Who brings more people to the stadium?

In recent years, owing an innovative stadium able to get fans involved has become something increasingly essential for football teams. For this reason, more than ten years ago, Europe’s top clubs have started to invest a lot of money in the construction and modernization of their facilities, starting a trend which resulted in the emergence of stadiums such as the Emirates in London, The Allianz Arena in Monaco and the Juventus Stadium in Turin.

Just a few days ago, Transfermarkt published the ranking of the European teams with the best stadium saturation point during home games, i.e. the ability that teams have to attract people to the stadium in relation to the number of seats. While this trend is growing in Europe, in Italy, unfortunately, there is an important drop in the number of people going to the stadiums. The only Italian team holding on seems to be the Juventus, owing a stadium which can accommodate about 42,000 people from 2011.

Regarding those teams, which lead the ranking about the capacity of their stadiums, in first place we have Bayern Munich, which has been filling the stadium to 100% of its capacity for the last ten years. In second place, we find Freiburg, filling up 23,945 seats out of 24,000 on average, which means a saturation point of its capacity to 96,76%. Chelsea would come as third, Stanford Bridge is usually filled to 99,75%. As mentioned before, there are no Italian teams amongst the top ten. The teams, which follow in the ranking, are: Arsenal, Manchester United, Leicester, Cologne, Everton, Crystal Palace and Stoke City.

Things differ when we focus on the teams that, on average, bring more fans to the stadium without taking into account the overall capacity. In this second ranking, Inter is the first amongst Italian teams; they have an average of 44,000 spectators per game. Milan and Juventus follow with an average of 39,000 spectators. In Europe, however, teams that, on average, have the highest number of spectators are: Borussia Dortmund, FC Barcelona and Manchester United.

Therefore, it seems clear that, as shown by the research made by Transfermarkt, there are several reasons that justify the need to own a stadium. For example, so as to reduce the capacity of the stadiums, as Juventus has done in order to achieve a higher quality of the services available for their fans. This trend seems to be the “new” challenge that many clubs will face over the coming five years to try to compete nationally and internationally.