To wish the people screaming outside would shut up?

[Notcontent]

Yes, I do understand that people are excited about the football, but it’s Tuesday night and my DC, who is completely exhausted, has to get up early for school - the rather scary shouting has just woken her up. Yep, I know someone will say I should move to the middle of nowhere. I would love to - as many people would - but sadly that’s not possible.

Plus, it's quite difficult to get away from the noise and bullshit associated with big men's football contests, even if you make the effort to do so

That honestly hasn't been my experience at all - I wasn't making any particular effort to avoid the world cup and still ended up watching only two of the group stage matches, both times intentionally. Unless you're the sort of person to get offended by people putting up flags or football-related adverts, it's really not that hard to just get on with your life. And as for the rest of the big competitions, i couldn't even tell you when most of them are on, despite living within a mile of two Premier League teams' grounds.

You do seem quite determined to create an issue where there is none - or at least a minimal one - and I don't understand why. If you're going to get yourself all worked up about 'idiot conformists' every time there's a match on or complain when people dare to watch a popular program on their phones in the same public building as you, of course you're often going to be annoyed. It sounds like you'd have a much easier time of it if you'd chill out a bit and accept that sometimes you're going to be mildly inconvenienced by other people in society having different interests to you.

Premier League attendance was 14 million in 2017/18 with West End Theatres recording 15 million (that excludes all the other London theatres).

I will agree with Reanimated on one thing - trying to find a pub that isn't showing the football is very, very difficult. A load of us want to go out on Saturday for a drink and we can't find one pub in our town of some 120,000 people that ISN'T showing football. Now, this shows of course that plenty of people do want to go and watch football with alcohol in a group setting but it is neglecting those people who have no interest in the football and want to chat with their mates. I suspect we would buy just as many drinks.

reanimated, apart from the World Cup which is on terrestrial television, many pubs these days do not make enough money to pay the massive fees for satellite tv in pubs. Most bars in the city I live in don’t even have a TV in - all the chains, slug, all bar one. None of the independent bars do. We also have a couple of pubs going for the “football free zone” angle. Do you begrudge the rest of the struggling pub Industry to cash in for 3 or 4 games every two years? Really?

England, if we are lucky, play 5 games in a major tournament. At least two of which will be during working hours. I can assure you the pubs in the UK are not rammed with people cheering and hollering for Croatia vs Russia.

So basically what you are saying is you can’t find a non-football pub or bar (which is bullshit anyway) for 3 evenings every two years. My god, how terribly awful for you. Are you going to start the gov.uk petition or shall I.

As a side note, if you are just antagonising in here for fun. I tip my hat, you are excellent at it.

Thanks @ShatnersWig - I think the AC report was about 2000 + venues (including some festivals) across England hence I was looking at PL and EFL. But the AC report has a different figure for London theatre attendance!! Consultants and their methodologies!!

My field is housing so you can imagine the joy I have to grapple with around party political interpretation of housebuilding figures

Come on shatners - I think you cope without going to the pub for 3 hours 5 times every two years?

By the way I typically enjoy and usually agree with many of your posts on here (even in this thread you’ve been pretty respectful of others in disagreeing), but that ones a bit wobbly for me.

I hate it all. Not happy noise at all. Ridiculous shouting .

a lot of it is class snobbery IMO - football is popular with working class people so all fans are obviously drunken racist hooligans who swear and throw bottles

As anyone who has been on a train going through Twickenham when England are playing rugby will be able attest, boorish behaviour is NOT just the province of the working classes. After all, look at the Bullingdon Club.

Football fans are pretty vile though. I used to live near Selhurst Park, I know all too well what they can be like.

I wouldn't include non-league football as I wouldn't include amateur dramatics

See I would include both. IME when any “big” event is on, it’s the non-league/amateur attendances that rise

Usernumbers1234 Not saying I can't cope. I'm merely remarking that it does seem to be difficult to find a pub not showing matches where we live. Which also backs up other people who feel the majority DO want to watch the World Cup That's pretty balanced of me!

It is just a pity that this weekend when a group of us unusually are all free and fancied catching up over a few pints we probably can't do so in a pub because we want be able to talk over everyone else or the TV noise. We'll just go to someone house and have less choice of drinks options!

Although to also be fair, whenever the Euros are on, it's getting trickier to find a pub, ditto Rugby World Cup. In fact, whenever there is any international match in either of those sports, regardless of whose playing, the majority of pubs do seem to have them on now. I appreciate this may vary across the UK and I'm sure having a major rugby team and stadium close by has something to do with it.

Shatners those statistics are really interesting! What it doesn't take into account though (and I missed the beginning of this conversational thread so sorry if it's not relevant/already been mentioned) is the number of people who follow football without ever actually attending matches. Where I live I would estimate that about 85-95% of people would describe themselves as followers of football, but many will rarely or never go to matches, because it's too expensive or they can't get a ticket (LFC has a years long waiting list for season tickets as they're so popular, and no doubt the same is true of other big teams) or they support a team on the other side of the country to where they now live. Some people are also casual fans who like to have the radio or telly on in the house but aren't bothered enough to go to a game. Of course some of those things might be true of the theatre as well - there have been a number of plays I would have liked to have seen but didn't because I don't live in London - but I can't imagine there's a similar contingent of people who follow acting news and could tell you who's behind the latest production of which play etc, but never go to the theatre themselves.

