With crowd attendances falling, Paddy Power paying out on Chelsea winning the Premiership title in September and a noticeable lack of goals from all sides in the first seven games of the season, the question of ?Has The Premiership become boring?? is the main topic of conversation in workplaces, pubs and radio phone-ins up and down Britain.

While the tabloid media are quick to jump on any ?controversial? bandwagon to help sell more newspapers, it?s often the views of the fans on the terraces that tells the true tale although these days the red tops would have you believe that you?d have a hard time finding any. Over the next few articles, Alan Hylands is going to investigate the real reasons behind the Premiership?s perceived fall from grace starting with the problem of falling attendances.

Football attendances on the whole have been rising steadily over the past decade as the Premiership went through it?s golden period spurred on by the vast sums of Sky TV money invested into turning the national game into the one of the most lucrative entertainment markets on the planet. The money was in turn spent hand over fist by the clubs on bringing in top name players from abroad including Dennis Bergkamp, Gianfranco Zola and David Ginola and generally increasing the marketability of the game by offering big name players at the big clubs who were hyped up by the Sky marketing machine to help them sell more subscriptions.

Even though many predicted an immediate decline in attendances due to three or four top division games being screened every week of the season, it never materialized and the blanket media coverage helped entice many fans back who had previously stopped going as well as attracting the new breed of Johnny Come Lately, prawn sandwich munching affluent supporter who, as football?s stock began to rise in the media, decided that being a football fan was the new fashionable place to be seen and demand for tickets at games increased.

This new breed of fan brought more money to the clubs through corporate hospitality, increased merchandise sales and, as demand grew, higher and higher ticket prices. We heard constantly from the press how the Premiership was the greatest league in the world and the clubs continued to milk the cash cow. This season the trend has reached it?s peak with clubs like Middlesbrough only playing to 14000 fans at the Riverside in their UEFA Cup match against FC Xanthi. Rising ticket prices and the non-stop TV coverage of games at all levels have seemingly finaly taken their toll on the average supporter.

With some tickets at London clubs like Chelsea going for upwards of ?80 a piece it isn?t hard to see how many families have been completely priced out the market and that?s even before you take into account travel costs to and from the ground, food and drink prices outside and inside the stadium and the obligatory trip to the club Megastore for a replica jersey or two. Football as a business cannot be viewed in isolation from the economy as a whole and after several years of astronomical house price rises and a general boom in consumer spending the predicted slump on the High Street and in the housing market will have far reaching implications. Expecting a father with two children to spend around ?200 a match on taking them to the football is increasingly unrealistic. Previously diehard supporters are finding that they simply can?t afford to go to every game and have to pick and choose their matches and, with a fall in football?s fashionable popularity, there just isn?t the same demand from the new breed of fan who would previously have filled that void.

Since leaving the old Divisions 1 to 4 structure the English game at the highest level has continually prostituted itself off to the highest bidder and now it seems their hunger for money above all else has led them to forget that, at the end of the day, it?s a club?s loyal supporters who are the lifeblood of the game and not TV viewing figures and advertising pounds.. Maybe now the powers that be need to sit down and decide how they are going to get back those that have continued to pump their hard earned money into the clubs and have found themselves finally priced out and left on the Premiership shelf.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 1st, 2005 at 1:23 pm and is filed under General Football Articles. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.