MEET Dave. Dave is middle-aged, has 2.4 children, and holds down a perfectly ordinary job. He lives in a three-bed semi smack bang in the middle of the country.
Market research would peg Dave as an everyman but in reality he is a hero for all of the reasons above. There is one other thing you need to know about him though, something that makes him a superhero. In the modern era, where fans are fleeced, disadvantaged and taken for granted at every turn and all for committing to an unceasing level of dedication and sacrifice that goes marginally beyond the sane Dave watches his team play football, home and away, each and every week.
As a Manchester City supporter that means that from now until the end of April he will travel to London on four occasions; twice on a Saturday, once on a Sunday and once on a Tuesday evening. He will shell out just shy of four hundred pounds on tickets alone for matches that at this stage of the season come thick and fast and that figure will substantially be trumped by travel costs plus food and drink.
Throw in a programme or fanzine as well as that mysterious life tax that charges you for going out into the wider world and doing stuff and Dave’s vocation as a Blue will deplete a sizable chunk of his wages.
Man City's fraught relationship with UEFA/Champions League continues Fans still booing the CL anthem at at the start of a new season.
Many empty seats across the Etihad Stadium – something just highlighted on 5Live too (Is it prices, limited interest, overload of football?)— Rob Harris (@RobHarris) September 19, 2018
That of course only focuses on the finances. There is also the time off work to be negotiated along with the eating up of countless motorway miles one cat’s eye at a time. There’s the reliance on his other half to take care of the kids because going to a game isn’t ninety minutes out of a day but a day itself. That incidentally makes his wife a superhero too.
Should City progress past Spurs in the Champions League there will then be hotels to book and flights to secure and by the year’s end his investment into his obsession will be incalculable, truly mind-blowing. If Dave spent the same amount of time and money following a favourite band he’d be considered a superfan. But this is football. He’s ‘just’ a fan.
Meet Josh. Josh supports Liverpool or Manchester United or Ipswich Town. It doesn’t really matter who Josh supports. All you need to know about him is that he’s young and doesn’t go to games and at some point during April he will source a photograph of the Etihad’s away section or the family section during a midweek game and put it up on Twitter. He will reference the ‘Emptyhad’ and accompany that highly original bon mot with a laughing emoji and in the replies rival fans will delight in saying ‘plastic’ a lot.
Jibes aimed at City’s supposed poor attendances are both tiresome and incredibly easy to debunk. I could get down into the nitty-gritty and point out that City’s average home attendance in 1998/99 was 28,273. They were in the third tier at the time. I could also namecheck a report that came out two year’s back that evidenced that City have more long-standing match-going fans than any other Premier League club.
That is not to look down on occasional attendees but it’s a proud boast nonetheless. I could highlight too that Liverpool’s record attendance would only be City’s 29th highest but why waste your time further when I can simply state that the club’s average home gate this season is 98.2% of its capacity. To use Liverpool again as a comparison theirs is 97.8%.
Attendance figures this season
Stadium Capacity –
Anfield – 54,074
Etihad – 55,097Average Attendance –
Anfield – 52,889
Etihad – 54,120Stadium Fill Percentage
Anfield – 97.8%
Etihad – 98.2%Hope this helps pic.twitter.com/w7485bwZvw
— DuffyEFC (@Duffyyyy_) March 25, 2019
That’s the argument over and done with surely, but of course it’s not. Because then come accusations that city massage these figures and I don’t know if they do and you don’t know if they do. We all highly suspect however that every club does this and have done so since the beginning of time.
So why is City isolated in this regard? Why indeed but it’s certainly not the only example where they are judged to a different criteria to everyone else. During a recent Champions League game Henry Winter and an assortment of other journalists felt the need to criticise the winers and diners of City’s Tunnel Club for not heading back out into the stadium straight after half-time.
This is an annoying occurrence that is commonplace in every major ground across the country and it’s odd that it’s taken so long for esteemed commentators on our game to highlight it. What was odder still was that Winter et al all chose to do so as a collective while a record-breaking European thrashing was taking place before their eyes.
This is all, by the way, not to suggest that everything is hunky-dory regarding attendances at City or anywhere you care to mention. The average age of a supporter in 2019 is 45 while two generations ago it was nearly half that. The young are being priced out and that is a genuine concern. Elsewhere fans are being fleeced, disadvantaged, and taken for granted, ever more so, with ticket prices exorbitant and games rearranged on a whim.
City’s performance being criticised but it can’t be easy playing in an atmosphere like that.
— Tony Barrett (@TonyBarrett) March 9, 2019
All of which gives the militant on social media plenty of wrongs to aim their wrath at. Do they do so? They do not. Instead we turn on each other, scoring petty meaningless points with entrenched tribalism and this despite the fact that in this instance we’re on the same side. It is fratricide wilfully committed for retweets.
Which allows the real villains of the piece not only to get away with it but to then have the sheer gall to pontificate at the crime scene with a knife in their hand. Sky and BT Sport regularly take cheap pot-shots at the attendances and the mild atmosphere at games they have scheduled at some ungodly hour while recently TalkSport discussed ‘the empty seats at the Etihad’ concluding it was due to City fans’ ‘arrogance’. This utter ridiculousness then naturally finds its way onto social media, echoed by Twitter accounts with players' names as their handle, and the whole stupid cycle revolves.
Yet none of this bothers Dave particularly. He doesn’t ‘do’ Twitter. He doesn’t have the time frankly because he’s too busy working hard to support his family and travelling the length and breadth of the country supporting his team. Furthermore he doesn’t seek out attention and he certainly doesn’t get any whereas Josh unquestionably does. Josh defines himself by likes. He lives for lolz.
Who will be most celebrated this April? Dave or Josh? We know the answer to that and it’s an odd state of affairs. It really is.
