Neither Paris FC nor St.-Étienne will have much reason to remember the game fondly. There was, really, precious little to remember: no goals, few shots, little drama — a dull, rainy stalemate between the French capital’s third-most successful soccer team and the country’s sleepiest giant.
This was on the field. Besides, the 17,000 or so fans in attendance can consider themselves part of a philosophical exercise that can play a role in shaping the future of the world’s most popular sport.
Last November, Paris FC became home to an unlikely revolution, announcing they were scrapping ticket prices for the rest of the season. There were a few exceptions: a nominal fee for fans supporting the away team and market rates for those using hosting suites.
Everyone else, however, could come to the Stade Charléty – the compact stadium that Paris FC rents from the city government – for free.
In doing so, the club launched what amounts to a live-action experiment that examines some of the most profound issues affecting sport in the digital age: the relationship between cost and value. the connection between fans and their local teams; and, most importantly, what it’s like to attend an event in an age when sport is just another arm of the entertainment industry.
At Paris FC, the thinking was more pragmatic than lofty. Parisian football is dominated by Paris Saint-Germain, the current perennial French champions. Paris FC, on the other hand, is an unusual second division team that plays in a rented residence, its history is not even a match for Red Star, traditionally the city’s second team.
By opening its doors, the club believed it could increase attendances, attract families and cultivate some long-term loyalty. But he was just as concerned with telling people he was there. “It was a kind of marketing strategy,” said Fabrice Herrault, the club’s general manager.
“We have to be different to stand out in Greater Paris,” he noted. “It was a good opportunity to talk about Paris FC”
Months later, most metrics suggest the game worked. Crowds have increased by more than a third. Games held at times appealing to school children were best attended, indicating that the club is succeeding in attracting a younger population.
Paris FC tickets were never prohibitively expensive — Aymeric Pinto, a fan who has been attending for a decade, said attendees were paying the equivalent of just about $6, but removing even that shallow barrier made a noticeable difference.
The match against St.-Étienne attracted around 17,000 (mostly) unpaid spectators. That number was a very good sign for the experiment, but also a little misleading: In the 1970s, St.-Étienne was France’s preeminent team and has the respectable fan base to match.
Inside the stadium, the number of green St.-Étienne shirts betrayed this fact. Even in areas nominally reserved for home fans, it was clear that many had turned up to support the visitors. “Look around,” said Thomas Ferrier, his St-Etienne shirt barely visible under his raincoat. “The whole place is green.”
However, for Paris FC, the overall pattern was encouraging. The free-ticket strategy will cost the club around $1 million – a combination of lost revenue and additional security and staffing costs – but the company’s line and supporter feedback is that it was worth it.
“It’s good for the club,” Mr Pinto said. “It’s hard to draw a crowd in Paris.”
The positive results are in line with the experience of Fortuna Düsseldorf, a German second division team that pioneered the free ticket approach. Last year, Fortuna announced it would allow fans to attend a handful of games for free, the start of a five-year pilot program — funded by sponsorship deals — that could lead to the complete abolition of ticket fees.
Fortuna has already run two of the three free games it had planned for the pilot phase. For the former, the club said it received so many requests that it could have filled its 52,000-seat stadium twice. For the second, he could have done it three times. More important, though, is the impact outside of these games.
“Our average attendances have increased from 27,000 to 33,000,” said Alexander Jobst, the club’s chief executive. “Our merchandise sales increased by 50 percent. Our sponsorship revenue is up 50%. We reached a record number of club members.”
Correlation, of course, is not causation — “It’s hard to tie it with absolute certainty to free games,” Mr. Jobst said — but there’s no other particularly convincing explanation. Fortuna traditionally bounces between Germany’s first and second division. retains hope of gaining promotion this season. However, it attracts more fans than when it won the second division with ease in 2018.
Fortuna’s rationale was more ideological than Paris FC’s. Like all German football teams, Fortuna is owned by its members and the club saw it as allowing fans in for free as a way of deepening its connection with its city and ensuring that no one is penalized for watching a match.
But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a quid pro quo at play. Fortuna also rents out its city-owned stadium. The club’s hope was that by starting what it saw as a distinctly “social concept”, it could persuade the local government to spend a little money updating the facility.
While both initiatives, then, are rooted in cold economics — and while both clubs say the programs should not be read as blueprints for the future of the sport more broadly — they have served as petri dishes for deeper issues.
The most obvious is the degree to which an item’s cost affects its intrinsic value. In the context of sports, this always boils down to the premise that fans are more likely to attend an event if they’ve already paid to go, and even more likely if they’ve paid a significant amount. Tickets that cost nothing, in contrast, are inherently disposable.
Fortuna Düsseldorf didn’t find that to be a problem. “We had fewer no-shows with the free games than with the regular games,” Mr Jobst said.
The picture in Paris is more complex. “Among fans, we talk a lot about the ‘free ticket effect,'” said Rayan Benabderrahmane, a relatively new Paris FC fan who renounced his allegiance to Paris St.-Germain a few years ago.
“You see people arriving late, leaving early or sometimes not coming at all,” he noted. “A lot of people think it’s not really their club and they haven’t paid, so if the weather is bad, it doesn’t matter.”
The most important question may be how the fans watching a match inside a stadium should be categorized. Are they spectators of a spectacle, and therefore obliged to pay for the privilege? Or is it time to change that categorization: Are the fans, the ones watching on the field, actually part of the production?
Soccer—like all sports—is now very much a television business. The teams are funded by money from broadcast deals. Start times are rearranged to suit viewers. Referee decisions are reviewed by officials in a remote studio.
And if football is now content, then some of that content – the chorus, the texture, the soundtrack, the spectacle – is provided by the fans.
“Since the pandemic, there has been a growing awareness of the role of spectators in the ‘production’ of sporting events,” said Luc Arrondel, a professor at the Paris School of Economics. He pointed out that there was broad consensus in the academic literature that the home advantage is real and that the single most important factor in its existence is the effect of a partisan crowd.
But turning football into a televised event also gives fans an economic role, Professor Arrondel said. “The presence of fans in the stadium increases the desirability of the television product and therefore, potentially, the value of television rights,” he noted.
It could therefore be argued that the clubs should go even further than Paris FC and Fortuna Düsseldorf have done. According to a paper authored by Professor Arrondel, in some cases – for teams receiving a certain amount of commercial and broadcasting revenue – there is an argument for incentivizing the presence of the most fervent fans: not just allowing them in for free; but probably even pay to attend.
As things stand, that remains somewhat distant. Fortuna’s project remains in an experimental phase. Paris FC will “excuse” its policy at the end of the season, Mr Herrault said. This review will most likely not include even the slightest detail of what happened on the pitch against St.-Étienne. The size of the crowd that saw the game, however, all these additions to the production, may well have ramifications beyond the Stade Charléty.
