Kids are loving FIFA World Cup 2014, so how can we keep them in the game?
One of the survey’s most eye catching headlines, that 47 per cent of the children surveyed wanted to help teams out by sending advice on selection and formations to managers, mirrors the initial response among adult football fans to an initiative in 2007. Approximately 32,000 people (of which this writer was one) each paid £35 to fund a takeover of Ebbsfleet United by the website MyFootballClub in exchange for a say in transfer policy and team selection in addition to more prosaic matters such as the price of pies at Stonebridge Road.
Tim Howard set a new World Cup record by making 15 saves against Belgium in USA’s second round defeat
While this initiative was short-lived – what it and Continental’s survey show – is that an interest in football produces opinion and debate, be the watcher young or adult.
Today’s children, growing up in an age of saturation football coverage, have more football information to access than previous generations. This creates a knowledgeable young fanbase who want to engage with the tournaments like the World Cup. These youngsters are certainly a lot more engaged than the majority of adults who paid £35 to play at being a ‘club owner’ for a season.
Robb makes this point: “It was interesting to see just how well-informed the youngsters were – reflecting that they have followed the action closely”.
Another of the survey’s key findings invokes an image key to football-supporting tradition. A number of the children surveyed said that the World Cup gave them the opportunity to spend quality time with their fathers. A father taking his child to a match is synonymous with football support, but much less is made of a parent and child watching football together on television. Probably due to the lack of sepia-tinted romance that can be lacquered over the latter.
Brazil capitulated after Neymar was ruled out of the tournament after suffering an injury in their quarter-finals match against Colombia
With both folklore and reality in mind, Continental’s research brings to my thoughts a point critical to the future of football in this country. Football crowds in England are ageing; the average age of a match-going supporter in the Premier League in 2011/12 was 41 and 9% of current Premier League match-goers are under 16, down from 22% of top-flight fans under 16 in 1983. This suggests that a parent and child attending a match together is largely no longer a reality.
What Continental’s survey confirms is that watching football is a thing largely done in front of a television rather than at a stadium. The reasons for this are much-discussed; high ticket prices and fixture rearrangements being chief among them. Added to that Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski’s assertion in Soccernomics that the ‘die hard’ fan is now more a minority compared to the casual consumer.
A key finding of this survey is that there is no lack of enthusiasm for football among the younger generation. Robb’s statement that the children’s forecasting was “remarkably consistent with the view of expert pundits” shows that today’s young fans are devouring the reams of available information about football from the media, computer games and other sources and deploying this in an intelligent, thoughtful manner.
These children are the future of football support in England. It would be a shame if these youngsters grow up believing that football is solely a television programme because they have been denied regular access to live football, and with it a sense of their community, personal origins and a safe introduction to life’s ups and downs.
Do any children you know have any opinions on the World Cup? We want to hear them
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