What do you look for in someone who is going to grow your club?

• They have to be entrepreneurial as they’re going to build business connections
• They’re also going to visiting schools, so they have to be good with kids and understand teachers’ needs.
• They’re going to be doing a role no-one has done before, so they need to be ‘self-starters’.
• They should be great in one-to-ones but also capable of taking the mic on a match day and being the ‘face’ of the club.
• They need to be imaginative, creative and out-going (as they’ll be finding new ways to promote the club) as well as analytical and data-driven, as they’re going to be assiduously recording their activities, measuring success and determining the impact and influence of a range of variables, including weather, kick off times and team performance.It goes without saying that they also need a passion for football, but they’re going to need that rare left and right brain balance of logic and intuition to succeed.

Aleks Dmitrijev stepped forward. Aleks had run his own online furniture retail business, while also being volunteer match promoter for the local futsal team (whose crowds exceed Narva Trans’ attendances). Along with two more talented CDOs (Katrin at FC Flora Tallinn and Heiko at Tammeka Tartu), he came along to our workshop; made some immediate connections between the things the likes of Lewes FC, Durham Women, Middlesbrough, Doncaster Rovers, Stoke City, Sligo Rovers, Cork City, Brentford, Colchester United and many others were doing and the rest is history.

At the last game before the pilot, there were fewer than 70 people present. In the first game after the pilot (separated by the World Cup just over the border) 824 attended.  True, that was helped by the presence of the UEFA Super Cup Trophy Tour (where people could pose with the Champions League trophy, for example) but four months later, attendances have averaged out at 400+.

What did we learn?

First of all, you need focus. Someone needs to take responsibility for growth. If no one does, it doesn’t happen.

Next: your community work needs to drive up attendance. Clubs’ work is powerfully linked to addressing social issues, but less so to getting people down to the game (a missed opportunity I often see in the UK).  So Aleks designed a programme around road safety; took players and coaches into schools; provided music that kids love, dancing, fun and learning and distributed vouchers to the kids to come to a game so that they could receive their JK Narva Trans-branded safety reflectors on the pitch. 40% of those kids he’d met turned up.

Second you need to be different. Narva’s grassed stadium has a running track around it, so Aleks organised for a local Go Kart provider to bring some vehicles to the game, so that kids could spent the pre-match period speeding around the pitch. A woman brought her new hairdressing business to one match; set up a gazebo and provided trims for fans with both her and the club benefitting as a result. In the most memorable example of all, I turned up to a game in September, bought my ticket and found a picture of Ana and I on it. Yep, photos of fans regularly appear on the tickets. We’re all part of the Narva community.

The personal touch is vital. Aleks visited existing business contacts and cultivated new ones. Many were sceptical. ‘Narva will never increase attendances’ they would say. Then they’d turn up to a game.

A lot of what Narva does is unprecedented, but you can no longer say it’s ‘un-presidented’ as the news got out about this amazing story and Estonia President Kersti Kaljulaid turned up to a game (along with 521 other fans). The deputy mayor (a fan of the club) was an initial sceptic, but not after this.

Players are so important, but I bet none of you can name a current Narva player. True, Valery Karpin comes from this part of the world, but he hung his boots up some years ago. The one you may know (Dante Leverock: captain of the Bermudan National Team) has just left Narva for Sligo Rovers (whose approach to community engagement, incidentally, was a big influence on this work).

But kids don’t care if the players are super stars are not. They are their players and high fives; autograph sessions and new pre-match and post-match player / crowd interactive rituals soon flourished. The club’s captain has commented on the positive motivational impact this has for the players.

I love how Narva Trans captures what makes it different and shares this on social media; how it uses Facebook to share its outstanding school sessions and how it invites other schools and colleges to declare interest in the comments line should they wish to take part.

Aleks also assiduously records all activity, since if we’re going to give focus to attendance growth it can’t be a series of un-connected ad-hoc interventions. We need data.

So, we record the kick off times; the day of the week; the weather; the temperature; other competing events (cultural and sporting); school term time; the quality of the opposition; the team’s current performance – all of the things we can’t control.

But we also record the ‘controllables’ too: the number of school visits; the number of tickets issued; the number of business meetings; the number of promised Facebook ‘event’ attendees (Twitter is yet to take off in Estonia); radio and newspaper pieces and personal invitations, etc. We then record the outcomes.

Aleks informally collects feedback from people attending; he strives to understand why people don’t attend, separates out what he can influence and acts.

Football is a game of opinions, so here’s mine:

The reason many clubs struggle to grow attendances is because they don’t give it focus and they don’t have a plan.

I hope this little example from UEFA’s work in Estonia inspires a few of your New Year Resolutions for 2019.

Head uut aastat!