If you want to know who a sport thinks its customer is, don’t read the mission statement. Look at the fixture list.
A Sunday 4.30pm away game in a city 200 miles from your own tells you everything. There’s no train home. The club knows there’s no train home. The broadcaster knows. The fixture went where it went because that slot pulls a bigger audience on a sofa than the 3,000 people who’ll make the trip, and that audience is the one the rights deal was priced on.
I don’t think that’s a scandal. It’s a business decision, and quite a rational one. The money that pays for the squad comes from the screen, not the turnstile. But it’s worth being honest about what it means, because clubs still talk to supporters as though they’re the point, and the schedule says they’re the backdrop.
The backdrop problem
Broadcasters need the ground to be full and loud. An empty away end on television looks like a product nobody wants. So the match-going fan is essential to the picture and incidental to the decision, which is an odd position to put your most loyal customers in.
Most industries would call that a retention risk. Football calls it tradition and assumes it’s permanent.
What marketers should take from it
Every business has a version of this. In football, the 3pm blackout is the one piece of the schedule still arranged the other way round. The customer who shows up, pays and complains, versus the customer who scales. The pressure is always to design for the one who scales. The mistake is forgetting that the one who shows up is the reason the scalable one is watching at all.
Football will find out what happens when the away end gets thin. The rest of us can learn it cheaper by looking at our own schedules and asking who they were really written for.