soccer – I Spit Hot Fire

Parc des Princes (Paris), Camp Nou (Barcelona) and the European Football Stadium Experience

Photos: First two rows of Paris / Paris Saint Germain / Parc Des Prices. Bottom rows of Barcelona / FCB / Camp Nou.

About four years ago, I finally had a chance to watch a football match in Europe, watching a 2-2 tie between Real Madrid against Valencia. The match itself (I remember Real as a bit sluggish) wasn’t that great, but this Cristiano Ronaldo goal was pretty nice:

What I remember from that match is that the Santiago Bernabéu is an old, non-modernized stadium hosting one of the five most valuable sports teams in the world. Surprisingly (or alarmingly), smoking near the seating area was pretty common and the view really wasn’t so good (I paid the relatively reasonable price of $75 or so for nose-bleed seats). My wife Ha remembers nothing from this match, but a couple of months later she got to see Zidane (before he became coach of Real Madrid) there in the equivalent of an old timer’s charity match for less than $25 (I was jealous).

In planning for our Europe trip this past March, I really wanted to watch more football. I’ve seen Manchester United twice in exhibitions (once vs PSG and Zlatan Ibrahimovic in Chicago, the other last summer vs Real Madrid without Ronaldo and Ibrahimovic at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara), and to see them in England is still a big to do for me.

Instead, we were fortunate to see Paris Saint Germain vs FC Metz in Paris, and then Barcelona vs Chelsea in the Champions League (think playoffs) round of 16 at Camp Nou.

The Matches

I knew the PSG match would be a blowout – Metz is one of the worst teams in Ligue 1. Unfortunately, Neymar has gotten injured a couple of weeks before the match (months after I bought the tickets direct from PSG) and Cavani was suspended. Kylian Mbappé, the next great young “chosen one” at 19 years old played ok, but despite all this PSG won 5-0.

Ha and I were in row 1 (technically the second row) in the center of the lower deck. The tickets were about $120 each and all considering, a great deal. Since we were close to level with the field, it was a different view from above, but you could truly get a sense of the speed of play and the level of skill, even from Metz. The crowd atmosphere was just ok and the 48,000 seats in the stadium did not look anywhere near sold out.

One thing I learned is that after matches, home players go to the goal side housing their supporter groups and thank them for their support. Supporter groups chant and sing literally non-stop throughout a match.

For the Champions League match, it was a thrilling experience to see Lionel Messi in his prime play in a high stakes elimination match. Messi responded by scoring his fastest goal ever in less than 3 minutes, then followed that up with an assist and second goal.

Easily the best soccer experience I’ve had, even after paying around $250 per ticket to sit in Lateral 3 (good viewing angles, but fairly high up) on Viagogo, a secondary market for tickets. The face value was around $170, and I think I could have bought tickets for the match direct from the club a week before the event. I didn’t know this would be possible however, so I bought tickets months beforehand just to make sure we’d be able to go.

The European Stadium Experience

Parc des Princes and Camp Nou, like Santiago Bernabéu, are older stadiums. All three remind me (not in a good way) of Candlestick Park in San Francisco, which has now been replaced by the fabulous AT&T Park for the Giants and Levi’s Stadium for the 49ers.

The San Jose Earthquakes MLS team play in Avaya Stadium, which was completed in 2015. Despite housing a mediocre soccer team and holding only 18K people, Avaya is a much better experience than any of the three European stadiums I’ve been to.

How so? Huge high resolution big screens are in all modern American stadiums and arenas, but not in Parc des Princes, Camp Nou, or Santiago Bernabéu. I have good stadium-alternatives food options with food trucks at Avaya but Aramark (popular provider in the US as well) does the food at Camp Nou; our sausage / hot dog was plain bad (not worth finishing). If I remember correctly, there were perhaps 3 different food items one could buy in the whole stadium. 3! The food options in Parc des Princes was about the same.

There is no in-seat food delivery as you might get at Levi’s. Whether you think this is good or bad, there’s no alcohol served either. More on that later.

