Chelsea cannot overlook the match-going fan as they continue global growth

Wembley Stadium had far too many empty seats for the FA Cup final. If Chelsea ever build a new stadium, they must keep the matches affordable for fans who will actually show up.

The overwhelming majority of Chelsea fans will never attend a game at Stamford Bridge. That goes for most of the top teams in Europe and an increasing number of teams in sports worldwide, but the phenomenon is particularly strong in football. Perhaps the only thing unique to Chelsea is how this simple, profitable, explainable, predictable fact has created a simple-minded, wasteful, surreal and pathological rift among fans via digital media.

Chelsea have been sending a lot of special attention across the Atlantic to the United States over the last year. This is goodwill generating good business, as my colleague Gabe Henderson explained last week. However, the club cannot let the almighty pound, ruble, dollar or yuan distract them too much from the match-going fan in the stadium.

No, this is not the dying cry of a yer da supporter-not-a-fan. I’m one of those overwhelming majority mentioned above. I’m across the Atlantic, despite my colourful affectations when writing about things like centre-backs. And, for reasons that should be obvious if you’re a regular reader or Twitter follower, the club did not send me a care package at Thanksgiving nor a video greeting last week.

Despite the FA Cup finalists’ colours being sky blue, yellow and black, one of the most noticeable colours around Wembley Stadium was red. Those were the large patches of empty seats.

The “prawn sandwich sections” (another of those charming Britishisms I’ve adopted) – the lowest rows right along midfield – were particularly barren. The few fans who were there made minimal contributions to the noise levels and atmosphere.

The likely culprit for the low attendance and low per capita volume was corporate seating. Tickets for those sections were probably reserved for the FA’s and the teams’ corporate partners, and offered either as part of the sponsorship deals or priced at a rate only a company would pay (and subsequently write-off on their expenses). Either the people who received the tickets via one of the corporate partners decided not to attend, or no one at either the corporate or individual level thought they were worth the price. Those who did attend had little investment in the outcome, so they sat there, impartial and aloof.

Even if every seat was fully paid for, this was still an epic fail for the FA’s business. There’s no worse visual in all of sports* than empty seats, let alone when it’s the national stadium hosting the finals of a major tournament.

If Chelsea and Roman Abramovich ever overcome their various legal and financial travails and break ground on a new Stamford Bridge, they will be under increased pressure to appease the high-dollar ticket purchaser.

The financial margins will be tighter than ever, the transfer market shows no sign of levelling off and the Blues will probably still be in the red on their transfer activity. Sacrificing a few rows of seats to raise the value of their sponsorship packages or pricing those seats above the level of someone who will actually bother to sit in them will seem like a convenient, if not necessary, way to boost the bottom line.

However, no one wants to see large swathes of “empty seat blue” in the colour palette on TV. That is a turn-off for potential fans, who will think the club is not worth following if the games are not worth attending. It’s depressing for current non-London fans, who will think the club has just traded one form of turmoil for another. It’s infuriating for local fans who would pay a reasonable amount of money for those unreasonably priced or purchased-and-forgotten seats. And the combination of those last two factors will lead to more finger-pointing by the morons on both sides of the fans vs. supporters divide.

I’m as greedy a capitalist bastard as America has produced in quite some time, and I am all about Chelsea (or any other business) charging the absolute most they can to fill their stadium.

But they have to fill their stadium. If that means lowering the price from “prawn sandwich” to “ale and pie,” spare me the class struggle and keep Stamford Bridge noisy, raucous and Blue.

*Liverpool lifting the Premier League trophy is a close second.