I’ve recently been rewatching “Fever Pitch: The Rise of the Premier League”. I was struck by just how many similarities there were to the world of orchestras. Both facing the challenges of live attendance, unlocking the true value of their product, and bringing about change in a world where the core fans don’t want it.

By taking radical steps to go against the established way of doing things, making live events into a spectacle, and marketing the sport properly, the Premier League not only managed to reverse a 33% drop in live attendance but now hits record ticket figures each year and has become most successful football league in the world. The Premier League provides a clear blueprint for what orchestras can do to implement change and thrive.

Today, the Premier League is the most successful football league in the world. It is by far the most viewed league with 643 million people watching live broadcasts, compared to second place La Liga with just 71 million. Clubs’ income continues to grow and live attendance is increasing each year. However, it wasn’t always this way.

Since the 1970s, football in England had been struggling. It had continued to be promoted to the same core audience, with little innovation or change to the product or how it was presented. Average live attendance in the top division was in free fall, dropping a third from 32,113 in 1970 to 20,533 in 1989.

Fortunately, things were about to change. Bosses of the big teams were unhappy and knew things needed to change. In a TV interview at the time, Arsenal’s then vice-chairman David Dein holds up a bleak graph showing the live attendance tanking.

“If this was Tesco supermarket, they’d have to do something very dramatic to stop going out of business.”

Encouraged by the popularity of the 1990 World Cup and the interest from new potential fan bases of women and children, these bosses came up with a new plan to replace the then Division 1 (the top division) with “The Premier League” – a new format that would go hand in hand with broadcast and inspired by sport in the U.S.A. A radical transformation of an archaic business model with a fan base that didn’t want change.

The first step for the new Premier League was to move away from the old TV deals that The Football League had previously negotiated. These were significantly undervalued, and clubs were only paid £25,000 per televised game. The Premier League moved to Sky, a new satellite subscription service. This was the first time in the U.K. that football matches had moved behind a paywall, something fans weren’t happy about. However, this was for a £304 million, 5-year deal, so the initial reward was clear.

This was a gamble for Sky. The success of this TV deal ultimately that of the Premier League would depend on the demand to watch games. But for this to work long-term, things needed to change. Dave Hill, the Head of Sport at Sky Television said:

“Football is the greatest entertainment of all time, but it wasn’t being represented that way. What we had to do was market it properly”.

As the Premier League launched in 1992, it was totally unrecognisable. Instead of just listing the matches that were coming up, there were glamorous new adverts with a focus on being family friends. “FA Premier League, live on Sky. It’s a whole new ball game”.

But things didn’t stop at adverts. The narrator of “Fever Pitch: The Rise of the Premier League” says:

“The success of Sky’s £300m gamble relied on the public getting hooked in. Sky could not rely on the sport itself. It assembled a marketing team tasked with commercialising English football.”

This was the start of a whole new ethos that was totally alien to the U.K. The commercial aspect of sport was something totally new.

One of the marketing consultants brought in to achieve this was Jon Smith who said:

“Marketing is everything. It has to tell you something, it has to touch your lifestyle. I had been living in LA and loved what they were doing with sport. It was essentially entertainment. You go and see something like the LA Raiders and it’s essentially a show, and the sport was in the middle of the show.”

David Dein said something similar about NFL games: “They made an event out of it, which we didn’t”.

One of the more controversial moves that the Premier League and Sky brought in was the start of “Monday Night Football”. This was something that Sky had insisted on as part of the broadcasting deal and was based on looking at sport in the U.S.A.

The number of women watching on Monday night was almost double the number that would watch the tradition time slot which was on Sunday afternoon. It became a phenomenon in the US, it would have parties, and the weekend didn’t really end until the football game had happened on the Monday night.

The broadcaster of the first Monday Night Football reinforced this: “Mondays are changing, no longer that start of the week depression, we’re into a whole new ball game on sky sports”.

However, this was deeply unpopular with the core in-person fans.

