Getting to Grips with Loyalty

Mark works all over Europe helping associations, leagues and clubs to understand and improve fan engagement and their match day experience.

The Fan Experience Company was founded in 2005, and in 2019/20 they oversaw the assessment of over 350 games each season in 13 countries.

The word ‘limbs!’ often accompanies a social media post depicting a crowd’s reaction to a moment of pure joy in football. The sight of arms (and sometimes legs) in the air, flailing about in rapture, is one of the things we love most about the game. But with Covid-19 holing football below the waterline and uncertainty about the numbers of fans who will re-attend (when permitted), isn’t it time to get a grip on fan motivations?

Academic definitions of Fan Engagement concur that it can be expressed both in ‘transactional ways’ (i.e., buying tickets, attending matches, etc.) but also in ‘non-transactional ways. Therefore, any club approach to understanding and nurturing loyalty must consider both sides of the coin.

The danger of an imbalanced approach – which, in our experience, often characterises the football industry’s approaches to engaging fans – is that if clubs only see loyalty as ‘purchasing tickets and merchandise’ for example, then the habits that define the emotional connection (travelling to away games; talking up the club on social media; advocating the club & turning up the games at lower categories in appalling weather, etc.) are not valued and the relationship less strong as a result.

This can be seen by comparing the way clubs define loyalty and the way fans see it. So, with the challenge of re-engaging our fanbases after Covid-19, why not give fans the opportunity to define loyalty themselves?

But what is loyalty? We undertook an informal survey with practitioners that follow the Fan Experience Company on Twitter and those who are connected to me (Mark) on LinkedIn. We wondered whether the responses would help us understand whether it’s a state of mind, a set of behaviours and habits or a combination of both.

Here is a selection of the comments received:

‘The interesting question which this raises, and loyalty programmes in general raise, is distinguishing what actions are given what reward. While we want to encourage many more activities, digitally and offline, we should never lose sight of the core action: paying through the turnstile, win-lose-draw, home-away, for years on end.’

Practitioner, Bundesliga

‘Loyalty is a very hard-to-measure concept because every fan group gives its own interpretation. For one, maximum loyalty means visiting all home-and-away games, for others it might be visiting max. 5 games a year, and another might say it's reading everything about their favourite club without ever making a transaction. Therefore, there is no 'maximum/minimum' and it's almost impossible to create a scale for loyalty. Nor that it is infinite; loyalty to me is a construct that can disappear when not being compensated properly. According to me, finding a definition for fan loyalty might be something like 'maximum emotional connection a fan (group) can create with its club.’

Former club practitioner, Eredivisie, The Netherlands

‘Football, and indeed much of sport is such a multi-faceted, product with personal and diverse behaviours, which makes measurement and judging/evaluating loyalty, that can be used in some way for value added promotions or enhancement activity somewhat problematic. Tracking visible consumption doesn't necessarily correlate in a tidy way to loyalty, as might be the case in other categories where traditional "loyalty" programmes exist. Clubs can create more meaning and loyalty through finding and acting from their purpose. Undertaking research to understand the culture, and to engage and listen to fans. Deep dialogue. Knowing who the fans are, how they see the club and developing a shared articulation and sense of what the club holds dear and what it seeks to achieve. From there, it becomes easier to be distinctive and authentic. To do the simple things well. To innovate. To know the right ideas. To stand for something. To provide more unique moments of magic. To offer more opportunities for fans to experience and get closer to their heroes and the club they love. To surprise and delight, beyond the performances on the pitch. Loyalty in sport is emotional. Fans want to be proud of how their club shows up. It's not transactional.’

Sports Academic, Northumberland, UK

‘Loyalty wears various hats. Some fans are satisfied with basic stadium amenities, minimal online/offline communication, a lack of personal contact with their club and obscure messaging in relation to season ticket/ticket availability and prices; these fans are often directly connected to the performance and results regardless of the ‘add-ons’. They are traditionally ‘loyal’ and will turn up regardless. It feels to me that that’s where much of non-elite football’s focus has been for a long time. To compete with other leisure experiences, to offer wrap-around family match-day entertainment, and therefore attract and retain a ‘different’ kind of loyal fan many clubs need to improve the fan experience from entrance to exit. This includes an improved focus on parking, catering, toilets, ticket and security staff interaction (smile and chat please), the quality of match-day entertainment and the provision of engaging music and announcements. Away from match days websites need to be easy to navigate and interesting, and fan communication, via email and other social media, personally targeted. Performance and results aren’t as important for some people and, for them, ‘loyalty’ can be developed in a different way.’

Owner, Sports Leadership Development Company

‘I always have been a huge FC Nantes fan and I could feel my deep link to the club when I cried when we moved to second division, when I suffered from moving away from my hometown and not being able to go the matches. And the hardest experience was when Emiliano Sala died. I couldn’t be at the stadium for the next home game, couldn’t share my sadness with my fellow fans and spent the whole match crying in front of my TV. But to move on more positively, I am now experiencing loyalty to a third division club as me and my kids have become US Orleans fans. I would say that loyalty at this level is more about keep on going to the matches, keep cheering up your players even when it’s hard. I would say that the fan that keeps attending matches, follows your social networks, buys merchandise when the results get bad, etc., deserves to be called a loyal fan. Even if it’s just about buying a scarf or going to 2 or 3 games in a season. These fans deserve special treatment.’

Fan & Customer Experience Consultant, France

I then spoke to several fans about the same issue. It’s interesting to see the common and divergent themes in both sections. So how do fans define loyalty? These are comments taken from informal discussions in the last few months.

‘I think there are layers of loyalty. My weekend is ruined if we lose, but because of distance, I can’t be at every game. I guess I am psychologically bound to my club, so while I think those who attend matches should be recognised and acknowledged by the club, I think football needs to work harder to understand the more intangible forms of loyalty’.

‘It’s about turning up to games early; supporting the youth teams; turning up in all types of weather; showing utter determination to be there. Sometimes I feel I have no option. It’s part of what I do.’

‘I haven’t really thought about whether or not I should be rewarded by the club for what I do, but I do think they need to account better for the challenges fans have when the TV companies change the dates of games at the last minute.’

‘I think it’s a mixture of the way you think and the way you behave. It’s impossible to accurately measure that across a diverse fan base, but you can at least ask fans what they think about loyalty programmes.’

And this last comment carries with it perhaps the most important learning point of this theme. Concepts of fan loyalty differ in ways that are natural in a sport that can be consumed in many different ways. However, an absence of focus on the fan’s perspective may lead clubs, leagues and federations to make errors that end up damaging the emotional and intangible nature of fandom.

Right now, when clubs need their fans like never before, football’s culture of keeping fans at an arm’s length must be challenged.

Unless it gets a grip on this soon, it might get several fingers bitten off.

Getting to Grips with Loyalty

Mark Bradley