UP386: Last Orders? Football and the Pub

In the UK 500 pubs closed in 2023. By the end of June it’s predicted 750 will have closed in 2024. It’s stark, there’s no two ways about it.

We asked YouGov again to help us make sense of what’s going on. They found that one in four sports fans – equivalent to 3.4m people – are going to the pub less than they did a year ago.

And more than half (55%) of sports fans (7.8m people) said at the moment, sport doesn’t form part of their pub experience at all.

Shit. Maybe a partnership under strain is putting it mildly. It’s a marriage heading for divorce.

Around 14,000 pubs and bars in the UK currently show football - what does it mean for Sky?

What does it mean for football clubs?

And what does it mean for the future of football in the UK? And specifically football fan culture?

Unofficial Partner is the leading podcast for the business of sport. A mix of entertaining and thought provoking conversations with a who's who of the global industry.
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Transcript

Pub bloke: 0:02

Last order's at the bar, please! Time at the bar!

Pub bloke 2: 0:09

The pub has always been part of going to see Millwall Park, from very early days. We'd always go to the same pub we're sort of running out of pubs in Bermondsey to go to, which has been gentrified even, you know, within the last three years because the original pub closed down and then the pub after that closed down and then the pub after that closed down.

Matt Cutler: 0:32

The pub has long been a spiritual home for football obsessives. The rituals, the beer, the community. Ask most football fans about the pub and they'll tell you how it shaped their formative years. You can trace it back to the 19th century, when administrators and players needed a place to create the rules, organisations and clubs that dominate the game today. What followed was a pre and post match tradition for hundreds of thousands of supporters up and down the country every weekend, deepened when Sky brought live broadcasts to the big screens in the 1990s. But that was then. We're in the now. A double whammy of Covid, followed by a cost of living crisis, saw the number of UK licensed premises fall below 100, 000 for the first time since records began in 2023. And it's brought football's role in the pub economy under the spotlight. New research from YouGov shows that one in four British sports fans are visiting the pub less than a year ago, and just under half say the pub isn't important at all to their life as a sports fan. And that means the relationship between football, Britain's biggest sport, and the pub is on the rocks. If it were a marriage, there'd be counselling.

Publican woman: 1:44

It's getting more and more frustrating as a publican. I want to show live sport, I mean, I love live sport, but there's so much more incentive for people to stay at home now. You can go to the supermarket and get a can of lager cheaper than what I could ever sell on my bar. I've got to pay thousands of pounds for Sky and BT Sport and then I'm limited to those. People have fire sticks so they can watch any live sport at home. Cost of living crisis, I mean, I could go on and on even with gas and electric bills as well. I It's just, it's disappointing with Sky because I think it's another reason or like another factor that is contributing towards pubs closing down because of the expense. Surely they can give discount to the hospitality industry. Surely there's a better way to do it.

Pub bloke: 2:27

Like, I love football, but I don't always think people want to come to the pub and have the football on. I think there's other places where they can go. And I think some people get put off if you're a football pub. Like, that's why they might not go to them places. They don't want someone shouting over their Sunday roast, do they? But also, like, if it's, I don't know if it can be quite expensive, can't it? You can watch it anywhere now.

Matt Cutler: 2:50

So does the pub need football anymore? And does football need the pub? Will the relationship get back on track? And if not, what does that mean for football culture? Listen to Last Orders, an exploration of the changing dynamic between two cultural institutions. And brought to you by Unofficial Partner Productions, the team behind the critically acclaimed documentary, The Pirates vs. The Premier League.

Richard Gillis: 3:18

So the first question is why are you so worried about pubs?

