Luxury Football

Can a football club ever be a luxury product?

Watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary about Serie B team Como 1907 recently, something struck me. I watch weird things. While I was coming to terms with my increasingly niche television tastes, another thing struck me. Djarum Group, the Indonesian tobacco and media conglomerate that owns this provincial Italian football club, are openly intent on turning it into a luxury product, like a private jet or central heating. It got me thinking: is there such a thing as a luxury football club?

You can understand the Djarum Group’s logic to a degree. Situated on the shore of Lake Como, one of Europe’s most picturesque bodies of acqua naturale, Como has become a bolthole for the rich and famous: George Clooney, Sting, and Sir Richard Branson have all kept hedge haberdashers and peacock polishers in business there. Surely then, this is a town that’s crying out for a luxury football club? If only it were that simple. 

For a lot of fans, gentrification is a four-letter word. And with good reason. When aspirational owners court the rich and famous, their ambition often comes at the expense of the butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers who pump the lifeblood of the club. These fans, loyal to a fault, are often left out in the cold by a new owner’s bourgeois vision. This isn’t to say that your average Joe doesn’t deserve a little luxury in their lives, we’ve all dabbled in a bit of Molton Brown, but when it comes to football there’s a certain down-to-earthness that can’t be swept under the Persian rug. 

Football’s bejewelled path is a well-trodden one. Roman Abramovich’s takeover of Chelsea in 2003 is an obvious example, but a closer match for Como’s situation can be found in AS Monaco. In 2011, the deep-pocketed Rybolovleva family bought Monaco for exactly the same reason: luxury city + luxury residents = luxury football club. But it didn’t work out as planned. When the Russians started splashing the cash, £50 million for Radamel Falcao and £40 million for James Rodríguez, it was expected that a packed house full of fancy folk would follow. The only question was: how many oligarchs can you fit in a stadium?

Well, at the point of the takeover, the club were averaging 5,000 fans per game. In the decade since, average attendances have peaked at 9,500 but currently sit closer to 7,000. Bear in mind, Stade Louis II holds 18,500. The demographic of the fans hasn’t changed, either. For the most part, it remains le boucher, le boulanger, et le fabricant de chandeliers.

The mission to create a luxury destination football club in Monaco was doomed to failure. It may be glitzy and glamorous, but the tax-haven principality has a resting population of just 40,000 people. Its hotels can hold around 5,000 more. So, to fill the stadium, you’re asking almost half of the population to decamp; to the delight of local burglars, no doubt. And, for what it’s worth, many of the people who reside in Monaco aren’t particularly passionate about it. Their residence is more of, shall we say, an arrangement. 

And you can’t escape the fact that, despite being one of the most ornate stadiums in the world, Stade Louis II has a running track around it, diffusing its atmosphere into the rosemary-scented hills above. Honestly, the only thing worse than a running track in a stadium is rugby posts. Just me?

While the luxury football club concept didn’t pan out, the Rybolovlevas have more than recouped their roubles. Investing in youth development, they’ve turned AS Monaco into a footballing diamond mine: unearthing gems like Aurélien Tchouameni, Thomas Lemar, and some guy called Kylian Mbappé. Never mind the oligarchs, Monaco could make money with an empty stadium. Who needs supporters anyway? 

When it comes to luxury in football, there’s more than one way to skin an Ocelot. In the last decade, we’ve seen the emergence of football x fashion crossovers, love them or loathe them. A prominent flag bearer for this trend is the fashion brand and occasional football club, Arsenal. 

It’s easy to point at Arsenal’s expensive private member’s lounge, The Diamond Club, and tut about the 'prawn sandwich brigade' so-on-and-so-forth, but wealthy punters are low-hanging fruit from a marketing perspective. The real trick is persuading your average fan, who may have already parted with over a grand for a season ticket, to put more of their hard-earned money where your brand is.

Enter social media, which has been a godsend for your football brand on the make. Arsenal’s social channels are awash with the latest merch drops and fashion collaborations. And people are buying it, too. It’s not enough to just have the latest shirt. If you’re not accessorising with the crossbody bag and bucket hat, both retailing circa £60, are you really a fan? You probably don’t even own a remake of a classic shirt, you absolute part-timer.

 

This brings me back to Italy in the shape of Venezia FC. Their model is one Como 1907 would do well to follow. Venezia’s American owners have worked with a series of boutique branding agencies to build one of the most exclusive football fashion brands in Europe. Promotion to Serie A for the 21/22 season boosted awareness of the work they were doing, but their stylish footprint was planted while they were toiling in Serie B. 

Some naïve football has landed Venezia back in Italy’s second division this season, but it hasn’t stopped the luxury merch drops. This season’s home shirt, €90, sold out in hours, and the club’s merchandise is so sought after that the market is flooding with Chinese fakes; a compliment of sorts.

Venezia aren’t the only club pushing their brand into the realm of urban cool. Arsenal look like mere amateurs compared to Paris Saint-Germain, who are relentless in repositioning themselves as a global fashion player. As Paris’s only major club, they have a near monopoly on the city’s chic image. But their decision to eschew the traditional sportswear names in favour of a collaboration with basketball brand Air Jordan, albeit a subsidiary of Nike, has catapulted them into a different stratosphere. PSG ‘drip’ hangs off the shoulders of the coolest cats in New York, LA, Tokyo, Orpington, and beyond.

