Not covid, so Fan ID – Newspaper Kommersant No. 39 (7484) dated 03/07/2023

The first tour of the Russian Championship after the winter break only added relevance and urgency to the topic related to the use of Fan ID. Back in the fall, the fan identification system looked like the reason for a sharp decline in championship attendance, despite the fact that it was used at only five stadiums. Against the background of its widespread introduction, starting from the spring part of the tournament, the number of spectators in the stands has even decreased – to indicators, given the demand for domestic football that has grown at the end of the past decade, almost shameful.

The Russian Championship resumed after a winter break that lasted almost four months with the matches of the 18th round held last weekend, and it is not at all difficult to determine the main pictures and figures associated with it. Pictures are almost completely empty huge sectors of the stands of all the stadiums where the matches were held. And the numbers are statistics that describe the size of the voids.

A total of eight matches of the 18th round visited, according to the official website Russian Premier League (RPL), 60,641 spectators, an average of 7,580 at each game. To understand how small this is, you need to remember a pleasant trend that seemed quite stable in vain.

The attendance of the championship was once the pride of the leading Russian football structures, and the RPL could “sell” it as an undoubted sign indicating the growth in 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 European five” championships, although earlier the Russian one was far behind them. The thesis 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.

Fully anti-coronavirus restrictions in football were lifted last spring. However, in the autumn part of the current championship, attendance suddenly dropped quite sharply compared to pre-coronavirus times. Now it is 10,321 people on average per match. But the thing is that the 18th round is far from this modest bar.

A few more details. Five, more than half, meetings of the tour – Spartak with Ural, Akhmat with Orenburg, Rostov with Lokomotiv, Dynamo with Wings of the Soviets and Sochi with CSKA – did not collect and 5 thousand spectators. The largest audience – 19,705 people – was at the game in which the championship leader Zenit hosted Nizhny Novgorod. But this is still an anti-record of the Gazprom Arena built for the world championship, almost twice as low as the average attendance at home matches of St. Petersburg residents in the season.

A look into the recent past can soften the situation a little. In 2022, in the first round after the restart of the season, the 19th, six meetings were played due to postponements, which were attended by 42,788 fans. That is, its average attendance – 7131 – was even a little lower than the average attendance of the 18th round of the current championship. But in reality this is not a very correct comparison. The 19th round in 2022 was played earlier – at the end of February – and until restrictions were lifted. And now the 20th round of eight games, which also took place at the beginning of March, attracted 83,739 people to the stadiums, 10,467 per match.

It is not at all difficult to determine the main version explaining what happened. From July 1, 2022 in Russia entered the law, according to which admission to sports competitions is carried out only subject to the mandatory identification of participants and fans, is in force – the law on Fan ID.

To purchase it, you must register on the Gosuslugi portal. The football championship became the testing ground for the introduction of the system. 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.

Demarches by loyal club fans who equated the fan card with a violation of personal freedoms, and simply the unwillingness of citizens to go through the procedure for issuing it, were in fact unanimously recognized as a significant reason for the fall in attendance in the fall. At least the other is hard to pick, given the context, which persistently hinted at the inevitability of 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 for spectacles of domestic tournaments, especially the national championship.

At the same time, in the autumn part, the identification system was used only at five stadiums – in Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Samara and Sochi. All cities hosted the games of the 2018 World Cup, and his successful experience was the basis of the law on Fan ID, which, as Maksut Shadayev, the head of the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation, said in January, about 350 thousand people issued it. From the spring part, the system has spread to all RPL stadiums. In the 18th round, it was used for the first time at six arenas – Zenit, Spartak, Dynamo, Krasnodar, Akhmat and Torch (they played with Nizhny Novgorod, Ural, ” Wings of the Soviets”, “Torpedo”, “Orenburg” and “Khimki”, respectively). All of these teams are on the list of those that have never had problems with a live audience before. Everyone in the 18th round was forced to play in silence, having lost their usual support, despite the fact that in November, in the final rounds before the winter break, they had a good level of support in their home matches, which did not suggest a possible crisis.

There is nothing strange in the fact that the events of the past weekend provoked another wave of discussions about the expediency of Fan ID, in which several deputies of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, which had previously stubbornly defended the system, took an active part. And if, for example, Dmitry Svishchev said Sport24 that the probability of abandoning it is “extremely low”, and that the government of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Sports of the Russian Federation and the Russian Football Union (RFU), in his opinion, should understand the reasons for the decline in attendance and propose measures by which “they plan to return the fans” , then Vitaly Milonov warned that he was preparing an initiative to cancel the Fan ID, calling it “madness.”

Alexey Dospekhov