Matt Cutler: 3:22

We all should be worried about pubs. We spend most of our time in whenever I see you Rich and Sean for that matter, it's mostly in a pub. The truth of it is that we, I guess when we were thinking about Unofficial Partner Productions, and what we were doing, we were looking to tell stories, like we did with the Piracy, the, the the Pirates vs. the Premier League. Telling stories that are, you know, B2B2C, that's a phrase we use quite often, right? It's about business stories that are also of interest to, I guess, the average sports fan. The, kind of, person. on the street. And the pub is interesting because the pub is one of those cultural institutions that is just core to society, really. And there was a thread in the Pirates versus the Premier League where we went after, well, I was always fascinated by, there's a few pubs in London that show three o'clock kickoffs illegally. I'm not going to say them. But I was always fascinated by that because it's in plain sight when you're in London. And I just thought, how does that work? If everyone's there and they're packed, is there, there must be police around or someone knows this is going on? So, so, so we actually looked at that as part of the pirates, but we didn't quite get the space to fit it in. So when we finished that, I kind of started tugging on that thread and thinking, well, actually, what, what, how is this happening? And is it, is it two pubs in London or is it? Thousands of pubs across the UK doing this. That's kind of interesting. Didn't quite get an answer to that, but in the process of trying to find that out there, it seemed that there was a bigger conversation at play. And it's about that relationship between. Sport and the pub, or specifically football and the pub, I think because the two have co existed for well at least the pub and sport have co existed in a kind of a healthy relationship since, genuinely since like medieval times when well actually medieval times when there was basically two places you could go that weren't your house. The church or the pub. And so that's what kind of how sport developed out of that, you know, and back in those days, and I'm kind of generalizing here, it was the place to, you could go and, you know, gamble or play pub sports or probably watch a bit of cockfighting. To where lots of the sports that we know, modern sports that we know today developed out of, you know, there's lots of The F. A. was founded in a pub. It's now a nightclub in Hoburn. The Freemasons Freemasons Arms or the Freemasons Tavern? Freemasons Tavern, that's right. F. A. was founded there. Liverpool was founded in a pub. Arsenal was founded in a pub. Nottingham Forest was founded in a pub. So there's like, they're intrinsically connected. And obviously when the pub plays a big role in people's game day experiences, you know, go to the pub before a, before a match, go after, and then Sky came along in the 90s and then all of a sudden there was like an added, you know, impetus to go to the pub because, ah, I can watch the, you know, watch the big game on the screen.

Richard Gillis: 6:18

I wonder when the, but when the first televised, pub televised game was? I imagine, I mean, there'll have been a load of FA Cup finals or whatever on telly in a pub where people were sort of watching. But I don't know when that became an official market, when it became an official sort of rights category in its own right. In terms of when it, when they started to, to actually designate themselves as, you know, football pubs, I assume it's to do with the Premier League, but I wouldn't, I don't know. So the, I was wondering about where to start, as always, there's always a, that question. And is the story, the pub is declining. As a cultural sort of force or a cultural thing within British society, and that's taking football down with it. Or, football is connected to that intimately. So what's going to happen? Or is something else going on here? That's one question I had. And we've got, we've got the research, haven't we? So we've got some data, which is quite exciting. This is it's weird that we don't talk about the pub very much, It's seen because it's this sort of third place between home and the ground. Yeah. And there's a whole economy there, which is to do with Sky, the Premier League brewers. Mm-Hmm. Alcohol. Yeah. Pub ownership chains and then punters. And because we're a of business. podcast, following the money is sort of part of it and trying to work out where the money has gone. So what the trend is, and we're, we're assuming that, you know, we all know, cause we see the numbers that pubs are going bust and that's to do with just people of your age and younger not going to the pub as much as people of my age did. So drugs, much more fun than sitting there in a boozer boozing. And all of that long term trend is part of it. So pubs are going bust anyway. Football is sort of along for the ride. Football is part of the decision making process of, you know, if you own a pub, are you a football pub or are you not a football pub? We're a gastro pub or a football pub. And if if you're just a pub, then I think you really are struggling because, either of those other routes is where the money is probably. But how have Sky and we were in the UK. So let's talk about Sky, but it's the same in, you know, other bits of the world. How have they treated this sector? Have they just milked it? For all it's worth as the, you know, as that just been priced into whatever it is that they charge the publicans, because we know the publicans always moan about the price of the screening Sky games. We also know that there's a bit of piracy within the pubs because that's what we found out from the last, you know, series. So there's quite a lot of interesting threads there. There's also the other bit is I think what the clubs are doing to the local pubs in their vicinity. And, you know, we might even get Sean on to talk about his alcoholic sort of you know, a day at the Spurs, which his yield, Daniel Levy would love, you know, would love this story because it's, it's all about Sean's yield. He's gone from drinking a couple of pints in the local To now drinking absolutely shit face before the game because it's so easy to do so, you know, it's just, and, but the sort of ramifications of that are quite profound on the local economy because the pubs, you know, aren't getting that business because the clubs got it and you sort of think, well, that's probably strategy. It'd be quite hard to get a club to own up to that because they've got all their community. Comms type stuff going on, but it'd be interesting to sort of just push on that a bit.

