Rethinking Football / SoccerShout.com

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Would you get hooked on “24″ if you could only watch every third episode?

Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds.  You’ll be able to read newspaper accounts of what happened in the episode, and you’ll see 2 minutes of highlights on the TV, so it’s not like you’re going to miss anything.

That’s what it’s like being a footy fan in the US.  There’s very few cable/satellite systems that carry both Fox Soccer Channel and Setanta, so you’re usually only have the choice of 3 or 4 games over the weekend.  This, in turn, means you your team play maybe 1 week in 3 - a lot less if you support a team outside of the top-4.

Would you get hooked on Middlesbrough, or Fulham, or Wigan, or Bolton, or Birmingham, or Aston Villa, or Spurs…if you could only see one out of every three episodes?

The majority of Premier League clubs have already wrapped up the loose ends of their season.  No more cups to play for.  Can’t be relegated - or can’t stay up.  Done and done.

Just one problem: there are still five games left.

If this was the TV series “24″, the Jack would have caught the bad guys, defused the bomb, saved the president, got the girl…and there would still be three episodes to go.  Would people still tune in to watch him fill out the paperwork, go home, pull on his pajamas and finally get a few hours sleep?

That’s the situation for fans of 11 of the 20 clubs in the Prem.  I’m counting the top-6 and Reading, Bolton and Birmingham as still having something to play for.  Fulham are Championship-bound I’m afraid, and the clubs from 7 to 15 are staying more-or-less where they are.

How are the fans of those eleven teams meant to get excited about the remaining five games?  It’s 15% of the season - seems a shame to take that much of the season and make it worthless.

If I ran a club or a league…I wouldn’t just accept this situation.

I wrote a post yesterday that floated the idea of making League Two an under-24’s league in an effort to differentiate it from the rest of the league.

I raised the notion on the forum I post most often (a Boro forum run by the club’s FMTTM fanzine) and got a pretty comprehensive ticking off by the people who responded. The main objection - quite rightly - being that the idea is unworkable when teams are swapping leagues. Do promoted or relegated teams joining the league have to sack all their older players? Hmmm…good point.

The inspiration for the article, though, was this: What can a League Two club do to make it more attractive to supporters? And is there anything the league can do to encourage such behaviour?

Let’s take Darlington as an example. The club is about 15 miles west of Middlesbrough. The town’s population is just shy of 100,000 - pretty close to Middlesbrough’s 135,000 residents. Darlington’s average crowd this season is less than 4,000 - a shambles compared to Boro’s much-maligned 26,500 average.

So what could Darlington do to get a few more people through the door?

• Brand themselves as the place to come and see up-and-coming footballers (and back that up by attracting some decent kids, training them, and giving them lots of playing time).
• Take the best five young players that Boro will loan them on season-long deals.
• Cut their prices a bit so that a dad and his two kids go could see a game for twenty quid.
• Move their games to Thursday nights to escape from the weekend crowd.
• Move their kick-off times to 6:30 p.m. You could take your kids and be home for nine o’clock. You could go for a pint after work and then straight to the game (and have change from twenty quid).

Any or all of these tactics would be fairly easy to implement and I’d bet they’d have a positive effect on the attendance figures and the overall financial health of the club.

Darlington have tried something else this season - play better football - and it didn’t work. As far as the league goes, they’re having their having their best season for a while. But their attendance figures are still anemic and they can’t get more than a four-sentence match report from the BBC. Ouch.

What would you do if you ran a football club that sat well outside of the top tier of the sport?

The Premier League is clearly the place to be. There’s a big drop - in terms of money and attention - when you step down to the Championship. And even more when you go down to League One and League Two.

Everyone who wants it has access to watch the Premier League. Thanks to modern telly you can watch the best teams and the best games, regardless of where in the world you live.

So why is anyone going to come to your League Two games?

There’s an attraction to watching your local side, no matter what quality you’re going to see. There’s also something to be said for watching a game in person. And there are people who will prefer watching a lower-league side - closer to the action, less pretentious players, more local players, etc.

But the attendance figures in League Two will tell you that there’s only so many people who are motivated to watch their local side. And no ground ever gets more than half-full.

So what else could you try? Here’s what I would do:

Commit my club to producing the best local talent. Hire some good coaches who can work with kids and young adults. Commit to playing the younger players in the league, maybe even to the point of putting an upper limit of 24 on the age of players.

It’s all about branding, so I’d promote the club to fans as the place to come to see the future of English football. I’d promote the club to players as the place to learn the trade, where you’ll get plenty of playing time in order to develop, and we’ll not stop you should a bigger club come calling.

From a business point-of-view, I should be all set as I’d not have to pay much in wages, which is always the biggest outgoing for any football club.

Now, if I ran the whole league, I’d get every club committed to this model. An entire league dedicated to producing the cream of English football. It would get a following from future-watchers who want to see the best young talent the country has to offer. I’d even move the games to, say, Thursday nights or Friday nights, when there will be little competition from the bigger leagues. People who were sick of the antics of the superstars in the Premier League would be drawn in.

