A survey conducted by the Football Supporters Association has revealed that 75% of match going fans will return to watching their team in August when supporters can return as normal, but is this a case of glass 3/4 full or a 1/4 empty for the game.

The survey throws up some interesting statistics and the link to the full assessment of it is at the foot of this article.

The headline is that 75% said they were happy to go straight back to the stadiums, with 65% of that number excited to be doing so.

So what about the other 25% what was their reaction, the bad news or good news whatever way you look at it is that 3.3% said they would not be going at all this season and a further 5.2% said they would be waiting at least 6 months.

Indeed most of those not willing to go back straight away gave apprehension about Covid19 etc as the cause rather than disillusionment with their team.

So the good news for football clubs is that they can expect 75% of their fans to be back, but although that sounds good that is still a fair amount staying away when converted from percentage to numbers, at St Mary's that would see a drop from an average of 30,000 down to 22,500 and that is a big drop.

I would also say some clubs will have lower of higher figures based on the situation of the club, if you are a fan at Liverpool or Manchester United you can't give your season ticket up, if you do you face rarely seeing your club ever again with long waiting lists for both season tickets and even to get a single matchday ticket in a season.

Whereas at Saints we can go in and out of being a season ticket holder knowing if we don't get one in a season we will still get in fairly easily to most games and can always buy a season ticket with no waiting the following season.

So the big clubs will see little drop there is always someone waiting to take their place, whereas we at Saints should brace ourselves for losing around about 7,000 fans this season on average.

It will be interesting to see how the likes of Tottenham Hotspur, West Ham and Arsenal fare, they all now have stadium far bigger than their support in recent times, they have filled the ground through season ticket schemes but will the be the catalyst for some of their fans to take a step back and just pick and choose games now.

The full results of the survey are in the link below, it is well worth a read and not too long, apologies for the picture the FSA have used.

https://thefsa.org.uk/news/survey-three-quarters-of-fans-will-be-straight-back-i

Photo: Action Images

ElijahK added 00:50 - Jul 24 Only a matter of time until it hits 50%! Footballs surely gotta change (especially on the money and repetitiveness side) if it’s to keep the fans and popularity it has today! But many just don’t care anymore as they’ll just go to somewhere in Asia/America to make up for it
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LoisDeem added 15:13 - Jul 30 In slightly related news, I see that the Blue St Mary’s template is set to change, as our more successful alter ego have put forward planning proposals that will see another 8 thousand fans and hotel facilities at the King Power. So do we remain as Red Leicester or is this just hard cheese? Still, we might still be at the Dell, or sharing a much smaller multi sports facility at Stoneham.

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