Photo by Paul Thompson/WSC Photos
With many Premier League supporters feeling increasingly excluded and priced out by their clubs, down the pyramid there’s an attendance boom
February 26, 2025
Sometimes a novelty candidate standing in a general election will come up with a good idea. Such as the one in the 1990s who wanted to demolish out-of-town retail parks and replace them with football grounds. A vision that would have got widespread popular support has still to be realised but lower level football is at least in far better shape than when that proposal was made. Last season’s Championship average of just over 23,000 is more than double what it was 30 years ago while crowds in Leagues One and Two are 50 per cent higher.
The changes are more marked in non-League. The reorganisation of the levels below the National League in recent times make exact comparisons difficult but public interest in semi-professional football has never been higher. Twelve clubs at step three of the pyramid, the seventh level of English football, are currently averaging crowds of over 1,000 this season, meaning they have more matchgoing fans than some of the teams in the old Division Four before the EFL’s rebranding in the early 1990s.
Allowing for the identifiable hotspot among Isthmian League sides in Sussex (see WSC 429), the attendance boom is spread fairly evenly across the country. Only one of those step three teams with four-figure gates, Macclesfield in the Northern Premier League, are a former member of the Football League moving back up through the divisions after a financial collapse.
Many smaller clubs have also discovered ways to boost their profile and turn some of their games into major local events. As everyone reading this will probably know, Sheffield FC and Hallam FC contest the oldest derby in world football having first met on Boxing Day 1860. This fact used to feature regularly in football reference books while the clubs rarely received much public interest. During this century, however, both clubs have made skilful use of social media to promote their history to a global audience. With Sheffield currently in the Northern Premier League Division One East, one level above their rivals, they hadn’t met in a competitive match in over a decade. On a Tuesday night in late January, however, they contested the quarter-final of the Sheffield and Hallamshire Cup at Hallam’s Sandygate in front of a capacity crowd of 1,496, many of them Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United fans paying to cheer on two other community institutions.
To an extent the non-League boom is a positive by-product of an otherwise negative development in English football, with many supporters feeling excluded from the game at higher levels. Season ticket costs continue to escalate, with supporters’ groups at several Premier League clubs carrying out what is now a regular ritual in asking their clubs for a price freeze for 2025-26.
This is a reasonable demand to make when clubs generate the bulk of their income from broadcasting deals and corporate sponsorships; nine of the top 20 revenue generating clubs around the world are in the Premier League, according to the latest Football Money League published by Deloitte.
But while stadiums are still full, it often seems that the fans that the clubs are primarily interested in are the visitors from overseas prepared to pay inflated prices on their annual trip to see a match. The clubs involved with the European Super League in 2021 reportedly made a distinction between the global fanbase that the new competition was aimed at and the “legacy fans”, a derisive term for those who had often followed their teams for a lifetime. Many of those will still watch games on TV but they are spending their Saturday afternoons elsewhere and taking the next generation of fans with them.
Most spectators have their first exposure to football as children going to games with adults. In past times they might have gone to watch local non-League occasionally when their League team was playing away. Now lower level games form the main spectating experience for many, who quickly discover that attending matches is about far more than just what happens on the pitch.
The vast majority of clubs will never emulate the wealthy handful who can fill overseas stadiums on summer tours and plough some of their vast profits into retail stores around the world. But most can still prosper if they provide spectators with a sense of belonging rather than simply feeling like they are the consumers of a product.
This article first appeared in WSC 451, March 2025. Subscribers get free access to the complete WSC digital archive
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Tags: Editorial, Non League