At this point you may be shaking your head and saying that will never catch on. But what I’m proposing is actually pretty similar to college football (egg-shaped variety) in the USA. And it’s hugely popular - not because the players are better than their NFL counterparts, but because (a) you get to see future stars, (b) it’s a team you have some affinity for, (c) the games are more attractive to watch because the kids haven’t learned to be cynical yet.

In the US, there are twice as many people going to a college Division One game than going to an NFL game. They’re obviously doing something that is attracting people. It’s certainly not a second-rate league.

Now that the ‘best’ can be everywhere, the ‘not best’ crowd have to find their own niche. I think this would work will for lower-league football in the UK.

Update: See this follow-up article.

Winning promotion is one of the most exciting and wonderful things a football fan can experience. The Premier League has managed to take the gloss off the experience by ensuring that a season of misery is probably waiting for you on the other side. This was not always the case.

Whether a promoted team enjoyed an easy romp to the league title or a nail-biting fight to the finish, these days they will often find themselves hopelessly out gunned when they kick off their first Premier League season.

I’ve broken the recent past into two groups - the Premier League seasons (15 seasons) and the 18 seasons before that (which takes us back to the 74-75 season, when 3-up/3-down was introduced).

It was once an common occurrence to find all three promoted teams beating the drop. In fact, it used to happen 50% of the time. Since the Premier League was formed, it has only happened once (7%). In fact, 50% of the time a promoted team now finishes dead last. This is illustrated in the chart below.

In the years before the Premier League, there was only a 20% chance of your newly promoted teams getting relegated. In the Premier League, that number has jumped to 44%.

We saw in a recent post how the excitement at the top of the league has been eroded since the Premier League was established. Now we see another group of teams will have a fairly predictable path through the season. If you’re feeling a little less-than-passionate about football these days, I’d suggest this pre-ordination of who will finish where is a significant factor.

This won’t be the first time you’ve heard the statement that the Premier League has become terribly predictable. It might be the first time you’ll appreciate just how bad the situation has become, and how this trend will continue unless something fundamental is changed.

Before we get to the pictures I’ve promised, let’s talk about Liverpool’s domination of the 70’s and 80’s, which is often brought up to paint the picture that the current situation is just the same as it ever was.

It’s true that Liverpool did dominate that time period. The Reds only finished outside the top-2 only once in a 19-year span starting in 1972-73, winning the Championship 11 times. Wow.

But to understand how predictable that time period wasn’t, take a look at the teams that did manage to usurp Liverpool during that period of dominance:

• Leeds United
• Derby County
• Nottingham Forest
• Aston Villa
• Everton
• Arsenal

So while Liverpool were bossing the league for almost two decades, the supporters of other clubs could enjoy a realistic notion of not only finishing in the top few positions, but even finishing above the best club side in the world. That, my friend, is unpredictability, and it’s what gets the juices flowing if you’re a football fan.

Now that we’ve put “Liverpool dominated for twenty years” into some kind of perspective, let’s move on to the pictures.

I have just two charts to share with you: First I divided the last 35 years into five-year chunks and looked at how many different teams managed to finish in the top-4. Bear in mind that, by definition, the minimum is four.

For twenty years, 10 different teams (on average) finished in the top-4 in a five-year span. In other words, almost half the league could expect what today would result in Champions League qualification. Think about how exciting that must have been for fans. Five years isn’t very long to wait for a shot at the top few spots.

By contrast, in the last ten years that number has fallen from 10 to 6.

That’s clearly a big drop, but does it really call for doom-and-gloom?

The second chart will illustrate another aspect of predictability. The next chart shows the number of teams that finished in the top-4 for all five of the years in same five-year periods.

The feat of staying in the top-4 for five years in a row was only achieved on two occasions in the first twenty years of this chart. Apart from Liverpool, no other team managed a sustained period of dominance, and even Liverpool were knocked off their perch on occasions.

In the last ten years, this once-rare accomplishment has become common-place. Arsenal have been in the top-4 for the last ten years, and Manchester United for the last fifteen. We can also add Chelsea to that list in the last five years.

The most damning piece of news is this: Once a team gets this five-year lock on a Champions League spot, they don’t give it up. First Manchester United, who were joined by Arsenal, and now by Chelsea as well. We’re adding teams that dominate but never taking any away.

This is what is eroding the passion that football supporters feel for the game. It’s hard to feel passionate about finishing “somewhere above the middle but not near the top”, which is pretty much the best that the majority of fans can hope for.

If the thought of a fifth-place finish does get your heart beating, I hope this brief history lesson illustrats that this shows the lack of ambition that has been forced on most teams and most fans.

A parting thought: By the time the 2007-08 season finishes, the number of different teams enjoying a top-4 finish in the last five years will likely fall to five. That will take us just one step away from the worst-possible scenario - the same four teams in the top-4 year after year after year.