Costs, and fan behaviour, spiralling out of control at sports events

A few European Football Championships ago, Carlsberg did an activation in the main press centre.

It created an oasis in the middle of an enormous, open room. Some low-slung, cream-coloured couches. A few ferns. A large, glass-doored fridge filled with bottles of Carlsberg.

Throughout the game day, the fridge was padlocked. But a half-hour after the last news conference, it was opened and all hell would break loose.

A couple of hundred middle-aged Poles and Spaniards would start going over tables like Starsky & Hutch. Everyone arrived in a pack with elbows up. Some brought bags. In the space of three minutes, it would all be gone.

I was the one who got stuck going to collect drinks for the table. Everyone else was always “right on deadline.” During one of these forced recons, I managed to grab six beers while a gabbling Italian was hanging off my back and screaming in my ear.

When you keep a glass-bottled beverage at 4 C for several hours and then suddenly expose it to the swamp-like humidity of a press room, it begins to sweat. As I wheeled away, one of the bottles slipped my grasp, flew across the room and exploded at the feet of a UEFA official. She’d been standing there, hands on hips, watching feeding time at the zoo.

She looked at me. I could just barely look at her.

Then, in a pronounced Teutonic accent, she said, “Why are you so greedy?”

She really drew out the long-e in greedy. Oh God, the humiliation.

After that, I didn’t stop drinking the free beer, but I did start refusing to go up and get it.

The pandemonium around the fridge continued, until one day late in the tournament we got there and it was empty.

Nobody explained why, and nobody had to ask. We had taken advantage.

This week, the French Open had a similar cancellation.

Several players complained about the drunken rowdiness of the crowds this year. In particular, Belgian David Goffin went full auto on the audience.

“It’s becoming like football,” he said. “Soon there will be smoke bombs, hooligans and there will be fights in the stands.”

In fairness, most of soccer no longer has that problem. That sport blanket-banned booze on the premises long ago. As a result, soccer fans no longer fight in the stands where millions might see them on television. They fight outside a nearby bar where hundreds of thousands can catch them on TikTok.

Nevertheless, Goffin’s warning resonated. Officials at Roland Garros banned booze in the stands, effective immediately. Attendees are still free to drink elsewhere, including 10 feet outside the courts.

Apparently, the French have never necked a mickey of Dr. McGillicuddy’s root-beer schnapps in the parking lot before going into a high-school dance, but I guess this is better than nothing.

Presumably, the thinking is that it will help ameliorate the court’s judgment after some over-refreshed Parisien comes off the turnbuckle and tackles Novak Djokovic in the final.

Tennis officials implied that this reduction in civility is down to the pandemic. That’s everyone’s explanation for everything nowadays – ‘COVID made them do it.’

To my mind, the more likely explanation is spiralling cost coupled with social media.

A ticket to the French Open, or any other grand slam, is ridiculously priced.

It’s a couple of hundred bucks and up for a grounds pass, which guarantees you access to nothing more than a pleasant walk. If you want good seats at the main stadium, first, best of luck getting hold of them. Second, they’ll run you several grand each depending on which match you’d like to see.

Until very recently, spending a month’s salary to see a tennis match was a private luxury. Instagram turned it into a public branding exercise.

I have sat in the stands at Wimbledon’s Centre Court before a match, looked around, and I am the only person I can see who isn’t in the midst of taking a picture of themselves. Increasingly, the reason to go to sports isn’t sports. It’s to advertise that you are the sort of person who can afford a ticket.

The traditional sports fan of 20 years ago was somewhere between interested and very interested in what was going on in the field of play. There were a lot of parents with kids. Everyone cheered in the right spots. Most were not hammered. Always a few, but never a plurality.

The crowd at a modern big-time sports event is somewhere between half-interested and not at all in what’s happening. They are there for the photo shoot. Depending on the sport, many are swaying drunk.

This isn’t to say that everyone who goes to sports these days is a sybarite. It is to say that that is the preferred consumer demographic. In an effort to extract the maximum number of dollars from them, sports arenas have been turned into theme parks.

The team doesn’t want you watching what’s going on on the field. That would mean you aren’t spending money. It wants you buying things. One woman isn’t gong to eat five bags of popcorn, but she may have five Aperol Spritzes. They have about the same profit margin.

This isn’t rocket science here. You start charging usuriously priced entry to people who are more experience-oriented than sports-oriented, deaden their aversion to overspending and then ply them with liquor and guess what? An afternoon at the game becomes first day at a beach resort. That’s the day you totally overdo it, and spend the next week recovering from.

How do we change this? We don’t.

Short of violent incursions, nobody cares what the players think. Somehow, the French Open could go on without David Goffin.

What matters is maintaining the impression that whatever event you’re holding is the place everyone wanted to be, regardless of cost.

If you encourage an atmosphere of frenzy – whether that’s by making the tickets so expensive that everyone who bought one is determined to have the greatest, drunkest, most selfie’d day of their lives, or by making the free beer available for a very limited time – frenzy is what you’ll get.