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TALKING FOOTBALL - Non-League Day and what it means to clubs

Non-League Day takes place on Saturday and we take a look at just what it means to clubs lower down the footballing pyramid.

Saturday brings Non-League day in England and Scotland, an annual event aimed at enticing football fans to a local football ground. It coincides with teams from the Premier League and Championship not playing because of international football.

Smaller teams appreciate the support and local football clubs should be cherished as part of the community. The United Kingdom is better for having at least one football ground in almost every town and village. They’re as integral to the landscape as rail stations or cenotaphs, part of the culture and history.

They’re old or new, ugly and picturesque. Some are overlooked by castles (Matlock Town), others by a cantilever bridge crossing a great ship canal (Warrington Town). There’s a slag heap looming over Frickley’s ground in Yorkshire, a relic from the community’s coal mining industrial past, while bleak moors face Mossley FC across the Pennines.

You’ll find some wonderful names – the Dripping Pan in Lewes, the Giant Axe in Lancaster or The Walks in King’s Lynn. These homes of football provide a platform for local heroes, for a community who can’t always afford or don’t have the inclination to watch top-flight football. Many are over a century old.

While the non-league players are mostly paid, the clubs are largely run by volunteers who are full of love for their local team. But they can’t run themselves. It costs £100,000 a year to run a typical club – not that there’s such thing in the esoteric world of non-league football - in England’s eighth tier. They need support, hard-earned cash from match going fans who are faced with more options for their time than ever.

The big teams naturally make the headlines, but the depth of support in England is what makes it stand out from every other country in the world – many of whom are struggling to attract fans to matches when they have so much choice on television. The same isn’t true in England.

While Premier League average crowds are over 36,000, there are still thirty non-league teams playing between the fifth and seventh level of football who average over 1,000 fans for each home game.

Many of the better-supported teams are former Football League clubs. Led by Tranmere Rovers, who average 5,235, all but one of the top 12 best supported non-league teams have spent the majority of their existence in the Football League before dropping out of the 92 club.

FC United of Manchester are the odd one out. Formed a decade ago, they’re averaging an impressive 3,425 in their new north Manchester home, complete with a vast 26-step covered terrace behind one goal.

There are other notable well-supported clubs lower down the pyramid. Hipster heroes Dulwich Hamlet average 1,084, while island team Guernsey, a club for whom every away game really does mean a journey over land and seas, attract 785.

Over 200 non-league clubs boast average crowds of over 200. They have wonderful names too – Blyth Spartans, Folkestone Invicta, Gainsborough Trinity, Marine, Shaw Lane Aquaforce, AFC Rushden & Diamonds and Sporting Khalsa, the first Asian team in England to own their own ground.

From Truro City in the southwest to Alnwick Town 500 miles to the north east, each have their dedicated band of match going followers.

In Scotland, Ross County and Inverness Caledonian Thistle were both non-league clubs until 1994. Now, both play in the Scottish Premier League.

These are changing times for football supporters. Armchair fans used to be derided for not going to games, for not supporting the club either vocally or by contributing to the players’ wages. They were viewed as lazier and less committed than the fans who actually made the effort to attend games. It was a logical point at a time when football clubs made most of their money from gate receipts.

Going to the match separated the wheat from the chaff. You paid your money and that gave you more right to an opinion than the bar room bore who formed his not through what he saw himself, but the media. You had some power too. If the fans voted with their feet then decisions were made: Dave Sexton was sacked as Manchester United’s manager because crowds were falling.

It felt right to support your club financially, to invest in a season ticket and show your faith. Your money mattered and Sir Alex Ferguson admitted that when he started out at Old Trafford, he had to wait for the season ticket money to come in before he could buy players. Matchday revenue accounted for almost 70% of United’s revenue; today it’s 25% and behind TV money and commercial revenues – and that despite Old Trafford being consistently full to its 76,000 capacity.

As the role of TV has changed football irrevocably, so the role of the fan has also changed. It has become socially acceptable to call yourself a football fan and not actually to go to games. Twenty years ago, fans who complained that they didn’t go because “you can’t get tickets” (when you could) were ridiculed.

Television changed the landscape of British football. The first football league matches only came to British television in 1983, but it was hardly a flood. United, England’s biggest club, played one live game home game per season between 1983-84 and 1986, two in 1986-87 and one the following season.

Fast forward to last Sunday. If you had enough time and fancied offering up grounds for divorce, you could have watched the following games on live television in the UK: Everton v Liverpool, Ajax v PSV, Arsenal v Manchester United, Bayern Munich v Borussia Dortmund, Paris St Germain v Olympique Marseille, Atletico Madrid v Real Madrid and AC Milan v Napoli. There were more games, but that’s enough for now, almost the world’s top football clubs beamed straight to a screen of choice.

Sounds great doesn’t it, like a kid in a sweetshop with all that choice? Or is there so much that it begins to wash over people? But they are tuning in and it shows how live football is central to the profits of broadcasters. People will pay to watch it and television revenues have turned the football clubs in the Premier League from loss machining entities to profit making businesses owned by American industrialists, sovereign wealth funds and Russian oligarchs.

The Premier League has a global appeal, so how can the fans around the world be expected to watch matches live? I’ve met Macedonian, Iranian and Indian Manchester United fans in their own countries in the last year who dream of attending a United game. A combination of sanctions, visas and finance make it almost impossible, but they were still deeply passionate about their team. They watch every game through a screen, they just don’t go to the ground.

Television didn’t kill people going to live football as first predicted. Gates used to be adversely affected if the game was on live. Not now.

Arsenal, Leicester, Manchester City, Southampton and West Ham have all recorded their highest ever average attendances in the last two years. The average Premier League crowd has grown by 15,000 from 21,125 at the Premier League’s 1992 inception. Crowds averaged only 19,000 in 1988.

Contrary to fears, the lower divisions have not been hit either. Average attendances in the Championship have been consistently around the 17,000 mark for a decade, well up on the 7,688 nadir of 1988. The Championship is better supported than the top divisions in Russia, Portugal, Belgium, Scotland, Turkey and many more.

League One’s average has been around 7,000 since 2002, League Two’s around 4,500, well up from 2,500 in 1986. More people are attending football matches in England than at any time since the immediate post-war period.

The shape of England’s national team or the number of English players in the Premier League may bring cause for concern, but football in the country which invented the sport remains in rude health.