It’s getting thinner in the stands – Kommersant Newspaper No. 205 (7406) dated 11/03/2022

One of the most noticeable results of the first round of the Russian Football Championship was, in fact, a catastrophic decline in the average attendance of its matches. Compared to the same period in 2019, which preceded the introduction of anti-coronavirus restrictions, it has almost halved, despite the fact that the international isolation of domestic football should, on the contrary, increase the value of the domestic championship, and the development of events in it so far looks extremely intriguing and attractive to fans. The crisis, at least in part, is caused by the introduction of the Fan ID system, which provoked boycotts of games by fans of many clubs.

Last weekend, the first round of the Russian football championship ended, and some observations and figures associated with it, in theory, should serve as an unconditional source of pride for the Russian Premier League (RPL). This is, for example, the effectiveness of the tournament. It is not just high, but surprisingly high – 3.14 goals per game, more than half a ball more than it was at the end of the previous championship. In this sense, the RPL has already actually caught up with the “big European five”, in which they always scored more often.

The degree of intrigue is also high. True, everything is clear with the leader: in a dozen and a half rounds, Zenit broke away from the nearest pursuer, Spartak, by seven points, and it is hard to imagine that St. Petersburg can miss the fifth gold in a row. But there are many intriguing moments behind them. It promises to be a good fight for championship medals: between Spartak and Orenburg, which closes the top eight, the distance is only ten points. Hot and in the basement of the table. Even being in last place with six points, “Torpedo” from mid-autumn does not look like a hopeless outsider, doomed to relegation. And in the danger zone, in which a couple of extra misfires can be fatal, there are a dozen more clubs, including Lokomotiv.

But with all these data, another figure contrasts sharply – this is the average attendance of championship matches.

At the end of the last decade, the RPL could “sell” it as an undoubted sign indicating an increase in the demand for domestic football. The 2018 World Cup, which Russia hosted for the first time and in which its national team sensationally reached the quarter-finals, clearly gave it momentum. In the season that followed, attendance shot up by 3,000 at once, to nearly 17,000 per match. And this was already an audience that looked shameless even against the backdrop of the Big Five championships, although earlier the Russian one was far behind them. The version that the live audience of the Russian Championship, albeit not at such a rapid pace, will continue to grow, remained relevant in the next season. The average attendance of his first round went off scale for 18 thousand people. However, due to the coronavirus pandemic, which provoked the introduction of varying degrees of severity of restrictions, including the presence of spectators at games that were filmed only recently, it was not possible to test the hypothesis in the next few months. But at the moment, it seems that we can safely say that the trend that was pleasant for the leaders of Russian football was interrupted in 2022.

The average attendance of the first round of the current championship is 10.8 thousand people. This is about 7.5 thousand (or 41.3%) less than in the first round of the pre-pandemic championship three years ago (see reference). The catastrophic nature of the fall is emphasized by some details. The audience shrunk in the stands of the stadiums of almost all the clubs that played in the RPL in 2019 and continue to play now. The happy exception here is Dynamo. And if we talk about the occupancy of the home arena, then worthy, without any reservations, it seems only to the newcomer of the Fakel RPL – 85.6%. However, this is largely achieved due to the exceptional cheapness of season tickets for matches of the Voronezh club.

Moreover, the catastrophe happened despite, perhaps, the context, which seemed to hint at a reverse trend. It’s not just about the championship’s jumping performance and an abundance of interesting events in it, but also about the international isolation of Russian football after the imposition of sanctions, due to which the clubs and teams representing it were excluded from all top competitions. In theory, they were supposed to raise the value for the public, the “share” in the market of spectacles of the main domestic tournament.

One explanation for the paradox lies on the surface. On July 1, a law adopted at the end of last year came into force in Russia, according to which the admission of persons to sports competitions is carried out only subject to the mandatory identification of participants and fans – the law on Fan ID. To purchase it, you must register at the “State Services”. The football championship has become a testing ground for the implementation of the system. Back in the spring, fans of various clubs, including those belonging to the “upper echelon” of the RPL, loudly protested against him, threatening to boycott its matches and carrying out the threats. In the current season, the mood in the fan environment has not changed at all. Matches of the championship of Russia are boycotted by associations of fans of CSKA, Lokomotiv, Zenit, Torpedo, Rostov, and some other teams.

At the same time, in the first round, the identification system was used only at five stadiums – in Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Samara and Sochi. All cities hosted the 2018 World Cup games, and his successful experience was the basis of the Fan ID law. To understand how the need to obtain it influenced people’s interest in attending matches of the national championship, it is enough to study the experience of two clubs – Rostov, which had a great first round, currently occupies fourth place and is very similar to a real medal hunter, as well as Sochi, which made a breakthrough in the last championship and won silver. Compared to the fall of 2019, the average attendance at their meetings has fallen by more than 75%. So, it is likely that the frightening numbers this fall next spring, when Fan ID will come to other cities, including Moscow, will still seem quite bearable.

Alexey Dospekhov, Evgeny Fedyakov