Abstract
Relationships between football fans and stadiums as well as the role that the latter play in football cultures have been the subject of a wide number of essays and investigations in the field of the social sciences. Going to the stadium to watch a football match remains a popular activity throughout Europe, despite the increased technology and media coverage of the game. The atmosphere within a stadium and the emotions that ‘being there provokes make the experience of the game more pleasurable’ (Giulianotti, 1999: 69).
This chapter provides an empirical approach to the study of football stadium attendance in different European countries over the two pre-COVID-19 decades. Our aim has been to make an analysis of stadium attendance, identifying the difference between European countries in terms of sociodemographic profile of spectators and forms of attendance. For this, we have used data from two surveys about football culture carried out under the FREE project.
These data show that more than a half of the people who support a football team normally attended its home matches while attendance of away matches is much lower. The analysis of the profile of those who attend home games shows that men’s rates are clearly higher than women’s in all the countries included in the survey. On the other hand, the attendance rate is rather homogeneous between the different age groups, although when considering the social class of the fans relevant differences between countries have been detected.
Take me out to the ball game,Take me out with the crowd;Just buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,I don’t care if I never get back
—Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer, Tin Pan Alley (1908)
This chapter has been carried out as part of the FREE project. The FREE project (Football Research in an Enlarged Europe) received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement No. 290805.
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Notes
- 1.
This could be translated into English as: ‘Boca is my religion, Maradona is my god, la Bombonera—home stadium of Boca Juniors—is my church’.
- 2.
The survey of Football in European Public Opinion (FREE, 2014a) was conducted by phone (Computer Assisted Telephone Interview, CATI) among a sample of Europeans residing in Austria, Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, Italy, Poland, the United Kingdom and Turkey. The fieldwork was conducted by BVA (France) in December 2013. The final sample was composed of 7245 Europeans representative of the population aged 15 or more. The representativity of the sample was guaranteed by the use of the quota method applied to gender and age. The sampling error in each country (sample size of 800 interviews per country) was ±3.4 (95% confidence interval). The survey of European Football Fans (FREE, 2014b) was an online survey aimed at reaching a very specific target group composed of an attentive football public. The link for the survey was launched in August 2013 for testing purposes and was promoted from September 2013 to February 2014. The collected data set composed of 17,516 responses was subjected to a data cleaning process, as a result of which the number reached was 11,384 (3490 in Poland, 3120 in France, 1804 in Turkey, 1800 in Spain, 635 in the United Kingdom and 535 in Germany). The numbers for the rest of the countries were lower and, therefore, were not included in the final sample. The final data of both surveys have been weighted, taking into account the population over 15 years in each of them.
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Şenyuva, Ö., Llopis-Goig, R. (2023). Take Me Out to the Ball Game! Stadium Attendance Across Europe: A Cross-Country Description. In: Alpan, B., Sonntag, A., Herd, K. (eds) The Political Football Stadium. Football Research in an Enlarged Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29144-9_2
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