It’s not easy following a team home and away, in the rain and the snow, ‘over land and sea’ as the song goes.
Long journeys, by car or public transport, which mean you get back home in the dead of night. Plenty of miserable defeats. Afternoons and evenings spent in thoroughly unpleasant conditions. Saturdays being unavailable as any sort of rest day. 20,000 home fans insulting you for 90 minutes. Frankly you’ve got to be slightly mad, or at least a little unhinged, to do it seriously for any length of time.
This is why away fans must be looked after, nurtured and protected. The authorities must realise that it is important to make sure that fans keep following their teams away from home, as it helps immeasurably in setting up the excellent atmospheres and large crowds in our stadiums (compared to the rest of Europe anyway).
Even in the Championship there can regularly be 1,500 to 2,000 away fans at some matches – in other second divisions across the continent you’d struggle to get that many home fans for some matches.
This is why the ‘Twenty is Plenty’ campaign is so necessary, and so important in helping shift the attitude of clubs with regards to away fans.
Of course, most clubs will simply view away fans as a necessary chore that needs taking care of – they’d probably rather we weren’t there, especially as inevitably these days the atmosphere is better in the away end. However, they grudgingly let us in and take care of us for the game, before seeing us on the long road home again.
The area where the attitude manifests itself most strongly is in the ticket prices for away fans. While essentially the same as for home fans, one has to put travel expenses and food on top of that, meaning that a £25 ticket will contribute only half the overall expense of the day. And when we add in time lost out of weekends as well, it starts looking like a very costly exercise indeed.
This is where a little long-term planning from clubs would be useful. While they obviously cannot control the price of petrol or train fares, they can control how much they charge visiting supporters.
A little less expensive pricing (which to be fair does only really apply to Premier League clubs), and a little more long-term thinking would mean that the fans who keep putting the long shifts in throughout the season to make sure that their team is always backed and supported will be rewarded by fair ticket prices.
This would inevitably mean that more fans go to away games, meaning that most clubs would recoup the losses from making away tickets cheaper by attracting a larger following. The atmosphere would also be better, as the home fans generally rise to the occasion when a large away crowd turns up and give it their best as well.
English clubs generally take much larger away support than other European teams, and that is a wonderful thing as it helps contribute to the passion, excitement and drama that runs through the veins of our game in this country.
Lets make sure that those great atmospheres in stadiums up and down the country aren’t lost due to short term thinking. Away fans are footballs great endurers, so lets make the other hardships they have to endure slightly easier to bear.
[ad_pod id=’writeforus’ align=’center’]