“Playing Monday night games, that’s a killer. How can fans from Manchester travel down to Southampton, hundreds of miles on a Monday night in the pouring rain. No chance, we haven’t got money for it, it’s just out of order, totally out of order”

Fans were also unhappy with the move to a more commercial approach:

“Many football fans certainly feel like commercialism is the priority of the game now. And I think we or to remember it’s a sport, it’s not pure business at all.”

(Sound familiar?)

Some of the commercial changes to make the sport a spectacle didn’t work. The Premier League’s cheerleaders were dropped quickly. Inflatable sumo fights at half time were met with chants of “what the fucking hell was that”.

“Ok we didn’t quite get that right” said Jon Smith. “But that idea had a germ of something, let’s entertain, let’s do better than a brass band at half-time”

“We got advertising boards that weren’t flat pieces of wood or cardboard, they revolved. Then we got ball boys branded with another form of advertising. Oh and by the way, you can have people in your stadium earlier, so you can sell more beer, you can sell more food, you can sell more merchandise. Anything that moved was saleable.”

Going against their core audience to change the product and how it was marketing was a gamble. But one that paid off big time.

Core fans didn’t leave. Ticket sales began to increase, and in the coming years, new fans started coming into stadiums to the point where average attendance is still growing and clubs are having to build bigger stadiums to deal with demand.

Monday Night Football is now a well-established part of the weekend in England and has led to a more diverse audience who have translated to the stadium. The marketing and coverage of the Premier League is that it is almost impossible to miss, no longer is football just for the weekend, it’s now something to keep up to date with 24/7.

The commercialisation of the sport that core fans hated at the start worked so well that clubs saw exponential growth. In 1991, Arsenal’s turnover was about £1.5 million… just over 30 years later it is now over £400 million.

Focussing on broadcast has led to significant revenue. That initial £340m million deal for domestic rights in 1992 has been totally eclipsed since, with the lastest deal reaching £6.7 billion. And this is before we even get to the new and significant international audience which would never have watched games before.

What’s amazing is this also had a knock-on effect. The divisions below the Premier League had also been experiencing a drop in live attendance, but since 1992 they too have been on an upward trajectory, with the second tier (Championship) league’s average attendance growing from 11,757 in 1991, to 18,868 in 2023.

This also impacted the players. In 1992, the average wage was £77k a year. In 2019, the average salary for a player broke £3 million a year for the first time. An increase of 3796% in 27 years.

When we look at football’s dominance in England with envy compared to how we think our society values classical music, we forget that it is something that was earned. The Premier League forged and created a path to capture attention, create something that would connect to new audiences, and become integral to our society. And that is something we must do too.

Like Sky and the Premier League, we cannot rely on just the music itself. To adapt Dave Hill’s quote from earlier:

“Classical is the greatest entertainment of all time, but it wasn’t being represented that way. What we have to do is market it properly.

Identifying how we can turn concerts into must-see events that connect to new audiences is vital if we want to see any form of growth in the industry. The Premier League shows us how powerful broadcast and digital can be in connecting to new audiences, and that it can generate significant revenue and open up new markets.

But what is most striking is that the Premier League shows us that for long-term survival, you have to change from what your core audience wants. Sometimes you have to radically go against the established way of doing things. We are seeing an increasingly vocal minority in the classical music world react loudly and aggressively to the tinniest of changes or innovations. We hear how these changes are “killing the art” and that we are dumbing down.

The radical turn in fortunes of football in England showed that core audiences are unlikely to leave if they don’t change, or if they do it’s in so few numbers that the reward massively outweighs the loss.

We regularly bemoan how underpaid musicians are, so why not take action to let the organisations they work for generate more income and in turn pay their musicians more? We’ve seen the increased success of the Premier League leads to players being rewarded for their talent.

If being a bit more commercial in order to bring classical music to more people and help our orchestras and musicians thrive, then I think there’s a lot we could learn from the Premier League.

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