Matt Cutler: 10:17

So, yeah, if you're a club and the media money dries up, how are you gonna, you know, what are your revenue streams that you can maximize and get, you know, game day is definitely warm because these stadiums are in the center of the communities and now not just football stadiums, but the Spur Stadium, you know, it's got the longest bar. What do they say? The longest bar in Europe or something like that. It's the one thing we're good at. We've won in the league of Getting people smashed. Yeah, but then, but then, yeah, you got Beyonce, then you got Premiership, playing there. Yeah. You got the NFL playing there. You've got an F1.

Richard Gillis: 10:55

got some F1 go kart thing going on in the car park, which

Matt Cutler: 10:58

I don't quite work out. You've got sport industry events being, being held there. These are like, this is. That's like a conference center with a bit of football played on a Saturday and a Wednesday.

Richard Gillis: 11:08

we might get a stadium designer or architect to say, well, what's the brief these days? You know, so, and the British sports industry has always, you know, Looked enviously at the sort of tailgate culture of American sport. And, you know, all of that stuff that you get them in early, keep them all day. It's an experience for the whole, you know, but they're spending money with you all day. Whereas we've always been a bit, okay, the game's on at three. We're in the pub at half two. We better get over there and then scarper straight away afterwards. And so, you know, that's, that's the way things have always been here. Yeah. And you can sort of see that that's irritating to people. If you want to maximize the amount of money that you're making per fan, you're gonna have to change that dynamic. But,

Matt Cutler: 11:56

but also the secret with that is actually that match day experience of, you know, I've done that. You've done that. Sean probably does that. It's actually pretty rubbish. You're going into a pub that's packed. You're maybe missing a start of a game, you're, if you want to get a beer at halftime, you leave your seat five minutes early, haven't already spent money for a ticket, the beer's usually rubbish. And so, and in researching this, a few people have said to me that the stat for as long as you can remember is that pubs are closing at a faster rate than they've ever been. But actually what is happening is the like other areas of the, you know, the economy, it's the, it's the poor operators that are seeing that are closing down. It's the ones that aren't improving in line with consumer expectations. And this isn't just about sport, right? But it's, it's now as we sit here in 2024, it's just kind of Even football fans don't want a warm pint in a plastic glass that costs six quid. And if a football, you know, if your club can offer you something better, maybe some subsidised drinks, the football's on there, there's a band, you don't have to worry about, you know, queuing up. It's actually, you know, and when you think about that, you think, well actually, do you know what I've been doing for the last 20 years? That is, that has actually been rubbish.

Richard Gillis: 13:16

I think there's a, I think. It's not necessarily the, it's not bad practice. It could be that, but it's also to do with market power. And, you know, you've got the big getting bigger in the pub trade, squeezing out independent pubs, which again, some of my point of view is, I quite like the idea of an independent pub, but that's probably a romantic idea, but I don't like a Weatherspoons on a, you know, that's Although the beer is quite cheap there. only because the, bloke who owns it. It was a I'm, you know, I'm going off the point a bit, but there is this from a sports perspective, the other lens is the telly. And I'm never quite sure what that market is like. I've never really thought about it very much, but the big screen in the pub and obviously they're being charged by Sky who have, you know, bought the rights from the Premier League. So you've got that supply chain there into the pub, but I don't know how, but Sort of how that features in the scheme of things, how much of their rights fee goes to that bit of the marketplace. Because always, always the focus is on individual home subscriptions and that the economics of that.

Matt Cutler: 14:38

Yeah.

Richard Gillis: 14:39

It's got to be, it's obviously significant, but I don't quite know how, I have no idea whether it's 5 percent or 10%. 20 percent or whatever.

