Restart: Insights into the path to the new normal in football

21 September 2021

No question, we are all happy to finally hear fan chants and see (half-)full stands in the stadiums again. It almost feels natural again to accompany our football clubs on match day and we are no longer so irritated when our calendars fill up with events and appointments.

But as quickly as everyday life and routine set in and many things feel like normal again, we want to take a look at how we, together with our clubs, have managed to get to the point today where many things just feel natural again. We often find ourselves taking things too much for granted. That's why we're starting a small "restart series" in which we'll look at the challenges and solutions of this very special season. And since football is the first league sport to start the 2021/2022 season, we will begin with it today.

A review

First of all, let's take a look back. We are at the beginning of the year, in February 2021 to be exact. If you feel like us and February already feels so far away and you ask yourself the question: What was actually going on back then in February 2021? Here we have a short classification:

In February 2021 ...

... we were still at the beginning of the large-scale vaccination campaign.

... we were in the second lockdown, which would last until early May.

... the Kansas City Chiefs lost to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the Super Bowl and Tom Brady got his 7th Super Bowl ring.

... only about 1/3 of our partners had events with spectators since the beginning of the pandemic.

In the same month, we wanted to know from our clubs how they are doing and how they assess the sporting future in general. Not surprisingly, the personal mood of our contacts was strongly influenced by the strain of the lockdown and the pandemic in general. But there was also uncertainty about how to proceed with the planning for the next season. Around 62 per cent of the clubs had already written off the 2020/2021 season, which was still running at the time, without spectators.

Concepts and challenges for the new season

Despite this, our partners remained confident for the new 2021/2022 season and indicated that they believe a return of spectators and even regular operations, as before the pandemic, are possible. We used this optimism to work with the clubs on concepts for the upcoming season. This may all read as easy and light-hearted, but we have to be honest with ourselves at this point: In between, we were all confronted with new challenges again and again, which gave us the odd frustrating minute. Because to the question "Do you feel well prepared for the restart?", the colleagues gave an average of only 6 out of 10 points. So now the task was to identify and solve the sticking points.

The biggest challenges in the preparation for the new season at a glance:

  • Under what circumstances and with what rules will my fans be allowed to return to the stadium?
  • How can I react flexibly to the stadium's capacity limit requirements?
  • Who will be allowed access?
  • Which tickets can we offer?
  • Who is allowed to buy season tickets?
  • How can I check antigen, PCR tests and vaccinations quickly and reliably?

Normally, the first to-do for clubs in the new season is to sell season tickets. But this season, for the second time in a row, the question was: Season tickets, yes or no? If yes, how? Therefore, the most urgent question for our ticket managers was to find a solution and strategy for ticket sales.

Season ticket models

To anticipate what is probably the most important answer: There was and is no universal solution. In consultation with the clubs, the best possible approaches were developed depending on the official requirements and the individual possibilities of the club. Here is a short excerpt from the various models that have proven to be practicable over the past months:

Second-round season ticket

As the conditions for the start of the league were uncertain for a long time, clubs such as Borussia Mönchengladbach opted for a second-round season ticket. They hoped that the season would have settled down by then and that they would be able to plan more securely.

With the return season ticket, season ticket holders will hopefully be able to sit in their usual seats in the stadium after the winter break.

Voucher season ticket

Season ticket holders will receive a voucher to the value of the single match ticket of the booked season ticket category. They can redeem this voucher for a fixed seat before the match. It is not guaranteed that the season ticket holder will be able to watch every match from the same seat, nor can it be guaranteed that every customer will be able to purchase a seat in the booked category due to the predetermined distribution pattern. In this way, the club retains flexibility to be able to react to new changes from the Health Department.

Season ticket reservation

Since the seats in the stadium are limited, other clubs such as Sportfreunde Lotte have decided to initially offer the season ticket for a reservation fee. The idea was that the fee would reduce half-hearted purchases and only encourage fans who would definitely like to return to the stadium to buy. An additional advantage of the reserved season ticket: at the time of reservation, no seats were yet selected or guaranteed. In this way, clubs retained the possibility of reacting flexibly to the requirements imposed by the health authority.

Support from the EVENTIM Sports team

In addition to developing and implementing concrete solutions, we also tried to give our ticketing managers confidence in using our EVENTIM.Tixx product platform. For this purpose, we developed various models to get our partners ready for their daily work in time for the restart. With webinars via teams, for example, we were able to go through topics such as game set-up according to hygiene requirements, (graphic) adjustments in the Tixx-Onlineshop, Tixx-CRM and the sensible use of e-mail marketing in a clear manner and answer questions on-the-job. In addition, we have used the time to significantly expand our range of manuals. In the meantime, we are able to provide a small, compact manual as a daily aid for the most common questions.

As already indicated, these were only the first points of a somewhat longer list of challenges for the new season. In the next parts of our "Restart Series" we will present the new tool Tixx-Select, explain how we implement the 3-G-Check with our clubs and why the handling of tickets for guest fans has suddenly become a big issue.