Why Lack Of Success Is Not The Only Reason For Falling Attendances

Last updated : 04 February 2011 By R Daniell

Since 1967 Coventry City have only had a handful of seasons where the fans could say the club has been successful. Winning promotion to the old Division 1 in 1967, the successful 1969/70 season which led to European football in the 1970 season and of course the FA Cup winning year of 1987. Not much to show for 45 years of supporting Coventry City is it?

Coventry City did have a few good seasons in the old Division 1, finishing sixth in 1969 and winning a place in the European Fairs Cup (now renamed the UEFA Europa League) and seventh the following year and again in 1989, even if that was year year they were humiliatingly beaten 2-0 by Sutton United in the FA Cup. The highest places Coventry City finished in the Premier League was 11th in the first season of the Premiership in 1993. City have also twice reached the semi finals of the League (Carling) Cup.

So that is one promotion, three or four good seasons on the top division, one major trophy, two semi finals and one European adventure (should have been two, but for English clubs being banned in the wake of the Heysal Stadium disaster).

Some fans will point to the excitement of the seemingly endless relegation battles, but such excitement can hardly be translated as success and apart from the occasional high profile "6 pointer" game, hardly an advertisement to encourage the fans to start flocking back to the fold.

It is now ten years since Coventry City were relegated and only Preston have been in the division longer. Ten years of indifferent form, poor quality football and no success have all taken their toll on the number of fans going through the turnstiles. The next generation of fans, the sons and daughters of lifelong Sky Blue fans are looking at clubs with a history of success to support rather than their local or home town team and these fans are likely to be lost forever.

The club is getting gates of around 16,000 this season and need to average about 23,000 a season to break even, it is little wonder they are getting into financial trouble.

Attendances at The Ricoh Arena have seen steady decline amounting to a 20% drop over the last five years. The average home gate in the 2009/10 season was 16,358. In the four seasons prior to last season the average gates were: 2008/9=17,305; 2007/8=17,407; 2006/7=19,123; 2005/7= 20,342. In the current 2010/11 season the drop has been even more alarming with home gates average slightly over 16,000, but worryingly recent attendances have been around the 14,000 mark.i

If the club owned the ground (and I am sure someone will tell me if I am wrong) the annual average gate could be lower for the club to break even. Having to pay rent for The Ricoh means more paying fans are needed to cover this cost, but as the club doesn't own the ground, they need the elusive 23,000 season average gate and with what is on offer there is no way they are going to get it. I believe the cost of the rent is around £0.5m a year while the club is in the Championship, but will double if they win promotion to the Premier League. That sounds like a lot of money, but in reallity amounts to around 800-1000 paying fans for every home game.

So what can the club do to raise gate receipts? Many fans will say spend big money on quality players that can almost guarantee success, but doing that is not a sensible option, even if it could be easily done. It is one thing for the board to sanction massive overspending and going deep into debt, but quite another for the club to be able to attract the right players, but the current board will not sanction the spend, spend, spend philosophy.

Sisu, the current owners won't agree to it either. I don't pretend to understand business finance, but as far as I understand it hedge fund companies like Sisu buy up debt ridden, badly run or undervalued companies, install a prudent management team to turn the business round and then hopefully sell them on as going concerns or failing that dismantle the company and sell the assets for a profit. It is not the philosophy of a hedge fund to throw money at a business trying to make it profitable, so we cannot expect injections of cash from them. The only assets Coventry City has are the players, the club doesn't own property, but it is unlikely Sisu would sell all of the players, but they could well sell some of the valuable, or expensive ones.

This is where the catch 22 comes in though with hedge funds owning football clubs. To attract valuable assets (players) they have to spend big money on wages and probably on transfer fees, but that sort of investment goes against hedge fund investment policy and they rarely do so. Their only option, if they are to make money is to make the club a well run organisation and make it an attractive proposition to prospective buyers. The big gamble Sisu made when investing in Coventry City was that they expected to be able to attract much bigger crowds than they are currently getting and this gamble has not paid off.

The current board are between a rock and a hard place. They have no money and can't get any investment, nor can they attract paying customers because the product they are trying to sell us is not up to the required standard. To add to the paradox of being owned by a hedge fund, one has to ask whether they would welcome any substantial outside investment? When the time came to sell the club, they would have to share the profit with the other investors.

So what are the options? In an ideal world the best way would be for the club to become a profitable, self supporting business able to finance itself. There are few clubs that manage to do this, but it takes years to achieve and the club would need substantial capital investment in place to start with and that would need to be in the form of loans or a very wealthy individual or consortium.

The best the club can hope for in the next few month is for the fans to return in their droves to The Ricoh regardless of the quality of football on offer and regardless of results, but they won't do that and thereby lies the problem, but why won't the fans return?

Other football clubs manage to retain their attendances, some go down a bit, others rise, so why can't Coventry City?

With all due respect to other sports in and around the city of Coventry, there is little competition to take the fans away. Leicester City for instance, has a football club and it has to compete with the hugely successful Leicester Tiger rugby union club and Leicester is a smaller city than Coventry.

At the last census Coventry had a population of 310,000, compared with Leicester's 295,000, Nottingham had 292,000 and Derby had 236,000. I have only mentioned cities with Championship clubs which is why Birmingham, Stoke, Wolverhampton etc are not mentioned.

