Challenging Times
The last 18 months or so has been a difficult period for the football programme industry. Games being played behind closed doors has meant no crowds to sell to at stadiums. This has resulted in some clubs choosing to produce digital-only programmes and others to cease publishing completely (hopefully temporarily).
Whilst all 20 Premier League clubs produced programmes during the season (albeit with three clubs – Burnley, Leicester City, and Manchester City going digital-only) some 15 EFL clubs did not produce at all, with a further eight opting to go purely digital, and a few other clubs printing only sporadically. Only one Premier League club – Southampton – failed to produce programmes for all their fixtures, with the Saints deciding just over halfway through the season not to continue production until fans were back at the ground.
Given the alarm bells that sounded when the EFL took the decision in the summer of 2018 to allow their member clubs to opt out of producing a programme, the sudden increase in the number of clubs not publishing in 2020/21 was certainly cause for concern.
Plenty of clubs did continue to issue programmes and there remained many fine programmes in all four of the English divisions – not least our four end of season award winners – West Ham United, Norwich City, Bristol Rovers, and Exeter City. There were also several clubs who kept publishing but reduced their page counts, down from 80 or more to something in the region of 40 to 50 pages – several of which were very well produced.
Lessons Learned
So, what can we determine from these trends? Well, firstly it is to be hoped that supporters will be back in stadiums come the start of the new season in August, making the printing of programmes more viable than it would be for an online-only audience.
Secondly, digital programmes are clearly here to stay. Our position is that digital issues certainly have a part to play, but that they should be offered alongside a printed version of the programme. Digital is a great way of offering a cheap alternative for fans not attending games (especially for those fans living abroad who want a way of keeping up to date with developments at their club). However, they should meet the following criteria:
- Digital programmes should have the same design standards as printed issues.
One club that managed this successfully during 2020/21 was Leicester City, whose digital issue only narrowly missed out on our end of season awards. The Foxes’ programme benefited from having essentially the same layout as the club had used for their printed issues the previous season. Credit also to Leicester for charging just £1.50 for each issue – see below for more discussion about pricing.
- Digital issues must be made available in an easily downloadable format
Programme needs to be available in a user-friendly format, such as PDF, that can be ‘collected’ and easily viewed on a range of devices. The most egregious example of this idea being flouted in 2020/21 was Manchester City’s webpage that, as well as being a very poor offering, could presumably disappear from the club’s website at any point.
- Clubs going down the digital route should offer a subscription service for those supporters who still want a printed programme.
There are plenty of examples of non-league clubs in England and lower-league clubs in Scotland who have, for many seasons now, produced excellent programmes on gates of a few hundred people. For lower league English clubs operating on gates of a few thousand or more there really is no excuse for not offering some kind of matchday publication. Any club who says they will not sell enough perhaps needs to consider whether the reason for this is not so much a lack of interest in programmes on the part of supporters, but a lack of quality and value for money in the item itself.
Content and Price
A related point, which applies to both digital and printed issues, is that price should more accurately reflect the amount of content on offer. One of the concerning trends among those clubs who reduced the size of their programmes for 2020/21 is that many continued to charge the same kind of price as for the larger issues they had previously produced.
There is a perfectly reasonable discussion to be had about whether supporters really want the larger, bulkier issues, often amounting to 100 pages, and the role that such issues have played in making programmes less collectible – for example, where are you going to store any sizeable collection of modern issues? There were several examples of clubs offering smaller, but still impressive, issues in 2020/21 – not least Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest, and Sunderland.
However, if clubs are going to cut in half the size of their programmes, the prices charged should reflect this change. One measure of the value supporters receive from programmes is a calculation of the number of pages of actual content in an issue (after taking away advertising) in relation to price. This is the measure we use at Premier Progs to separate clubs tied on points in our annual programme awards.
Whilst Premier League issues managed to retain much of their value from the 2019/20 season, seeing only a slight fall in this ratio, from 19.9 to 19.5, the fall in the value of EFL issues was far more marked, dropping from 15.21 to 12.36. Again, clubs should not be complaining that there is no demand for programmes when supporters are receiving less value than in previous years.
Hope for the Future
As the start of the 2021/22 season nears, it seems that at least some of those clubs who did not produce printed programmes last season will do some this term – at the time of writing both Wycombe Wanderers and Mansfield Town for example now have season-long subscriptions available to purchase online.
Our hope is that clubs will see printed programmes not simply as a piece of merchandise that needs to cover its own costs, but as something of value that has non-financial benefits, serving for instance as a reference point long into the future.
As we have said above, digital issues – done well – have a part to play in the modern game, and it would be foolish to think that the digital genie can be put back in the proverbial bottle. However, we contend that printed programmes should remain part of every club’s offering, not just as a way of serving the particular preferences of collectors all over the country, but as a source of pride for the club itself, making a lasting contribution to the way the history of a club is recorded and understood.