Jacques I wouldn't include them because it is much harder to find accurate figures for amateur dramatics and so sticking to league and professional is the only fairly accurate indicator we can find. I think you'd probably find the figures would still indicate more people go to theatre than football because of the large disparity already mentioned.

I suspect there are more people who take part in amateur dramatics than play football every week. I know that in 2008 (again, I don't have anything more recent at hand) a report by the Dept for Culture Media & Sport found that 9.4 million people regularly took part in a performance art - which would cover theatre, choir, orchestra.

Yet the football gets far more attention.

More people go to the theatre than go to watch football.

That comparison is done for only the 380 premiership games a year, it excludes all cup games, champions league and lower leagues.

You can't nitpick about BARB and then use a sloppy metric yourself.

Yet the football gets far more attention

Suspect it’s the regularity thing. However much I enjoy AmDram it’s more interesting to watch competitive sport than a female chorus stumble through List and Learn for the umpteenth time in rehearsals

@psychomath It's becoming more interesting now that a lot of cinemas are doing live transmissions from the National Theatre, Royal Opera House, things of that nature. They are proving hugely popular.

The business about people not going to a football match because of cost is interesting because it is CHEAPER than going to see a West End play or musical. Let's look at Chelsea - cheapest ticket this past season was £47 and the most expensive £87. Man Utd was £31 cheapest and £53 most expensive.

Hottest show in London at the moment is Hamilton. Cheapest ticket is £37.50, average ticket is £90, most expensive is £200.

So, attending theatre in London and the big professional regional theatres is generally more expensive than going to football. Yet far more people don't go to football.

@Justanotherlurker I am only using what I have to hand - Premier League vs West End. Yes, there are lower leagues, but then as I also said, there are a lot of regional theatres and the big regional theatres have bigger auditoria than a lot of the lower league stadia. But those figures are far more accurate than the BARB figures because as I pointed out, they register a flick of a tv channel not whether someone is actually watching for more than 60 seconds, whereas the theatre figures and football figures are based on actual attendance and ticket sales. And a far, far, far larger sample of the population!

So, attending theatre in London and the big professional regional theatres is generally more expensive than going to football. Yet far more people don't go to football

It would be interesting to see a more direct comparison.

So for example I want to see Matilda. It is on virtually full time, or on lengthy runs. I want to see Man Utd vs Chelsea I have only two definite opportunities per season.

As anyone who has been on a train going through Twickenham when England are playing rugby will be able attest, boorish behaviour is NOT just the province of the working classes

Funny enough I used to live very close to Twickenham, which is part of the reason why I think it is about class prejudice - a LOT of the behaviour that people are attributing to football fans was common among the rugby fans too. One of my neighbours in the v leafy suburban street where I lived got arrested for pissing in someone's garden after too many post-match drinks, and all our other neighbours thought it was hilarious But rugby doesn't seem to have the same reputation for attracting that sort of behaviour that football does (except for some reason in universities, where it seems to be becoming more notorious).

I'm not for one minute suggesting that all football fans are perfect, by the way. When Liverpool lost a big match recently i had nobhead fans throwing firecrackers at my house, so I know this kind of shitty behaviour does happen. But that was one incident in my seven-ish years of living here, in an area that has a high crime rate anyway, so to stereotype millions of fans as brainless louts on the back of one thing like that would be stupid. The vast majority of the time they cause no issues.

@JacquesHammer Ah, I spot a Gondoliers reference

Such occasions are so rare, I think suck it up and take some joy it made many people happy last night.

this awful upsurge of nationalism, which is giving the whole business a really worrying edge this time round. There are going to be people who will see the English footballers kicking a ffew more goals as some kind of pro-Brexit 'sign', and there are likely to be more outbreaks of foreigner-bashing this time round.

I know what you mean. I'm seriously hoping we don't end up with an England-France final, because it will bring all that sort of shite to the fore, whatever the outcome.

I think that's why I prefer individual sports to team sports, because they don't seem to bring out that mob mentality. I only really follow tennis and MotoGP, where it's not nationalistic at all. It's lovely to see fans of all nationalities supporting their favourites.

@ShatnersWig you do. Huge fan! Sadly no active society anywhere close any more but I very much enjoy watching still.

Even if you’re excluding non league or amateur football you have to count attendances in the football league.

The Championship ( the league below the Premiership) is the third most watched league in Europe with 13m people watching it every year.

Yet the football gets far more attention. That's because we know the end result of each and every play or musical.
When I was teaching, the boys and some girls would play football every play time. They lived and breathed it. I ran the football team and we were the smallest of the small schools in the area. We trained and played through rain, hail and mud. Was that good for them? Or not?
All I know was that those kids were as fit as fleas and learned a lot about resilience. Blaming the world's ills on football is ridiculous.
A pp made the point about other nations' celebrations which are way more exuberant than ours. Look at how the Colombians flocked to Russia and cheered their team. A lot of women there.

nielsensports.com/global-interest-football/
According to the chart on this website 52% of us are footie fans in this country