Is it not slightly surreal that we are now at the end of the first quarter of 2021 – having spent a full year living in a time of masks, social distancing, reduced social interactions, and the lack of live sporting action.
For football fans, a lot has changed since March last year when FIFA advised all international football matches to postpone indefinitely. Plus, the major football leagues worldwide, the English Premier League, Bundesliga, La Liga, and Serie A, all halted their season midway to their fans’ chagrin. It was a difficult time which made isolation that bit harder to bear.
One Year Later
Fast forward a year, and while games have resumed across the leagues, clubs are not allowed to play to a live audience just yet. Hence the different football teams have started to try engaging with fans in various ways, mostly through social media channels to meet their fans where they are.
Across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, we have seen clubs such as Manchester United and Borussia Mönchengladbach engage with their fans to submit pictures of themselves to be printed and placed across the seats in their respective stadiums. Last May, the Danish Superliga returned to a virtual audience with AGF Aarhus playing against Randers alongside thousands of fans on Zoom.
Throughout the world, there are heart-warming scenes of fans tuning in from their living rooms, engaging and cheering with others all around the world.
Making Safe and Steady Progress Toward Normalcy
While no clubs have fans back into their stadiums, the closest so far is Dutch Superliga leaders FC Midtjylland which hosted a drive-in football match against AC Horsens. Big screens and over 2,000 spaces allocated to the car park just outside the stadium for fans to watch the game while observing social distancing. Fans snapped up all lots, attending in cars of all kinds: limousines, tractors, SUVs, and more, all decked out in the team’s colors.
While the league leaders did not win that day, that was still a good memory for their fans.
Hopefully, none of these fans made a poor bet on impulse. If they did, though, they could consider taking out title loans for those vehicles. However, given that this type of loan is usually short term let’s hope their next call is the more accurate one!
In more good news, the Netherlands is trialing having a small group of supporters at soccer matches soon, hopefully paving the way for more live matches across Europe. Although some clubs are playing sounds simulating crowd noise and fan chants, they cannot replicate the buzz their players get when seeing a packed stadium. Players and fans alike are all waiting in anticipation for when fans come back in, but in the meantime, technology continues to help this engagement process.
In summation, football clubs, stadiums, and even the teams themselves have made progress to keep fans in Europe engaged throughout the pandemic. While we are still working toward reclaiming normalcy, the world of sports has shown true grit in progressing those efforts.
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