Why football without fans is a pale imitation of itself - Chris Waters

At the turn of the millennium, FIFA, the sport’s governing body, estimated that there were approximately 250 million football players and over 1.3 billion people interested in the sport.

Its annual turnover was a staggering £250bn.

It remains by far the world’s most popular and lucrative game.

But, despite being one of those 1.3 billion-plus, I have not been able to get into football this season.

For the people’s game without the people – ie the supporters – has not been the same.

As the legendary manager Jock Stein once said: “Without fans who pay at the turnstile, football is nothing.”

It has been a pale imitation of its normal self.

With that in mind, the announcement that up to 4,000 fans will be permitted to attend outdoor sports when the national lockdown finishes on Wednesday is clearly welcome.

It means that football matches in those areas deemed lowest-risk for coronavirus will at least have some semblance of ambience and atmosphere again.

Although only 2,000 fans maximum will be allowed to attend games in tier 2 areas and none in tier 3, and although I personally think there is no firm evidence that lockdowns save lives and that crashing the economy works, it is at least a step in the right direction towards the return of full crowds.

For too long, the nation’s grounds have been empty, cavernous, dispiriting places, the gloom only heightened, in my opinion, by the grotesque spectacle of cardboard cut-outs of spectators at some venues – arguably the worst idea since Abraham Lincoln hitched up his trousers one April evening in 1865 and announced: “I’m just going to the theatre.”

For football without fans is not really football.

It is more like a training session, a reserves team game, a behind-closed-doors pre-season friendly.

If the pandemic has proved anything when it comes to “the people’s game”, it is how important the people are to the experience, which is ironic when one considers how football often takes its fans for granted by making them pay over the odds for tickets, and so on.

Yet their presence at games contributes so much – passion, noise, excitement, colour.

Fans help to make it “an experience”, an occasion to remember.

In this respect, football is different to some other sports.

Cricket, for instance, about which I bore readers of this newspaper in my capacity as cricket correspondent, does not suffer so much from the absence of crowds.

Granted, it is clearly not the same and there is nothing quite like the gentle hum that you get at a cricket ground on the first morning of a Test match or a County Championship game, and the financial implications for the sport are no less dire.

But the absence of crowds in cricket is not the same as the absence of crowds in football, even if the old joke about one man and his dog attending the average Championship game suggests that cricket is not unaccustomed to swathes of empty seats.

Indeed, covering the abridged two-month county season that started in August, I was struck by how the matches still felt proper and authentic.

In part, that was probably because I was behind glass in a press box and working away as I normally would (well, working away of sorts...). To me, it felt like covering any other game apart from the stirring sound of the Yorkshire crowd purring “shot” whenever Adam Lyth strokes the ball away through the covers, or when loud cheers greet an opposition wicket.

It was almost certainly different for the players, especially in T20, the form of the game that suffers the most from having no fans present, but I personally found the cricket to be just as enjoyable and recognisable as it always is – something that also struck me when I watched on television.

With football, though, the opposite is true.

Watching football on television, to me, does not feel the same.

This season, I have barely got through one live match without feeling the urge to switch off and get back to reading The Yorkshire Post.

Indeed, I haven’t watched a single episode of Match of the Day whereas normally I would watch it most weeks – at least up until the final fixture shown, usually a 0-0 draw between West Ham and Crystal Palace.

In contrast to some, who tell me they hate it, I have found that I can only tolerate the little football that I have watched by using the crowd noise feature that is sometimes available.

Even the sound of a fake crowd is better to my ears than no crowd, and it has the added advantage of drowning out the incessant, if clearly incisive observations of the likes of Gary Neville.

Interestingly, and intending no disrespect, whenever I have watched football on Sky without the crowd noise feature, it has been the only time that I have been able to hear clearly what Martin Tyler is saying on commentary.

Usually, I find his mellifluous tones blend into the background of the crowd noise to the extent that they are difficult to distinguish.

Perhaps it’s my ears, which do need doing, and have done for months, but unfortunately the wax removal service at my local doctor’s surgery, you’ll be absolutely fascinated to know, is still suspended due to Covid.

Pre-Covid, there were times when I would rather have tried to remove wax from my ears with a vacuum cleaner than sit in the stands at a football match when, let’s be honest, you can often end up next to or near the sort of person who should either be locked up, who has recently been locked up and released, and/or has the brains and self-awareness of a tadpole.

This sort of thing is usually pot luck.

But I have really missed attending lives games this season and sitting in the crowd, watching the mighty Lincoln City blaze a trail through League One (hey, someone’s got to do it) and that warm feeling you get when, a few hours after the final whistle, you finally get warm again having spent Saturday afternoon freezing in the stands and can reflect in comfort on yet another defeat before rounding off the night with Match of the Day.

It feels as if an entire part of our cultural life has disappeared, for nothing can replace the experience of “being there”, or, if watching on television, of getting that real sense of atmosphere and occasion coming through the screen.

For football without fans is like a day without sunshine.

It is the people who make “the people’s game”.

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