SWANS SET FOR LOWEST CROWD AS CLUB CONTINUES TO TREAT FANS AS CUSTOMERS

On average 2,100 less people are packing into the Liberty this season to the last one. The reduction is less because of the home Cardiff match and the ‘buy 3 tickets’ and guarantee your derby day one. As the Swans drift from the top, it is highly likely that this figure will increase.

The current average is a little over 16,000. Unless the Swans can continue to endanger those play-off places then the reality is that we’d be expecting under 15,000 come the end of the season. Probably our lowest Championship average yet.  ‘Plastics’ will be the word labelled at some of these fans who have chosen to part with their Saturday tradition now that Manchester United aren’t coming to Town, but it was inevitable.

What I think is really concerning for the club is that the fans which remain are often not the ones who were around before the Premier League years. Many of these fans left long ago and the reality is that the club chose the Fairweather fans for the Premier League years and now needs the ones that they’ve let down to come back.

Before last season, our two previous seasons in the Championship were both around 15,500. We averaged 13,500 in League One before that. Each season the attendance grew. It obviously went off the scale when the likes of Man Utd came to visit and we could have sold 40,000 tickets at that time.

I would say that the huge majority of fans which I know from those Championship and League One days didn’t go to the Premier League and certainly didn’t go to the latter days in the Premier League. These fans no doubt helped me fall in love with the match day experience, the funny chants, the lively exchanges with the opposition fans; this is what made match day for me, especially when the football wasn’t much kop.

One of my favourite ever games was watching us play Peterborough at home at the Vetch. Either League One or Two and for some reason a few of the fans had it in for one of the Peterborough players, I think he was called Farrell. This player had bleached hair, which was rare back then in these parts. ‘he has a pineapple on his head’ was a chant which I still remember today but for nearly 90 minutes, the whole North Bank tore him apart. I can’t remember the game, no idea what the score was but I know that I loved those 90 minutes of my life. It was entertaining and surely that’s what I want with my free time which costs me money.  

Over the last twenty years, the price of tickets has increased far quicker than wages and that has linked, without doubt to the atmosphere changing. Let’s be very frank about it, the club changed from a working class fanbase who were half-cut by half-time to the ‘who’s who’ of Swansea with a glass of prosecco at half-time.

The East Stand (on a good day) were the exception to the rule but every year a little bit of it died. Austerity and the increase in ticket prices simply priced lifelong fans out of the game and the atmosphere got worst every time a Stella drinking borderline psychopath was replaced with another prosecco drinking CEO.

The stewards and club throwing many out and banning them for often trivia reasons.  But from a business point of view, the club wanted the CEO’s and their money and not the type of person who thought entertainment was shouting ‘you have a pineapple on your head’ to some poor kid for 90 minutes.  From a family point of view it was arguably better too, you could take your kids to the stadium and be pretty sure that they wouldn’t leave stinking of piss and having learned the ‘C’ word.

The problem with the business model was that suddenly watching football became exclusively about watching football. And when you do that, who is playing the football plays quite a large role in the football. When we played Peterborough, the fact the football may have been boring was irrelevant but now, that is all that is on offer.  Put simply, Football stadiums need Stella drinking borderline psychopaths!!!! And they aren’t CEO’s, they don’t drink Prosecco.

And these Prosecco drinking CEO’s aren’t really that interested in seeing Luton Town on a Tuesday night. Quite a lot of the kids aren’t too keen on it either.  Another issue which I’m finding when speaking with fans is that the club is so out of touch with us these days that it no longer feels like our club.

How many of the 3,000 fans who would have seen Posh (that’s Peterborough for all you CEO’s reading!) at the Vetch Field remain today? I know many who no longer go.You felt a part of the club then, you felt like your money, your voice, your support genuinely mattered, was appreciated and (I might sound stupid for saying this but) that you were doing a good thing. You were supporting your local club, it was us against the opposition.

That has gone. Completely gone. The club became one where TV money was more important than fans. I remember attending a game at the Liberty where I had the very back seat and I prefer to stand and so I was delighted. As the game kicked off, I stood and was asked to sit by a steward. When I showed that there was nobody behind me it was pointed out that I was blocking an advertising hording. A little part of Swansea City died in my heart that day! When did I become less important to the club than a painted piece of wood? We were expected to sit down and behave; I wanted to do neither!

But Swansea City has been far more of a business than a club for many years now. Which is fine but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t expect to be able to tell me to sit down because an advertising hoarding is more important than me one day and then expect me to ‘support’ you when you need me.

I use the word ‘support’ carefully there and I’m not sure if it is the right word. I’ll always ‘support’ Swansea physically but financially I’ve felt begrudged to give them anything extra from that very moment. Twenty years ago I’d buy a Vetch Field flyer as if it was a local charity raffle, now I’d rather give my money to pretty much any other organisation in Swansea.

The problem which the club are going to face is that they have made it very clear to fans that they are a business. The owners have bought the business to make a profit. But if it’s a business, then we aren’t fans, we are customers and as customers we don’t simply give you money for nothing. In 2010 in the Championship, Swansea City averaged 15,500 fans, in 2020 we will average a similar number of customers. There is a MASSIVE difference!

The ‘class-cleansing’ of fans was inevitable and let’s be honest, it was needed in some cases. People should be able to bring their kids to the football, but I would argue that there are parts of the stadium where you shouldn’t or if you do then you have no right to complain if they do hear some words and see some things which you’d rather them not see.The North Bank was the North Bank. You knew what you would get. If you wanted to bring your child to experience the North Bank then that would be our call. If they heard someone screaming to the referee that they were going to ‘f*ck their missus tonight’ then don’t complain; that’s what you get! (that is also what you get in Jack Swan magazine so don’t complain about that either!!!) But if that person shouted that in the family stand then they wouldn’t be able to complain if they were thrown out; horses for courses and all that jazz!

I’m getting almost daily emails from the club with ticket promotions or whatever and I have little sympathy to be honest. The club is no longer our club, the fanbase which kept the club going through the dark ages has been truly shat on, the atmosphere deliberately destroyed, and the CEO’s won’t remain. They are customers and not fans!

The club has deliberately evolved into one which has more wealthy and middle-classed people attending the ground. In the short-term it may have made some extra money* but these are customers who will chose rugby or football or gigs or a caravan weekends and this figure will drop and drop again.

PS * I genuinely personally believe that we could still be in the Premier League if we had of had a few more stella drinking psychopaths bringing some atmosphere to the ground in the latter years of the Premier League but that’s a different conversation.