The Great Football Access Swindle

Chris Nee
Chris Nee
Aug 23, 2017 · 4 min read

“With unrivalled views into the players’ tunnel, you are rewarded with an intimate insight into the players’ preparations.”

In those eighteen words — seventeen if you discard the one that doesn’t need to be there — a universe of implications unfolds.

This is the first of three matchday benefits listed under the heading “Unprecedented Access” on the web page for Manchester City’s Tunnel Club, the top-end venue that now encloses the tunnel at the Etihad Stadium and turns it into a hospitality urethra.

The recently opened facility triggered a skeptical response when it was announced, and again when the players of City and Everton passed through its voyeurtube for the first time, in full view of the Tunnel Club’s weird and wealthy.

The Tunnel Club, which will also be on offer when Tottenham Hotspur open their new stadium next year, represents much more than two walls of glass. It strikes at the heart of football culture. New versus old. Rich versus working class. Customer versus supporter.

Every cultural dichotomy the modern English game has to offer is reflected in some way by the Tunnel Club, which explains why it provided such a potent source of copy for a second time when it served its first speciality gin.

In The New York Times, Rory Smith examined the appeal of the venue, which costs £15,000 per season at its most premium.

“The Tunnel Club’s key selling point is not luxury,” he writes. “A similar standard of hospitality is already available at the Etihad Stadium, for those who can afford premium tickets, and in some form at most Premier League arenas.”

“No, what the Tunnel Club offers is something quite different, something that echoes in the way we engage with sports on social media and watch it on television, something that speaks to our desire as fans not simply to be at an event, but to be in it.”

Ah.

Smith is absolutely correct, of course. The Tunnel Club’s website offers access. The appeal of the Tunnel Club, the reason the its punters fork out the better part of £400 a match? Access.

Quotes from various parties in Smith’s article detail the rationale behind offering this opportunity for pseudo-participation and other forms of access, most notably in social media content. City have been pioneers in that regard too, as evidenced by their other incursion up the Etihad pee-hole.

Fans want access, they say. Clubs have to make fans feel like a part of it.

Indeed, Smith references a paper by a psychology professor who found that, “experiential purchases are more gratifying, on average, than material purchases.”

It seems obvious, really. So when stadium consultants and marketing experts tell us that access is what we all want, we end up with the Tunnel Club and all sorts of insights and sneak peeks designed to satisfy this widely recognised desire for involvement.

Smith’s article includes the single word that encapsulates the entire debate about the Tunnel Club: gentrification.

Yet my reaction to reading the latest round of media coverage about City’s new hospitality venue isn’t political. It isn’t one of anger or dismay or regret.

I don’t want to burn it down or turn it into terracing. I’m not of a mind to take up arms in some footballing class war, avenging the loss of the working man’s game.

No, my response is this:

Why the hell would anybody want to go in there?

That puzzlement has become a familiar flavour lately. I have the same feeling about goal music, about City’s “Peak Cheese”, and about practically every other concession to participation and access in football.

I’ve been a football supporter for long enough to not remember becoming one. I’m a bit old-fashioned in some ways but I’m not in any sense ‘against modern football’. Far from it; I’m as in love with the game as ever.

Football is my game. It’s my hobby. It’s been my job. I’m an addict. And I’m lucky enough to have been born in the country that seems, for whatever reason, to be home to the league the rest of the world is obsessed with.

As a dedicated, totally smitten football supporter, I consider myself to be at the heart of the football community. I’ve got the credentials, the ticket stubs, the celebratory bruised shins to prove it.

But I don’t recognise in myself any of this hunger for access. I don’t dispute it; I just don’t share it.

Being a football supporter has always been a participation pastime. In my experience it’s never just been “access to a seat”. Supporting my club is participation and I can’t easily compute any perceived need for involvement beyond that.


Smith concludes his excellent dissection of the virtues of the Tunnel Club by drawing a distinction between access and participation.

“The appeal of the Tunnel Club is not that it is an aquarium,” he says. “It instead offers the chance to know how it is for the fish.”

Yet for all the talk of psychology and fan engagement rationale, the minted ghouls of the Tunnel Club aren’t participants at all. They pay for perverse levels of proximity to an experience that no amount of chats with Brian Kidd, no pitchside walk-abouts, will ever let them touch.

And I just… Don’t. Get. It.

)

Chris Nee

Written by

Founder and Managing Editor of @SphinxFtbl // Writer, Editor and Podcaster // Twitter @ChrisMNee

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