spursphil
Tottenham To The Bone
- Aug 8, 2008
- 517
- 98
Just ten per cent of Premier League spectators are aged 24 or under. We have to ask whether the death of the football-going tradition among young people will mean a struggle to fill grounds in future.
In the 70s when I was a teenager the average age of a football fan was probably 19.
When football was invented by Rupert Murdoch in 1992 things changed dramatically. Here we are, footballers on seven-figure wages and English chairmen the exception to the rule of the modernised Premier League. Other well documented pitfalls include the increasing gap between club and supporter, the sanitisation of the match-day atmosphere and the decline of the working class fan. My generation may well be the last to appreciate fully the ups and downs of supporting a football club. The game needs to face up to its problem with the lack of English youth. And by that I don’t mean footballers, I mean fans.
A survey carried out by the Premier League last season revealed that the average age of a fan at a top-flight match is 45. And that’s the average. And that’s old. Where are the sticker-collecting, magazine-buying youngsters who crave the world their heroes inhabit? They’re probably at home, idolising Richard Keys and Andy Gray. Where are the alcohol-fuelled, rowdy adolescents? They’re watching the games in pubs, and for most that is the extent of there match going experience.
It takes a huge chunk of disposable income to follow a football club and prices are way beyond the reach of the younger fan. In the short term, atmospheres become less vibrant, with older fans, even if they still sing all game, generally more sceptical and pessimistic; stadiums largely void of the naive enthusiasm of youth. Youngsters local to smaller clubs develop little or no bonds with their hometown team and instead begin a phase of idolising Gerrards, Lampards or Rooneys, skipping a vital stage of the footballing rites of passage of supporting their local club.
In the long term, there is a much harder problem to solve than that of the working-class fan who can no longer afford it – their solution is simple: lower prices and they will return. Kids who have no discernible bond to the match-day experience by a certain age will not feel the need to come back even if prices eventually tumble, and that’s where the real problem lies.
The older members of the ­missing youth are resentful for being priced out of what they know they have a right to, and the younger ones know little of what it is to be an active supporter of a club that has a history beyond the Premier League, histories that were the foundation of football’s popularity and mass appeal.
Young fans now have no “glory days” to look back upon, no hazy memories of simpler times and the underlying passion this brings with it, the memories that make modern notions of football bearable for the older fan. They grow up either unable to afford a ticket or reliant on their embittered father to fork out yet another sizeable chunk of his salary to take them along.
All the time, what makes football football is gradually being eroded deep within them, as the game continues to whore itself out to business and celebrity, carelessly underestimating the importance of the younger fan who will soon become its main target audience. A generation ignored becomes a generation lost. Football is not just losing fans, it’s losing its future.
In the 70s when I was a teenager the average age of a football fan was probably 19.
When football was invented by Rupert Murdoch in 1992 things changed dramatically. Here we are, footballers on seven-figure wages and English chairmen the exception to the rule of the modernised Premier League. Other well documented pitfalls include the increasing gap between club and supporter, the sanitisation of the match-day atmosphere and the decline of the working class fan. My generation may well be the last to appreciate fully the ups and downs of supporting a football club. The game needs to face up to its problem with the lack of English youth. And by that I don’t mean footballers, I mean fans.
A survey carried out by the Premier League last season revealed that the average age of a fan at a top-flight match is 45. And that’s the average. And that’s old. Where are the sticker-collecting, magazine-buying youngsters who crave the world their heroes inhabit? They’re probably at home, idolising Richard Keys and Andy Gray. Where are the alcohol-fuelled, rowdy adolescents? They’re watching the games in pubs, and for most that is the extent of there match going experience.
It takes a huge chunk of disposable income to follow a football club and prices are way beyond the reach of the younger fan. In the short term, atmospheres become less vibrant, with older fans, even if they still sing all game, generally more sceptical and pessimistic; stadiums largely void of the naive enthusiasm of youth. Youngsters local to smaller clubs develop little or no bonds with their hometown team and instead begin a phase of idolising Gerrards, Lampards or Rooneys, skipping a vital stage of the footballing rites of passage of supporting their local club.
In the long term, there is a much harder problem to solve than that of the working-class fan who can no longer afford it – their solution is simple: lower prices and they will return. Kids who have no discernible bond to the match-day experience by a certain age will not feel the need to come back even if prices eventually tumble, and that’s where the real problem lies.
The older members of the ­missing youth are resentful for being priced out of what they know they have a right to, and the younger ones know little of what it is to be an active supporter of a club that has a history beyond the Premier League, histories that were the foundation of football’s popularity and mass appeal.
Young fans now have no “glory days” to look back upon, no hazy memories of simpler times and the underlying passion this brings with it, the memories that make modern notions of football bearable for the older fan. They grow up either unable to afford a ticket or reliant on their embittered father to fork out yet another sizeable chunk of his salary to take them along.
All the time, what makes football football is gradually being eroded deep within them, as the game continues to whore itself out to business and celebrity, carelessly underestimating the importance of the younger fan who will soon become its main target audience. A generation ignored becomes a generation lost. Football is not just losing fans, it’s losing its future.
