Sean wants LCCC want to do something a little radical in the world of cricket. No, not another form of the short game. Something really different. They want to put the fan (supporter, member, call them what you will) at the heart of what they do.

To this end, they’ve recently renewed their partnership with The Fan Experience Company for a second season, with an objective to make a visit to their Uptonsteel County Ground (previously  known to all as Grace Road) a memorable one for all visitors, whatever the result.

While The Hundred, cricket’s latest format, enjoyed a solid baptism during the summer, with large crowds and a largely new audience, the city-based competition wasn’t played in Leicester (the Trent Rockets play their homes games in Nottingham) but there are three other formats played at the ground that they can influence.

Watch This Grace

County Championship games (4 days) as well as the one-day Royal London Cup competition and the Twenty20 Blast matches will ‘grace’ the stadium next season and the club is determined to not only attract new fans to games, but more importantly, make them want to come back time and again.

For those thinking it’s about playing good cricket and winning, think again. It’s far more complex than that, in any sport. Fans are a lot less fixated on success than we are led to believe. Some very well supported clubs around the world maintain their numbers without success or winning hardly anything at all. Newer fans, families for example, have it way down on their list of priorities. Cricket, like most sports, is in the entertainment business and entertaining fans comes in many forms.

That brings us back to Sean, the CEO brought in during the pandemic. A native of Leicester, his background is in football – Sean was Commercial Director at Huddersfield Town for 14(?) years including their two seasons in the Premier League – he had witnessed the dramatic rise in attendances of families and junior fans (the next generation no less) in the EFL since 2006. This, not coincidentally, was the time when the league began its own focus on bringing new fans to clubs; a move that saw a 37% increase in junior attendance and an increase in attendances to numbers not seen since the 1950s (the golden age of football when it came to crowd sizes).

Through the Family Excellence Scheme – a programme that assesses the matchday experience at all 72 clubs via two games per season – clubs began to understand the importance of delivering a great day and how, while they had no control over the result, they can control what takes place off the pitch. Fifteen seasons later, the EFL is recognised as the benchmark for fan engagement and match day experience across Europe.

Huddersfield Town were one of the higher-achievers in the scheme. Before Covid robbed clubs of fans for eighteen months, a record 63 clubs achieved the Family Excellence award in 2020. The scheme has won global awards for its effectiveness, and been adopted in several other countries as well as by UEFA for international matches. So Sean knows the difference that a great experience makes to fans, and the club.

On his arrival into cricket last summer, at one of the most difficult periods the club and sport have ever faced while fans were not permitted to attend games, he immediately set about revitalising the club, or pressing the reset button as he put it.

With fans returning during the season, he was quickly aware that the focus on the matchday experience within cricket grounds was not the same as it was in the EFL. There were no guides on websites for new fans or families, social media wasn’t as engaging (or helpful) for those groups, there was not an abundance of things to do at the grounds (outside or inside) other than the match itself, and vital revenue streams such as retail and refreshments were drastically under-utilised.

He knew that the secret to changing this was through the club’s staff.

Time for Change

Sean wants to people working at the club (especially matchday staff) to buy into the ethos of putting the fan first, and do that whenever an opportunity arises.

Despite Covid creating a pandemic-sized hole in finances and, of course, attendances, Sean and his team began to make those changes wherever they could. This helped to get more than 3,000 people (including plenty of younger fans) to the ground on 30 August for a Family Fun Day during their County Championship match versus Kent. It didn’t happen by accident, the club did a lot of background work to create the necessary buzz to get those extra people there. But they also showed it WAS possible.

But that’s only half of the battle. They also have to want to come back. To help with this, Sean commissioned a match day assessment for a one-day game at the end of July. The staff at the club were recently shown the results in what will be the beginning of a wider programme, designed to get them fully on board and delivering a world-class experience at matches next season, and that will include a training programme and a staff recognition scheme that The Fan Experience first delivered while working at the NFL London Games prior to the pandemic.

The longer term vision that Sean has is for the county to be seen as a ‘challenger’ brand; a club that ‘bites at the heels’ of the bigger ones in the sport. While this is important on the field, they can do so off it too. By creating the best matchday experience in cricket, at games in all formats, they can put themselves on the map as pioneers and set an example for other counties to aspire to.

Sean concedes that in the past, the club had lost its way, its credibility and to a certain degree, its respect. Now they are ‘undertaking a quiet revolution’.

With membership increasing, partnerships growing the club commercially and a more positive outlook in general, fans (new and old) have quite a lot to look forward to in the coming months.