Matt Cutler: 14:49

It is. That's one of the questions I've been asking as I've been researching this, that asking people who in and around that in and around that sector of what the, I think they call it like residential versus business. And It's, the residential stuff is so, it's, that's where the, that's where the, that's not only where the number of subscriptions and customers are, it's where the money is. So it's almost that these pub if you're a Sky or an Amazon and a BT, there'll be some of the big pub chains that you can do a deal with directly into, someone like Stonegate's a good example of that. Stonegate, I think are the biggest UK pub operator. They've got, I think they've got about 2, 000, 3, 000 pubs. So you can do one deal with them. And that's like, that's, that's probably 80 percent of the revenue that you're getting through. So it's just, that's just, and that's just doing one deal. So I think, I think that is one of the things where the the, the focus on the residential side of things has almost made, made that neglected a little bit. And you see that, so you mentioned Weatherspoons, like Weatherspoons doesn't show sports. Unless it's on the BBC. So like, clearly, Weatherspoons doesn't feel like it needs to show Sky Sports. That's kind of interesting in itself, I think. And

Richard Gillis: 16:01

And it's probably part of why their, I don't know why their beer is much cheaper than elsewhere. But maybe, you know, it's, it's obviously must be a cost equation that they've worked out. In addition to the just the scale question that there's so many of them and, you know, they can leverage the price down that way.

Matt Cutler: 16:23

But we, so with this, this research we've done with YouGov, one of the questions was to, to sports fans who go to the pub, why, where does sport fit into your pub experience? And actually more than half, 55 percent said sport is not part of my pub experience, which is. And only 28 percent of sports fans who go to the pub say they go to the pub to watch live sport on the big screens. So like less than 1 in 3. Which I found quite interesting. I thought that is lower than I anticipated. But maybe that's my personal bias because that's one of the reasons why I do, I do go to the pub to watch live sports. To watch, watch sport. So perhaps the, the draw of the, you know, a Premier League football in a pub is quite, it's not quite as big as we may have anticipated. I don't know.

Richard Gillis: 17:20

Yeah, I think it's probably also skewed around big events, isn't it? So I'm trying to think again, the danger of, personalizing it to your own experience, but I, you know, I don't tend to go to a pub because it's, I don't know why, I sometimes go for an England game, you know, a World Cup game, the Euros, I might go just cause it's, there's a load of people going and it's an occasion. I don't do it as a, as a regular thing. Although you sort of, again, to your point, it's sort of a bit counterintuitive because I, I, I wonder what that relationship is. Cause I, again, people start to calibrate. Okay. Am I going to, if I get rid of Sky, I'll go and see Spurs games in the pub. I don't, but that's part of the sort of framing of getting rid of that cost on the subscription, because, you know, if push comes to shove, Oh, okay, I'll go to the pub, but actually go to the pub, you end up spending 25 quid just to watch the game anyway, so it makes no sense, real sense.

Matt Cutler: 18:22

No, no, completely. And there's, there's, just to confuse matters, there's also so I've spoken to, to Fanzo as part of this. So Fanzo, the they're kind of like, they're, they're like a digital platform that's in between the pubs and the punters who are looking to watch sport on the big screen. And their data shows that the people who have subscriptions to sports channels are more likely to watch sport in the pub. And again, I can kind of understand that, and I think their point is that it's, the environment, it's the experience, it's that third, you mentioned it earlier, that third space, particularly for men, I think, of like, I don't want to sit at home, I want to have some kind of live, you know, live experience with people I like.

Richard Gillis: 19:07

Well, it's sort of, it's also, it, it echoes the, that data from piracy, which is that the more you watch, the more you pirate. So there is a sort of, it's actually the reverse, you know, it might be just that the more football you watch, the more football you watch. And there is a, you know, a core of people who are just watching it at home with a Sky subscription and going to the pub. And then there's people who drift in and out and they're not going to buy a subscription, so I don't quite know how that would be interesting to know what, how Sky looks at the marketplace I remember we had Carling as a client and I was at Cake and they, you know, Obviously we're the official partner of the Premier League and we had Premier League pubs and it was a really nice idea that, you know, you would have carling pubs around the country and then they would sort of bracket them as almost Premier League pubs. And their view is quite, again, would be interesting, particularly around zero alcohol, that trend. So you've got all these various bits of the puzzle, but when you come back to it, they, they're in the business of selling beer and they know, at a precise level, what's working, what doesn't, the impact of football on that question. When you talk about Fanzo, again, what's interesting about them, is that They are attempting to build a database, a fan database of people in pubs, because obviously that could be very valuable because you then end up saying, right, okay, I know the people at home because they've got a subscription. I know the people in the ground because they bought the ticket. It's the people in the pubs I don't know. I don't know what they want and what they, you know, who they are, etc. But there's a, there's they, when you're looking at trying to quantify this.