No ads, no extra information, not even helpful overlays on the big screens, no music, no one hawking snacks in the stand. From a purist perspective, I guess you could say you’re just left alone to enjoy football – in some ways the TV experience for football is the same. That can be a good things, but there’s just a lot of money left that these teams should be and can be making without ruining the spectator experience (see Earthquakes).

These are all just reminders of how American sports, particularly in the last 20 years, has become so competitive from a business perspective, innovating (nowhere near as fast as startups, but clearly fast relative to Europe) to capture more value from the modern sports fan.

Getting back to our hotel in central Barcelona from from Camp Nou was good – a number of different train lines connect at different stations nearby. Worst case, Camp Nou would have been just an hour away walking. Getting back from Parc des Princes was a mess, however. Google and local bus stop information suggested a bus we could take back to our hotel. That bus did not stop at the designated stop. It stopped at another stop (like a mini bus depot) very close by with other buses and just did nothing. I believe it was at least a half hour before any buses left, and all the while, we had no idea what was going on. Bus drivers didn’t know or could not say, or there were no signs that suggested an answer. We would have taken the subway, but the lines just to get into the (one) station were completely packed.

Alcohol and Hooliganism

One of the biggest surprises in European soccer is the lack of alcohol sales at the stadium. I don’t really drink, so it’s not such a big deal, but on the business side, this seems to be a lost opportunity. Then again, I’m not a fan of drunk fans either. I tried to think more about why this is the case, and my guess for it is hooliganism, a term used to describe disorderly, violent or destructive behavior perpetrated by spectators at association football events.

English football in the 1980’s was notorious for this; it was just dangerous to attend games.

During the Barcelona-Chelsea match, I witnessed hints of this after Barcelona went up 2-0, and the Chelsea fans in attendance became upset at a potential missed call. In another section above (and behind us) I had seen a plexiglass-like transparent barrier dividing the top-most section and the one in which I was sitting. I realized that opposing teams fans sat there, but I wasn’t clear why the barrier was needed. I had never seen that at a sporting event before.

After the missed call, I started hearing constant loud bangs on the “glass”. I then started seeing flying objects fly overhead (and likely hit fans). These were coins being thrown by Chelsea (a London-based club). What was astonishing to me is that there was no security to warn fans or to watch the fans doing this.

It was almost everything was perfectly all right and expected. In the US, you see warning messages on the big screens and around you to text message security in case anyone is being disruptive. You feel like you have an outlet in case you feel unsafe. Not the case here.

Then, when you think about not selling alcohol to fans, it does make more sense.

10 Things to Learn from Soccernomics (by Simon Kuper)

Soccernomics: Why England Loses, Why Spain, Germany, and Brazil Win, and Why the U.S., Japan, Australia, and Even Iraq Are Destined to Become the Kings of the World’s Most Popular Sport by Simon Kuper is basically the Freakonomics for Soccer. It looks at how the game is played but also the business of the sport and has many many many good things to note. Ideally, this article would be fifty things to learn, but here are ten things to learn from Soccernomics:

the most dangerous corner was the inswinger to the near post. The beauty of the inswinger was that it sent the ball straight into the danger zone.
In short, the more you pay your players in wages, the higher you will finish, but what you pay for them in transfer fees doesn’t seem to make much difference. While the market for players’ wages is pretty efficient—the better a player, the more he earns—the transfer market is inefficient. Much of the time, clubs buy the wrong players.
A new manager wastes money on transfers; don’t let him. Use the wisdom of crowds. Stars of recent World Cups or European championships are overvalued; ignore them. Certain nationalities are overvalued.
Older players are overvalued. Center forwards are overvalued; goalkeepers are undervalued. Gentlemen prefer blonds: identify and abandon “sight-based prejudices.” The best time to buy a player is when he is in his early twenties. Sell any player when another club offers more than he is worth. Replace your best players even before you sell them. Buy players with personal problems, and then help them deal with their problems. Help your players relocate.
It was Rupert Murdoch who went to English clubs and suggested putting them on satellite TV; the clubs would never have thought of going to him. In fact, the clubs often fought against new moneymaking schemes. Until 1982 they refused to allow any league games to be shown live on TV, fearing that it might deter fans from coming to the stadium. They couldn’t grasp that games on television meant both free money and free advertising. There is now a good deal of research into the question of how many fans are lost when a game is shown on TV. Almost all the evidence shows that the number is tiny, and that the gate revenue that would be lost is usually well below the amount that would be made from selling extra matches for television coverage
Let’s compare the breakeven rule to the salary cap, widely used in American major-league sports. A salary cap generally restricts teams’ spending on players to a fixed percentage of average club income (55 percent, say). UEFA’s breakeven rule restricts player spending to the level of club income defined as “relevant.” The key difference is that the US cap is the same for all clubs, whereas breakeven caps each club at the level of its own resources—a lot for the larger clubs, not so much for the smaller clubs. So while the American salary cap encourages competitive balance between clubs (it stops the Dallas Cowboys from spending infinitely more than the Jacksonville Jaguars), UEFA’s breakeven rule cements inequality by making it harder for smaller clubs to compete with the aristocrats. This hardly seems fair, unless by “fair” you mean the idea that big clubs should be protected from competition from upstarts.
“Two thirds of goals come from possessions won in the final third of the field,” he lectured. The great sin, to him, was losing the ball near your own goal.
“Soccer” was the most common name for the game in Britain from the 1890s until the 1970s. … Soccer conquered the world so fast largely because the British gentleman was such an attractive ideal.
Daniele Tognaccini, longtime chief athletics coach at AC Milan’s “Milan Lab,” probably the most sophisticated medical outfit in soccer, explains what happens when a player has to play sixty tough games a year: “The performance is not optimal. The risk of injury is very high. We can say the risk of injury during one game, after one week’s training, is 10 percent. If you play after two days, the risk rises by 30 or 40 percent. If you are playing four or five games consecutively without the right recovery, the risk of injury is incredible.
Kevin Alavy, the managing director of the Futures Sport + Entertainment consultancy whom we met earlier in the book, says that often the Premier League enters a new territory by offering itself on free-to-air TV. That’s what it did in eastern Europe, across the former Soviet Union, and more recently in Indonesia. Until a few years ago, hardly any of the 247 million Indonesians knew soccer. But given the chance to watch top-class English games on TV for free, many began watching. In recent years, says Alavy, “typically Indonesia has been the number one market by TV audiences for the Premier League.” Once Indonesians were hooked, the Premier League gave them a new TV rights deal that offered them far less free soccer.

10 Things to Learn from Game Changer: How the English Premier League Came to Dominate the World (Mihir Bose) [Soccer, Sports Business]

Continuing my research into soccer-business (see my previous post, 10 Things to Learn from Sounders FC), I recently finished Mihir Bose’s Game Changer: How the English Premier League Came to Dominate the World. Although the book may discuss the TV contract negotiations / creation of the Premier League in the early 90’s a bit too much, there is a lot of great insight into the modern game (from a business perspective).

Here are 10 things that I would like to highlight from the book:

All the major English clubs have targeted these fans and Chelsea have been particularly active trying to target disillusioned fans of other clubs who are not doing so well. These fans follow success and do switch loyalties.
Indians probably watch more live Premier League matches, including the 3pm Saturday kick-offs, than most do in Britain.
When the Premier League was founded in 1992, La Liga in Spain and Serie A in Italy were the dominant European leagues, secure in their own homelands and in the wider world. Italian football had even invaded England’s football scene, being broadcast every Sunday afternoon on Channel 4. But in the last 20 years all that has changed.
In another curious reversal of the American experience, football embraced segregation in order to cope with fan violence. The Americans spent much of the 1950s and 1960s trying to eliminate segregation based on colour from their society. English football in the 1970s decreed that fans could only watch if there was strict segregation between fans of rival teams. For all the changes that have since occurred in football, this separation of home and away fans still exists, with grounds having large signs directing them away from each other. And even in new stadiums such as the Emirates, Arsenal’s ground, it is made clear even in the executive box areas that fans should not be wearing the colours of the visiting teams.
Against this background, it is hardly surprising that English football failed to attract non-white fans. This failure persisted even throughout the 1990s when English football made strenuous efforts to oppose racism. The most prominent initiative, Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football, was launched jointly by the PFA, the Commission for Racial Equality and the Football Trust, and within a year all but one of the professional league clubs in England and Wales had signed up to its 10-point plan. This effort was supplemented by multiple individual initiatives from clubs, fanzines and community groups. However, in 2001 the FA Premier League’s national fan survey found that only 0.8 per cent of “active top-level fans” were Black British or British Asian. This represented a rise of only 0.1 per cent since the previous survey in 1997, and compared to a total minority ethnic representation of 13 per cent in the UK population. The same survey found that 7 per cent of all Premier League fans had reported witnessing racism against other fans and no fewer than 27 per cent had reported racism displayed against players at matches.
Hilly’s great idea was to take the score and the time and put it on the screen. I remember thinking, “Oh fuck — why have we not thought of that before?” It had never been done. Anywhere in the world. Can you believe it, only 20 years ago when you were watching football, you’d switch on and you didn’t know who was playing, you didn’t know the time, and you didn’t know the score.
The Champions League was born! The new marketing concept was both innovative and commercially adapted to the changing market conditions. Each sponsor would receive exclusivity in its product area, not only in the stadium as was previously done, but also on TV, with commercial airtime spots and programme sponsorship. By linking stadium advertising together with on-air sponsorship, it became almost impossible for non-sponsors to associate with the competition. The three pillars of stadium advertising, commercial airtime, and programme sponsorship generated a “multiplying media effect” that offered new levels of recognition to the sponsors. A “less is more” approach was taken and a maximum of eight international sponsors was decided upon. The sponsor package included four stadium advertising boards, ticket allocations, and identification on TV interview backdrops and in the VIP and press areas. Each of the sponsor ticket holders was also invited to specially arranged hospitality suites before and after the matches.
In the years since 1995 the Bosman ruling has led to other changes in the transfer regulations. It led to transfer windows allowing player transfers only twice in a season, once at the start and once in the middle. But most significantly, it greatly increased player power. The court ruling meant that footballers were now free to move when their contracts expired. And this in turn paved the way for footballers to earn multi-million-pound salaries. Sport could no longer be exempt from EU competition rules and had to be treated like any other business. The net effect was that unless a club arranged a transfer before the player entered the last year of his contract he was free to move at the end of it. This tilted power decisively in favour of players and away from clubs. Now players, particularly high-profile stars, were masters of their own destinies. And as free-agent players they could suddenly demand huge signing-on fees and salaries on the basis that the club they were joining did not have to pay anything in transfer fees. Football clubs were powerless to prevent their best players from leaving at the end of their current deals. Conversely, players under contract could demand bigger, better and longer deals — because the threat of being able to leave for free, especially if they would otherwise command high transfer fees, was something clubs could not ignore.
In his very first season Abramovich spent £111.3 million on transfers. Not only was this more than anyone had ever spent before in English football, but the Russian dramatically changed the terms of trade. He paid the full transfer fee at the timing of signing the player. This broke with the usual convention of fees being spread over a period of time. Cash on the nail proved a lifeline for clubs facing cash-flow problems. Indeed, it was immensely beneficial to clubs such as West Ham who were then under financial strain, as the then club chairman, Terry Brown, acknowledged. Since 2008 and the purchase of Manchester City by Abu Dhabi United Group, Chelsea have been challenged and even overtaken in transfer spending. In 2010–11 the club spent £141 million on players, the third successive season they had spent more than £100 million, double that of Manchester United and comfortably ahead of Chelsea at £91 million.
While the 20 Premier League clubs had an income of £2.3 billion, the remaining 72 clubs in professional football in England between them had an income of under £700 million. Two of them, Port Vale and Portsmouth, are in administration and 13 of the clubs in these three divisions are classified by financial experts as in distress, meaning that they have serious court actions against them, including winding-up petitions and high court writs, or have been issued with striking off notices for late filing of accounts or have county court judgments against them.