World view UK Playing in silence While football returned to stadiums as restrictions eased, supporters could not. How did empty grounds impact the fan experience? By Liam Kay The celebrations over a last-minute winner. The roar of the crowd as a red card is shown or a penalty appeal is turned down. All are intrinsic parts of the football experience, and all were put on hold this year. uropes top five leagues were forced to stop matches in March, when France, ermany, ngland, taly and pain all implemented restrictions. Of those competitions, only France did not restart the 2019/20 season. The rest opted for crowdless stadiums, with games played behind closed doors and matches broadcast on television with artificial crowd noise. nitially, it seems, fans were not wholly in favour of footballs return. n ay, a ou ov poll of the general population found that 73% did not feel it would boost morale in the generally. ocial listening firm ynthesio, meanwhile, analysed what fans were saying online about footballs return before and during the reopening of the ma or leagues. entiment about the Premier eague restarting was negative because of concerns about spreading the virus through large public events see boxout). The ootball ssociation has been researching sentiment about footballs return using a fans community panel called Pitchside, which has 2,500 participants. A tracker, called the Fan-o-meter, runs monthly with 400 people and a CRM database of fans who are members of the ngland upporters lub and ngland upporters Travel lub. Despite the lack of atmosphere, most fans embraced crowdless football. The FA research found that only 10% to 15% of supporters were less likely to tune in when matches were behind closed doors, offset by a rise in viewership reported by broadcasters such as ky. ne match shown on the during the Premier eagues restart outhampton v anchester ity broke the Premier eague viewing record, with 5.7 million viewers. Ross Antrobus, head of behavioural insights and business analytics at The , says most fans preferred artificial crowd noise when watching matches, rather than the sound of an empty stadium. We know from our broadcast and survey data that watch with artificial crowd sounds turned on, he says. People who watch with the artificial sound on watch for minutes longer on average. f you look at people who initially started watching without artificial sound, of those switched to using virtual crowd noise. The FA has also tracked mood and attitudes among fans, finding that stress and boredom levels started falling in une, as restrictions began to ease in the , but also that the return of football was broadly welcomed. e wanted to get peoples views on whether football is good for the mood of the nation. ootball fans overwhelmingly thought that was the case and, even among the general public, only one in five saw football coming back as having the potential to undermine lockdown, Antrobus says. t was probably helped by the fact that nglish football was not first back to market the erman undesliga helped pave the way in peoples minds, to show football could return safely. The FA surveyed 3,000 people who had attended events at embley tadium in the 18 months before Covid-19, to work out how best to return fans to stadiums. A trial with 2,500 fans has already taken place at rightons mex stadium, and there will be others at Wembley to pave the way for clubs of all sizes to return to a more traditional environment for games. The research will be used to inform the measures that are tested and subsequently recommended to clubs, to help them generate revenue from crowds again. Media value assessments for sponsors and partners are also being carried out. e are going to show the survey participants what we might be doing in terms of ueuing, turnstiles, cashless interactions and digital ticketing, social distancing in seats and making the most of social bubbles, Antrobus explains. All of the measures will mean that getting into the stadium and into your seat will be a more protracted process. We need to make sure fans are aware of that, and ensure they have the best experience they can. England v Germany Synthesio used a social-listening dashboard to analyse what people were saying online, between 17 April and 17 July, about footballs return to matches behind closed doors: For the German Bundesliga, 28% of the posts online were negative, while 22% were positive. For the English Premier League, it was 17% negative and 3% positive. 14 Impact ISSUE 31 20_pp14 football.indd 14 18/09/2020 10:07