Nottingham has two football clubs competing for fans, as already mentioned Leicester has the rugby club, but both clubs consistently get higher gates than Coventry City, so does Derby.

There have been ongoing surveys commissioned to find out the ethnic make up of football crowds. A summary of the 1997 survey found 98.8% of fans were white, in 2001/02 97.3% were white, in 2005/06 it was 96%, in 2006/07 95% and in 2007/08 it was 94%. As with any statistical survey it's not necessarily 100% accurate and the methodology used has changed a bit over the years. In the earlier years it mainly surveyed season ticket holders by post. The 2006/07 survey included an email survey for the first time which probably increased the number of younger fans taking part, and more effort has been made in recent years to include people who attend matches but don't have season tickets.

As can be seen the vast majority of fans come from the white community and in 1997 2.7% of fans were non white, but this figure has increased over ten years to 6%. It is not an hugely accurate picture of the ethnic make up at individual football grounds around the country, but it does graphically suggest a trend. That trend would suggest that in cities with larger ethnic minorities would be more likely to have greater difficulty in attracting fans to watch their local team, but is this the case?

Taking the four English Cities in the Midlands which have Championship teams, Coventry, Nottingham, Derby and Leicester as examples, the statics available from the most recent census of 2001 show the ethnic make up go some way to proving that of the four cities, Coventry ought to have by far the largest pool of potential supporters to draw from, Yet they have the lowest average attendance of all four clubs!

CITY

POPULATION

DENSITY population per square mile

WHITE

ASIAN

BLACK

Coventry

310000

8000/sq. mile

80,00%

15,00%

5,00%

Nottingham

292000

9500/sq. mile

82,00%

10,00%

8,00%

Derby

236000

7000/sq. mile

86,00%

10,00%

4,00%

Leicester

295000

10400/ sq. mile

61,00%

31,00%

7,00%

ii

As we have already seen there as been a drop of 20% in fans going though the turnstiles at Coventry, but what of the other three clubs?

So far in the 2010/11 season the attendances of the four clubs is shown in the table below.iii

 

CITY

Games Played

Total attendance

Highest attendance

Average attendance

Ground Capacity

Percentage

Coventry

15

243646

28184

16243

32500

49.9%

Nottingham

14

312962

29490

22354

30602

73.0%

Derby

14

368290

33010

26306

33597

78.2%

Leicester

14

324811

30919

23201

32500

71.3%

These statistics make extremely grim reading for anyone involved with running or watching Coventry City, but can anything be done to reverse the trend?

Bradford City in League Two are getting gates of around 13,600, not much less than some of Coventry City's recent gates, so why can Bradford still get relatively big crowds to watch a mid table team in the fourth tier of English football?

I mention Bradford because of the agreement the club came to with their supporters and it evidently worked because they now get bigger gates than every other team in Leagues One and Two (with the exception of Leeds and Nottingham Forest when these two clubs were both in League One). Indeed they get on average higher gates than some Championship clubs.

So what was the agreement the club came to with their fans? Essentially it was all to do with cheaper season ticket prices, but only if the gates remained high. They drastically reduced their season ticket prices to around £150, but on the proviso sufficient fans took advantage of the offer.

The fact that Bradford now regularly get gates of 13-14,000 at Valley Parade goes some way to proving the idea worked especially when you realise that before the offer of cheaper season tickets the average gate in the 2007/8 season at League Two grounds averaged just 4,341.

The argument against reducing prices is Bradford failed to attract maximum revenue from their much larger gates, but programme sales, food and drink sales have more than doubled and that is to the financial benefit of the club.

One of the criticisms aimed at The Ricoh is the lack of atmosphere because it is, at best usually only half full. I even heard opposition fans called the Sky Blue faithful the Shy Blues because of the lack of noise made by the home fans.

If the Coventry City board looked at the Bradford City model, there is is the huge potential in the City for the fans to return to the fold in quite large numbers. Of course if season tickets were to be made cheaper the average annual gate of 23,000 currently required for the club to break even would need to be raised to cover the reduced entrance fees, but as revenues from catering and other sales would inevitably increase, the revised break even attendance might not have to go up by too much.

The library like atmosphere that is sometime felt at The Ricoh would at a stroke improve if the club could attract another 10,000 fans. The lack of atmosphere is often blamed for not offering enough encouragement to the players. At a stroke and with a little luck if the club could attract those extra fans back, revenue would increase, the team would improve, the results would improve thereby attracting yet more fans back.

To summarise, the city of Coventry has the population and catchment to potentially attract regular gates of well over 20,000 for each and every home game. It doesn't have massive competition from other spectator sports like Leicester has with the rugby club. It has the stadium and facilities to cater for the larger crowds.

The club needs to recognise that fans are not going to return, or to be attracted for the first time unless they have some incentive to do so and the club doesn't have the financial resources to be able attract the type of players who would bring the fans back. They will have to look at alternative means and I think they could do a lot worse than look at the Bradford experiment, which I am sure would go down well with many supporters, past, present and future especially in these times of financial uncertainty.

i Football League website

iiNational census 2001

iiiFootball league website