Sports and business

I’m not a business man. I’m not a sports person. I’ve never played a sport professionally. I just sit on my couch and think about stuff. Right now, I’m thinking about how sports, or more specifically football clubs, intersect with business. Everyone says that it’s all business. Everyone is just getting theirs. Except for the fans. Are the fans just a simple minded herd -naively supporting their club while they get fleeced by football clubs and lied to by footballers who don’t care where they play their football as long as the money’s nice?

Liverpool is a storied club. One of the facets of the club is it’s fanbase. If you’re marketing Liverpool football club you’re not only marketing the players, you’re also marketing the stadium and the experience. The fans who live in Liverpool, or close by, and go to each game and make up the atmosphere in the ground, they make up the experience and the experience is being priced out. At some point they will not be able to afford to go the games. The flags will disappear and the atmosphere will wilt away and die. It’s already wilting. I can experience it through the TV.

The counter point is simple. Supply and demand. Except supply and demand actually doesn’t apply here because selling tickets to a football match isn’t like selling a bar of soap. Yeah, people will always go. You could sell the cheapest tickets for a Liverpool game for 150 quid and you’d still fill the ground. But what does the crowd look like at that point? What is the atmosphere? Haven’t you intrinsically changed your product by overpricing it? That is what is happening now.

Liverpool football club has completely lost its roots. It used to be a working class team. It’s no longer that. The club has no idea what the working class, what the people in the ground, singing and waving flags, make in a year and how that relates to their ability to sing and wave flags. Liverpool FC is very lost right now. The club is lost in business and the sport aspect seems to be suffering for it. It’s all about the numbers, not about the fans. It probably has been for a while but we just got the last confirmation. Liverpool FC doesn’t care about flags or songs or the atmosphere. It cares about the money. The numbers.

It’s sad but it’s a reality. Football is big business and the fans don’t seem to matter. Money matters. So yeah, football fans are being fleeced because you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you bargain for. Liverpool fans need to start bargaining.