Matt Cutler: 21:07

Yeah, yeah, definitely. There was always a big unknown about you're so right about the, the people at home, the people in the stadium, but there was always, even when I was working, you know, writing for TVSM, it was always a thing about, you know, Oh, yeah, out of home, there's been a record, there's been a record, you know, amount of people watching Arsenal, Liverpool on Sky Sports, but then it just didn't take into account, there could have been tens, hundreds of thousands. Well, no one knows how many people are in the pubs, but, you know, Pubs will be packed, and surely that is something that is within everyone's interest to understand how many people there are. It's within the pub's interest, it's within Sky's interest, it's within the Premier League's interest, definitely.

Richard Gillis: 21:49

Yeah.

Matt Cutler: 21:50

I think,

Richard Gillis: 21:50

I remember someone saying that they used to just bung 10 percent on top or something. Do you know what I mean? It's like that of the number, they just say, get bung 10 percent or that'll do for out of home. But I, it must be more scientific than that. You might imagine or it might not, but there's a, you know, someone will tell us how you, how, how you actually go about doing it.

Matt Cutler: 22:09

I would love to know. Yeah, for sure.

Richard Gillis: 22:11

I think it gets back to, it always gets back to the sort of this understanding of the myths and the, the reality of football fans, basically. Yeah. they are a group that people talk about in abstract quite a lot. But I think there's quite, you know, it's, it'd be interesting to see what, if there's any, any regional. Variations or whether there's a sort of urban rural thing going on or whether or not there's a you know What the big cities tell us versus if you're not in a big city Yeah, and likewise if it's a UK thing or you know what it's like in because I will you know again Anecdotally when you go on the holiday and there are big sort of moments. There's a sort of different vibe to it Yeah, it's just people in, you know, we've all sat in bars when there's the telly on, you're supposed to be concentrating on what your family is saying, and you're looking over their shoulder at some, you know, Burnley vs. Wolves, trying to find

Matt Cutler: 23:04

something to watch. One of the things I've also been asking him this, and I'm really fascinated by it, is, Does that whole thing that you mentioned earlier around Gen Z drinking less, it's all like, this is all like fact now, like it's, it's, it's completely clear that people under the age of 25 or whatever don't drink as much. What does that mean for like football fandom in 30 years? Because the two have been intrinsically connected for 150 years. Yeah. Maybe nothing, maybe completely changing, I, I don't know. It's probably somewhere in between, but it can't, it can't not change it.

Richard Gillis: 23:35

Well, and presumably it, it makes the beer category in sponsorship, for example, less valuable over time. They might, you know, I don't know if that's true or whether that's going to be a marginal thing. Again, the unknown is whether or not those people not, whether there's a sort of class. Thing going on here. And or people will grow into drinking again in the same way as, you know, the, their sort of media consumption habits and the, have they changed? Are they fundamentally different or are they, is it just a you know, a stage of life question? There's a, you know, there's a load of stuff in there, which, there's a few quite nice unknowns. And a lot of the time these types of conversations are about, Oh, my kids do this, my kids do that. And it's, it tends to be a sort of, middle class conversation about, Oh, my kids don't drink, you know, actually one, you don't know what they're doing. And secondly, they, you know, it might be better off in a pub rather than getting sort of, off their face somewhere else.

Matt Cutler: 24:39

Yeah. On LSD on a park bench.

Richard Gillis: 24:41

Yeah. Yeah. Sherry. What was wrong with Sherry on the park bench? You're bloody LSD and heroin now. Get them in pubs. It could be an unofficial partner campaign. Get the kids back into the pub. There's always a sort of, you know, all the French kids are drinking wine over you know, over lunch. How sophisticated are they? And that was always an argument for the deregulation of pub hours. You know, when I, when I was 20. One of the frustrations was you couldn't get into a bloody pub because they were always closed. And that, that argument over 10 years was, you know, we should be a bit more like the French, bit more sophisticated. That was very middle class. You know, when I went on the French exchange, I had red wine for lunch, you know, when I was 12 and, and then they opened the pub that everyone is, is that sort of Sodom and Gomorrah, everyone's like, you know, vomiting over each other. You think, Oh, what happened to the French, you know, French kids argument. You don't hear that very often anymore.

