JUNE | OPINION
Football without fans
Andy Rice, COO of Major
Events International
Germany’s Bundesliga
restarted behind closed doors
in May. Andy Rice, COO of
Major Events International,
says sport in 2020 will look
very different than how we
remember it
Champagne orders
would have been
coming thick and fast
to the boardrooms of betting
companies around the world
last week, as live sport - in the
form of the German Bundesliga -
resumed on Saturday 16th May.
There was a special
‘Nebuchadnezzar’ reserved
for BT Towers on the Olympic
Park, as their sports rights
gamble finally paid dividends.
Thousands, starved of live
football, signed up for packages
which allowed football fans to
get a much needed ‘fix’ of live
sport, and the betting revenues
flowed. However - this was not
football as we know it.
What was missing? The fans,
of course.
Saying that “football is
nothing without the fans” is a
massive insult to the hundreds
of thousands of footballers who
turn out on Sunday mornings
to play non-league football. But
perhaps if there is one good
thing that will come out of this
storm, it is that more people
will be out playing sport in the
summer of 2020 than will be
watching it. That has to be a
step - or even a jog- in the right
direction.
The atmosphere of
professional sport - and
therefore the motivation of the
players - will change massively
without the fans. Football will
be very different for the players,
without stadiums packed full of
fans. But more importantly, it
will be almost unrecognisable
for the millions of TV viewers,
as anyone who has watched the
stilted, audience-less Graham
Norton Show or the nowseemingly-witless
Have I got
News for You will know.
Audiences and fans - they
bring the cast to life. Kudos to
Borussia Monchengladbach’s
brilliantly creative attempt
to recreate a crowd, by
allowing fans (and those of
their opponents) to pay €19
to place cardboard cut-outs
of themselves in the stadium.
But atmosphere is not created
visually, it is created orally.
MEI member Beyond 90,
who are responsible for most
of Manchester City’s fan
engagement experiences, may
have come up with an answer.
Their solution is to create a
microcosm of fan experience in a
hybrid bar/broadcast studio. The
premise is that 100 fans, with
beer in hand in a small space,
can create as much atmosphere
as 50,000 fans in a large space.
That ‘atmosphere’ can then
be piped over the stadium’s
PA system to ensure the game
will be played (and even more
importantly, broadcast) with an
appropriate soundtrack. It may
sound a little far-fetched, but
once the social distancing issues
have been resolved, why not?
And, I am told the pitch to the
Premier League clubs went well.
So, whilst German football is
back in a sterile environment
(in more ways than one), we can
be hopeful that Project Restart
will conclude with the type of
broadcast experience we have all
come to expect.
Major Events International is a
business development consultancy
that helps suppliers connect with
major sporting events. MEI are
running a Mash Media-sponsored
virtual summit in July.
“Football without fans will be almost unrecognisable, as anyone who has
watched the stilted, audience-less Graham Norton Show will know.”
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