What has this got to do with luxury? Persuading your own fans to buy your merchandise is a relatively easy sell. Persuading people outside of your market to buy into your brand requires a much more thoughtful and edgy strategy. Positioning is key. As consumers, every brand we buy says something about us. When a person buys into a football club, particularly one that’s geographically alien to them, they do so to signal something about themselves --

Before I continue, I can feel the feathers of suburban fury spitting from the “I follow *insert big club name* because my old man was born a few streets from the ground” crowd. Fair enough. If I understand it correctly, the real mid-century baby boom was around Britain’s famous stadiums, where, presumably, you couldn’t move for the sea of future suburban fathers. The Raleigh Chopper and Space Hopper matchday traffic must’ve been epic.

Now, where was I? Ah, yes… When a person buys into a football club, particularly one that’s geographically alien to them, they do so to signal something about themselves. Chic urban cool: Arsenal/PSG, left-wing anti-fascist: St. Pauli/Clapton CFC, underground fashionista: Venezia/Red Star Paris, football hipster: vintage Dukla Prague away kit. There’s a market for all of them, but, as a club, you have to pin your flag to the mast and tell the market who you are.

This is where Como have come unstuck thus far. They’ve brought in some big-name experts, Chislehurst’s own Gianfranco Zola is a consultant and Dennis Wise is a director (puzzled Italian shrug), and they’ve splashed the cash on Cesc Fàbregas and Patrick Cutrone among others. However, other than being in a luxury city, with possibly the most scenically sighted stadium in Europe, the club doesn’t stand for anything other than trying to position themselves as a luxury brand. This was where the Monaco project fell down. 

Como’s fans aren’t the George Clooneys of this world, they’re ordinary people who are passionate about their local club; Italian campanilismo in its truest form. While these fans are happy to see investment, the documentary reveals their opposition to the new owner’s attempts to charge €12 (£10.70) for a ticket on the curva. Clearly, they’ve not bought into the luxury vision just yet.

And then there’s the question of Como’s brand reaching beyond its home market. Como’s merchandise and social media offerings lack the slickness and sophistication of their market rivals and their home shirt is utterly headache-inducing. The club’s new direction has undoubtedly boosted attendances, which have risen from an average of 2,000 to 4,000, but their stadium holds 13,500. If you struggle to charm your own city, how do you hope to access markets further afield? Como’s owners are hoping a fly-on-the-wall documentary and free match streaming will help. It got me to pay attention, but I’m a pretty small market. 

By comparison, fashionistas Venezia, Como’s Serie B rivals, have gone from an average of 2,000 fans to 6,600, selling out three games in their 11,000-seater stadium last season, albeit in Serie A. The extra ticket demand isn’t just from locals, it’s from tourists who’ve bought into the club’s underground fashion brand. Is this the blueprint for building a luxury football club?

Then again, isn’t football itself a luxury? We don’t need to support a team. We don’t need to buy a season ticket, or a replica shirt, or a bucket hat. We do it because we enjoy it in a perverse kind of way. You might not feel very luxurious when you’re queuing for an overpriced hotdog or, in the case of non-league fans, trying not to fall through the floor of a portacabin while you pee, but you don’t need to be there. You’re there because a grubby little part of you loves shouting at a bunch of sweaty people kicking a ball for your town (or the football brand you’ve bought into). It gives us a thrill. It’s not a cheap thrill, but still. 

Some people demand a luxury experience when they attend a football match. It’s no different from the theatre, where a deeper pocket buys you a box away from the hoi polloi. Society has always made space for these people, or perhaps they’ve made space for themselves, but pitching your whole club toward that crowd is foolhardy. Football is about atmosphere. The noise at a football match isn’t coming from the private members club or the executive box, it’s coming from the “boys making all the noise everywhere we go” in the stand behind the goal: society’s great equaliser. 

As this article is debuting on From Bromley with love, you might be wondering what all of this has got to do with Bromley Football Club. Isn’t it obvious? Como sits on the shore of Lake Como while Bromley sits on the shore of the River Ravensbourne. Como has George Clooney, whose films have played in Bromley’s cinemas. Coincidence? I think not. And did I mention Chislehurst’s own Gianfranco Zola? 

Okay, it doesn’t have much to do with Bromley. But it does make me wonder what it would take for a suburban club like Bromley to cut through into the consciousness of the urban-cool fashion market. Edgy branding? A Ziggy Stardust-themed kit, complete with giant collar? A sweeping move to far-left politics? Milan Fashion Week here we come! Then again, perhaps it’s just fine as it is.

When we choose to follow a football club, we choose a luxury of sorts. How deep you immerse yourself in that luxury is a question of taste. Personally, given a choice of bouncing up and down in the curva or sipping Prosecco in the posh seats, I know where I’d rather be. But I wouldn’t mind a bottle of Molton Brown in the pee-soaked portacabin.

* The Como 1907 documentary and live match streams can be found on the free Mola TV app. 

** This article was in no way paid for or supported by Mola TV or the Djarum Group. But they could if they wanted to. I’m an affordable luxury and I smell nice.

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