Matt Cutler: 25:35

Yeah. Yeah. I would love to, I love to, I would love to have a, like a, a candid camera of set up of like 17 or 18 year old kids like going into a pub and seeing their reaction when they're like, sorry, that's one pint. That's eight pounds. Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Gillis: 25:51

Yeah.

Matt Cutler: 25:53

Because I guess that's one of the differences. Like, you know, I, I, I, so this is going to make me sound older. I remember when I graduated from Cardiff in 2008, I'd already moved to London for two months and I came back for My graduation and mine was early. So then I just sat in the student bar and it's one pound a pint. And even then I was like, this is fucking insane. I'm already, I'm already used to, and that probably then was only like, I'm already used to buying four pound pints in

Richard Gillis: 26:16

2008. I like it when the chancellor and the the budget says there and a

26:19

Penny.

Richard Gillis: 26:20

off a pint of beer is like, you know, buy 800 pints, get, getting one free. There's a I remember really the Red Lion in Oxbridge, and we were sitting there and, and they, they announced it was a pound of pine for the first time, and this was in the, it must have been in the mid eighties, maybe late eighties. And it was like, it was almost a riot. There were people, yeah. You know, it was the, end of times, end of civilization. People were sort of weeping in the streets. I can't remember where, where, when it was, but there was. It was quite a moment because they, first of all, you could take a fiver for the night out, you know, and you'd be covered pretty much then. And I knew where you could get a fiver from the, from the the bank. Great student, student sort of dodges. But yeah, no, I remember people were being properly angry. That was, that was like a sort of, it was like the The first million pound player, you know, the first pound of time you paid a pound for a pint, the Trevor Francis of the Red Lion. It's interesting the part again, it'd be interesting to sort of just stand up some of the cliches because again, like you, my assumption is that you see all the headlines of pubs going bust and, but then on the other hand, you see lots of, there's a sort of vibrant market in the, craft ale type, you know, Space and small independent pubs, pump houses or, pump rooms growing. And it's the same thing, but just a different iteration. And I don't know, be interesting to sort of know just how sport plays and whether or not it's just something. Oh, that's something my dad does. Whether it's that or whether there is actually something fundamentally that is. That is changing. There'll be people who just sort of talk to one of these cool hunters, always quite like them, and they with their finger on the Gen Z pulse, see whether, you know, see whether actually something fundamentally is new, or it's just, we're projecting onto a small data point, a whole load of dodgy conclusions, which is quite often what I do.

Matt Cutler: 28:23

Yeah, it's, it's funny. So I as part of this, I've been speaking to quite a few different publicans and I spoke to Alex, who's the he's the landlord of the High Cross pub in Tottenham, which is really close to Seven Sister Station, and it's a converted public toilet. So the council owned it and, and he kind of rents it off them. And his vibe that he's been going for is very, As you just described there, Rich, it's like, it's very, it's very heavy on Craftales, they have quite a simple food menu, but it's like traditional like kind of pies and things like that at a decent price point. They're close to the Tottenham Stadium, so they get a bit of footfall from there. But doesn't show too much. sport. So it doesn't, you know, they don't have a Sky subscription because that's not part of the model that they that they need. And also their capacity, because it's, you know, it's an ex public toilet. It's only, I think it may be 80 or 100, he'll probably say on the, on the interview. And he, his assessment is that it's really, it's hard in the economy at the moment, but their business is good because they've got a niche, you know, they, they know what they want to provide. They've got a really good local community who comes through it. They get a bit of added benefit from Spurs games, but they're not dependent on it. That's the, they're the kind of operators that I think are doing okay in this world, and it's the, maybe this is the same for lots of other businesses, it's the businesses that don't quite know their place, or they've, or they've relied on their old business models going for years, that are the ones who are who are struggling. Again, that brings an interesting dynamic for sport because like you hear on some, I'm almost saying that the sport doesn't necessarily matter to them. Clearly it does. Like sport, where is sports role in this ecosystem? Because I think we would all agree that sport is really important to society and it's really important to most people in the country. But like, how important is it? Like capturing that. Is, I think is really important just for the, for the future going forward because know, what was in these, in these times of kind of economic uncertainty you've really got to fight for your kind of position in the world to make sure that your long term kind of sustainability is, is good. So yeah, I think it's like the pub almost. Being like a microcosm of, you know, sport and football's place in the world is kind of an interesting, interesting thread to Dugout.

