The progressive owner, by contrast, will be re-thinking relationships with fans in order to be able to anticipate their changing habits and perceptions and thereby optimise the resources they have.

Any business worth its salt has a dashboard that feeds into regular top table meetings. What are our customers saying this week? What’s the key positive? Where do we need to improve and how are we going in relation to our longer-term ambitions? How many football clubs have such a dashboard and can answer those questions?

AZ Alkmaar is one of the few clubs globally who take a reading of fan sentiment after every single home game.

That’s right: not every couple of years or maybe when there’s a crisis on the pitch, but every time the team plays a home game.  This shouldn’t be seen as some visionary activity, but the ‘bread and butter’ of any spectator sports business.  The fact that it’s absent from the vast majority of non-elite clubs we know just shows how unprepared the game is for the difficult moments ahead.

Let’s at least have an engagement KPI (Key Performance Indicator). Let’s have a score that tells us how engaged our fans are – how positive their levels of emotional connection are. 

This is not just about their likelihood to attend and renew but about how they feel; how positively they are likely to speak about the club; how likely they are to forgive when the club gets things wrong and the extent to which they believe the club understands, respects and honours their emotional investment in it.

A decade ago, we undertook some research with a League One club in England.  It led us to recognise that there are at least two vital KPIs clubs should use: Net Promoter and ‘personally valued’.

Of the first, much is known. ‘Based on your most recent experiences with us, how likely is it that you would recommend us (e.g., recommending to friends and family interested in football that they should attend a match and start supporting the club)?

It’s a question any business worth its salt will ask of its customers. But it’s not the only one. You need to understand the reasons behind the NPS^© score. If they’re scoring you high, why is that? Conversely, if they’re unhappy, what’s behind these sentiments?

There are, of course, many sports businesses around the globe who use this metric (most in the USA), but one thing we have learned is that, when we’re talking about sports fans, you need to ensure you’re in tune with the perspective of the long-term fan: he or she most emotionally connected to the club.

Let’s take my club Sunderland, for example. If I’m asked, ‘how likely is it that I would recommend Sunderland’, I may be tempted to reflect my love for my club by exaggerating my answer.  I’m not likely to recommend Newcastle. 

That is, indeed, what we found a decade ago.  When the fans of the League Club we worked with several years ago were asked the Net Promoter question, the aggregate score was positive (somewhere in the region of +3 to +5).

But when the same fans were asked a ‘re-worded’ question (‘based on your most recent experiences as a fan of NN club, how personally valued do you feel?’), the resulting score was markedly different: around -60.

Was this because using the phrase ‘personally valued’ somehow clarified that we were asking about their own individual lived experiences on match days?  We think so.