Football is back! But what about the fans?
This weekend marks the start of the new football season in Switzerland and Germany. Because of the Corona crisis, the Swiss Football League adjusted its schedule for 2020/21. Beyond postponements, fans face new rules they will have to adapt to. But are they ready, and have they already bought their tickets?
The Swiss Football Association had been working on a protection concept for handling fans in a Corona-compliant way. Alongside individual rules, clubs had to follow guidelines such as a cap of 1000 people in the stadium until the end of October. From October, the Federal Council allowed more than 1000 people at major events in principle, but protecting citizens, and stadium-goers, fell to the cantons, so fans had to adapt to regional conditions.
Using our cultural-events indicator, we see a level shift since the start of the year that is unique in the last four years, illustrating uncertainty about attending events in general. The chart below shows the search terms spielplan (match schedule) and saisonkarte (season ticket) alongside maskenpflicht (mask requirement) and fallzahlen (case numbers). Interest in match schedules and season tickets dropped to unprecedented lows, while case numbers reached a new record, far above the first wave.
The cultural-events index makes the uncertainty about attending events clear. A year-on-year comparison shows 2020 sitting well below earlier years.
Given uncertainty about a second wave and possible new restrictions, we expected stadium attendance to stay low. That same uncertainty affected most people, with possible knock-on effects not just on ticket sales but on consumer spending more broadly.