Richard Gillis: 30:49

There's also the bit about, as you say, the, you've got two things going on. One, you've got the experience, you've got the pub as a, as a thing before and after the game. So there's that question. And if pubs go away, what happens? You know, if pubs are closing, what, what happens to that trade? And are the clubs just going to soak that up with their own bars, get there early, etc. So there's that, there's one route for this. And the other one is the media conversation in terms of where people go and watch football. And again, if pubs close at, The rate that they are now, what happens, what, what the impact of that is and whether or not to the big players like the Premier League to the sky. Is it just a rounding error in their accounts in terms of it's a marginal thing and it's business as usual and it might be the, you know, is there a sort of level of complacency in their relationship to the pubs that they think, well, it's always going to be there and it doesn't matter. So is that, is that the relationship or is it completely the opposite? Is it something that's. absolutely something they think about all the time and are worried about and think, okay, well, what happens when the pubs start to go bust and no one's paying for it anymore? So it'd be interesting to know where their heads are in this, but I think there's, as I say, you're right in the, the pub goes away, you know, it's, it's a cultural institution. The other question is, what the sort of growth of, as my telly has got bigger and bigger, has that persuaded me? And as it's, you know, I've got everything at my beck and call. I've I don't even have to go to the off license anymore and just get it delivered in. As that market has grown, what is, you know, how that plays to this as well. And it's just that we're so, we're so, Our lives are just so easy by comparison to our sort of predecessors everything is so convenient and any need is instantly met by sort of marketplace. What that means for being a football fan. Again, it's interesting to project that forward.

Matt Cutler: 32:58

Yeah, definitely. And what does it tell us about, you know, Football fan behavior going forward because there's lots of these similar, you mentioned about your big TV sorry, that sounds as if you were boasting, I've got a big TV in my house. I have got an enormous television,

Richard Gillis: 33:12

famously, people talk about it locally.

Matt Cutler: 33:16

But the the, it's very similar themes to what we found, particularly when we were talking to sports fans around piracy. YouGov have helped us out again to try and, you know, put some data to the hypotheses. The one in four sports fans are saying they're visiting the pub less than a year ago and the main reason for that, 55 percent are saying it's because it's become too expensive. That's exactly the same themes of piracy. It's, I'm pirating football, pirating sport because it's become too expensive. It's another, I guess, evidence point of the changing. Sports fandom in in a kind of an unprecedented cost of living crisis where the cost of everything is going up, you know, wages are going up, inflation is falling, but inflation is still high. And so there's, it feels like we're almost in the eye of the storm here of the kind of the macroeconomic factors around, you know, The economy are impacting sport in lots of different areas. And what does that mean for sport going forward? I think it's kind of fascinating. No one really knows, but like you can, you can follow some threads and some of it doesn't look very good for lots of different sports, I'd suggest.

Pub bloke: 34:36

Last order's at the bar, please! Time at the bar!

34:42

Okay, so thanks for listening. And you can see what we're trying to do here. There's a lot of questions in there and not many answers. So this is really an invitation. If you know stuff get in touch, you can see that it could be. Someone from the broadcast side, who knows that? Pub marketplace. And can answer some of the questions or it could be from the pump side or that question about the beer relationship with football. And sport more generally. Um, so maybe a a sponsorship type framing. but it's also just about fan audience behavior and how we think that's going to evolve that future question, which is a nice juicy sort of unknowable. So all of that. If you've got views, we'd have to hear them get in touch via the newsletter or just connect with either myself, Richard Gillis. Or Matt Cutler. Probably best to do that on LinkedIn or Twitter is where we spend most of our time, probably the best places. So in the meantime, thanks for listening. This has been an Unofficial Partner production.