Playing in silence

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The celebrations over a last-minute winner. The roar of the crowd as a red card is shown or a penalty appeal is turned down. All are intrinsic parts of the football experience, and all were put on hold this year.

Europe’s top five leagues were forced to stop matches in March, when France, Germany, England, Italy and Spain all implemented restrictions. Of those competitions, only France did not restart the 2019/20 season. The rest opted for crowdless stadiums, with games played behind closed doors and matches broadcast on television with artificial crowd noise.

Initially, it seems, fans were not wholly in favour of football’s return. In May, a YouGov poll of the general population found that 73% did not feel it would boost morale in the UK generally.

Social listening firm Synthesio, meanwhile, analysed what fans were saying online about football’s return before and during the reopening of the major leagues. Sentiment about the Premier League restarting was negative because of concerns about spreading the virus through large public events (see ‘England v Germany’ boxout, below).

The Football Association (FA) has been researching sentiment about football’s return using a fans’ community panel called Pitchside, which has 2,500 participants. A tracker, called the Fan-o-meter, runs monthly with 400 people and a CRM database of fans who are members of the England Supporters’ Club and England Supporters’ Travel Club.

Despite the lack of atmosphere, most fans embraced crowdless football. The FA research found that only 10% to 15%  of supporters were less likely to tune in when matches were behind closed doors, offset by a 30% rise in viewership reported by broadcasters such as Sky. One match shown on the BBC during the Premier League’s restart – Southampton v Manchester City – broke the Premier League viewing record, with 5.7 million viewers.

Ross Antrobus, head of behavioural insights and business analytics at The FA, says most fans preferred artificial crowd noise when watching matches, rather than the sound of an empty stadium.

“We know from our broadcast and survey data that 75% watch with artificial crowd sounds turned on,” he says. “People who watch with the artificial sound on watch for 13 minutes longer on average. If you look at people who initially started watching without artificial sound, 55% of those switched to using virtual crowd noise.”

The FA has also tracked mood and attitudes among fans, finding that stress and boredom levels started falling in June, as restrictions began to ease in the UK, but also that the return of football was broadly welcomed.

“We wanted to get people’s views on whether football is good for the mood of the nation. Football fans overwhelmingly thought that was the case – and, even among the general public, only one in five saw football coming back as having the potential to undermine lockdown,” Antrobus says.

“It was probably helped by the fact that English football was not first back to market – the German Bundesliga helped pave the way in people’s minds, to show football could return safely.”

The FA surveyed 3,000 people who had attended events at Wembley Stadium in the 18 months before Covid-19, to work out how best to return fans to stadiums. A trial with 2,500 fans has already taken place at Brighton’s Amex stadium, and there will be others at Wembley to pave the way for clubs of all sizes to return to a more traditional environment for games. The research will be used to inform the measures that are tested and subsequently recommended to clubs, to help them generate revenue from crowds again. Media value assessments for sponsors and partners are also being carried out.

“We are going to show the survey participants what we might be doing in terms of queuing, turnstiles, cashless interactions and digital ticketing, social distancing in seats and making the most of social bubbles,” Antrobus explains.

“All of the measures will mean that getting into the stadium and into your seat will be a more protracted process. We need to make sure fans are aware of that, and ensure they have the best experience they can.”

England v Germany

Synthesio used a social-listening dashboard to analyse what people were saying online, between 17 April and 17 July, about football’s return to matches behind closed doors:

• For the German Bundesliga, 28% of the posts online were negative, while 22% were positive. 
• For the English Premier League, it was 17% negative and 3% positive.

This article was first published in the October 2020 issue of Impact.