From Bovril and bobble hats to Michelin star meals and a swimming pool next to the stand — football at Fulham ain’t what it used to be!
IT IS not just the teeming crowds of people that stand out in an image taken before Fulham played Chelsea at Craven Cottage in August 1965 — boys hanging from the floodlight pylons and perched precariously on a ledge in front of its ornate lattice ironwork — but the sense that it was a place for the entire spectrum of society.
Men in ties and jackets blend in with the younger fans in bobble hats and though the flat caps which would have dominated such a scene 10 years earlier are largely absent, there is a clear sense that matchgoing is in no way stratified.
Everyone had the same experience, including the solitary woman captured in photographer Patrick Larkin’s shot. There was no corporate experience for those who had dressed so smartly for Fulham’s second game of the campaign, which they lost 3-0.
The photograph is an eternity away from the computer-generated images released this week of the modernised elements of Fulham’s new Riverside Stand, including an outdoor swimming pool, ‘skydeck’ with views of the Thames and two Michelin star restaurants which form part of ‘The Gourmet Experience’. Bovril, you imagine, is not an option.
THEsupposed ‘cheap seats’ in the Riverside Stand are already eye-wateringly expensive. It was £160 to watch the Manchester United game from that vantage point earlier this season. A ticket with pool access and deck access? It just doesn’t bear thinking about.
It would be wrong to assume that the great Johnny Haynes, Bobby Moore, Rodney Marsh or Alan Mullery, legends of the Cottage, would turn their noses up at the place being turned into a high-end dining facility.
Haynes, the first £100-a-week footballer, enjoyed the good life and so did the others. But the facility, with its wide leather seats, poolside deckchairs and jungle of potted plants, flaunts the luxury experience to those long- suffering fans who were watching Fulham play Scarborough and Rochdale in the fourth tier in the mid-1990s and will not be availing themselves of the pool.
The new facility’s glossy PR launch comes six months after the Fulham Supporters’ Trust accused the club of pricing ordinary fans out of games by charging up to £3,000 for a season ticket — the most expensive in the Premier League this season.
The cheapest adult tickets for the Manchester United game were £35 in the ‘Family Zone’ in the Johnny Haynes Stand — but supporters had to be accompanied by children, who cost £24 a ticket.
The next cheapest adult ticket in the Hammersmith End set fans back £67. Fulham owner Shahid Khan gave fans’ complaints short shrift, which was consistent with the way he generally treats supporters. It’s a month since the Fulham Supporters’ Trust formally stated that the club is not taking fan engagement at all seriously — and now this swanky new facility. All slightly excruciating.
The relationship between football and hospitality didn’t start out this way. When merchandise and retail guru Edward Freedman was poached by Manchester United from Tottenham in 1992, to rev up their commercial operation, his interest in improving the hospitality mix was driven by a feeling that some of the wealthier regulars, United all their lives, were missing out.
‘The fans were treated very poorly,’ Freedman tells Mail
Sport. ‘It wasn’t just the directors who wanted something nice for lunch before the game. There were just a few executive boxes at that time so they upped it to 105. They took things upmarket.’
There were few British clubs to learn from. Among the most imaginative things in the cuisine department in that era was Liverpool opening a McDonald’s store inside the Kop in 1995. The Liverpool Echo proclaimed it to be ‘Europe’s first football ground burger bar’.
So Freedman and United chairman Martin Edwards flew to the United States to get some ideas for hospitality. ‘ Basketball and American football franchises were doing it,’ says Freedman. ‘ We learned from them.’ It was a shot in the dark but United discovered that this was a new revenue opportunity. In the 1991- 92 season, United earned £20,000 from executive boxes. By 1994-95, the figure had doubled.
In those days, when a manager could spend whatever the chairman agreed to on a player, the terms ‘financial sustainability rules’ had not even been conceived. By the late Nineties, however, football’s setting of such parameters led clubs to pursue what Roy Keane dubbed ‘ United’s prawn sandwich brigade’.
It’s not just that the executive spend is needed to buy the expensive players now. It’s that the high-rolling audience is so evidently there. There’s a willingness to spend big to watch sport that didn’t exist 10 years ago.
The old notion of struggling for ‘spares’ has evaporated for those who have simply bought a Club
Wembley membership (which costs between £5,000 and £13,000), entitling them to attend all England, FA Cup and Carabao Cup games at the stadium.
