looking to do things a little differently should consider the lessons hiding in plain sight, because they ignore them at their own and their club’s peril.

It’s really not that difficult. As consumers, we go to places where we like the experience all the time, and avoid places were we don’t like it. That’s human nature, and fans are human.

But it’s much easier to just pray for a 3-0 or 4-0 win that will make everyone feel better. For a week at least.

So come on, decision makers. It’s decision time. Are you ready - or even prepared - to think differently?

Because how else can we realistically plan to strategically grow the fanbase or matchday attendances if we aren’t thinking any further than next Saturday?