Those figures are in line with the kind of money people are willing to pay, with live football more of a draw than ever.
The audience is evolving, with a bigger high- end. Anecdotal evidence suggests the cost of some season tickets at Everton’s new Bramley-Moore Dock stadium — provided the club remain intact to compete there — are £3,000 per season, with holders being asked to sign up for three seasons. That is a £30,000 commitment for one supporter, whose wife and son have also been season ticket holders for years. He is inclined to buy.
Other sports are also charging huge sums for the kind of vantage point that Fulham are promoting. Some of the viewing platforms for
Formula One in faraway lands are beyond spectacular.
The best of the best facilities view the prosaic matter of 90 minutes of football to be only a part of the equation. There’s an F1 karting track under the new Tottenham Hotspur Stadium — not something White Hart Lane could ever boast. A button at the new Bernabeu activates the retractable roof, which can be closed in just 15 minutes to protect concertgoers from the elements. Taylor Swift has already been booked in to perform in May.
This stuff understandably jars with some fans, battling to get across the country for 8pm kickoffs. Most supporters accept the razzle-dazzle and the hiving off of uber-expensive sections of a stadium as part and parcel of the money machine which sustains their place in the Premier League. But some fanbases have a more acute sense of owners crossing
the line than others. liverpool fans, whose relationship with owners FSG has been difficult at times, walked out en masse in 2016 in the 77th minute of a match against Sunderland at anfield, after a £77 match ticket (up from £59) and a £1,000 season ticket for the following campaign was announced as part of the new 8,500 capacity main stand. ‘Without fans it’s just 22 fools in a field,’ the liverpool podcaster rob Gutmann said at a time.
For the more enlightened clubs throughout the British leagues, hospitality is also about the concourse. It is there where Spurs have reimagined the pre-match experience for fans. The average fan spent less than £2 inside the ground on a typical match day at
White Hart lane, but now that figure is £16 because of new facilities including europe’s largest bar and a microbrewery.
Outside of the Premier league, Hull City — who have won awards for their catering — have expanded their concourse range to include a chicken katsu curry box and apple crumble. On Twitter, @footyscran lays out some of the culinary pleasures fans experience all over the world, from the Kidderminster Harriers cottage pie to the leeds United cheeseburger-loaded fries.
and then there’s Carlisle United, showing remarkable imagination when it comes to hospitality with their promotion of a ‘Fixture release Breakfast’ in which those willing to pay are royally entertained when discovering the date of Port Vale at home, lincoln away and myriad other delights.
But it’s still hard to avoid the sense that the Premier league is at most risk of losing touch with its base, as its clubs go in search of the high rollers who seem to be ready to pay, and creating a kind of class war in the process.
Perhaps the most beautiful evocation of the unstratified football, as we used to know it, comes in the homes of Football — British
Football Culture in the 1990s by the documentary photographer Stuart roy Clarke: his journey around a domestic game on the cusp of a modernisation which, after the horrors of Hillsborough, supporters were right to feel could only serve them well.
It is a reminder of the accessible, affordable place that the sport here used to be, before the unanticipated billions that rupert Murdoch paid for broadcasting rights bestowed unbelievable material riches on what, to the outside world, is now known as the ‘ePl’.
Clarke’s image of fans at roker Park in 1996, entitled Looking Up is extraordinary — both because of its artistic merit — the colours and stripes of their kits reflecting the vernacular architecture — and because of the people who occupy the frame.
Brothers, sisters, cousins, schoolfriends, a father, you imagine; all entranced and frozen in time by we know not what. They are an anachronism because now they couldn’t afford 12 tickets to be side by side even if they could find them.
There is an irony and a significance about the fact that only a German publisher — Spielmacher
— commissioned the homes of
Football (the text is in German, with english translation tucked away at the back). Germany seems to have a fascination with 1990s english football just before the big money, the modernity and the million-pound-a-month salaries came in.
Beprepared to hear a lot more about how to blow a fortune at the Cottage on matchday. yet to be fully unveiled are ‘The Dugout’ (a seat behind Marco Silva) and Fulham’s ‘Matchday Plus offering’ (which seems to be something entirely different).
Fulham are delighted, like all expanding Premier league clubs these days, that there’s been a ‘strong emphasis’ on employing local people to do the building work. It may be as close to the pool and Skydeck as those londoners ever get.