How do we change the 'cultural' make up of football crowds?

[Handsworth Wood Villa]

Quality post mate.

Was your school mainly a white school though?

If it was, this could have increased your chances of supporting a local team.

If you go to a mostly Asian or black school in Birmingham it is probably unusual to support a local team.

[Shoody]

Lol dont give up do u Tilton Road Stand?

[Witton Warrior]

Lol dont give up do u Tilton Road Stand?

I didn't join in this thread because of he trollness...
Has been an interesting discussion.

What about the Zulus I wonder?

[Ger Regan]

Quality post mate.

Was your school mainly a white school though?

If it was, this could have increased your chances of supporting a local team.

If you go to a mostly Asian or black school in Birmingham it is probably unusual to support a local team.

Utterly fantastic. Fair play, sometimes you are actually pretty good at this trolling business.

[Handsworth Wood Villa]

If we were massively successful as ManUre of the last 15 years we would have shedloads of asians wearing tops all over the city.

Definitely.

But then again 30 years we were Champions of England and then Champions of Europe so I don't understand why it didn't happen then.

[Dave Cooper please]

Football grounds in the early 80's were not the most welcoming of places to young Asians.

[Percy McCarthy]

I went with my b-lose mate to their tatty shop sometime in those all-conquering seasons. In those days there was a school just over the road and seemingly every pupil was of Asian descent. Just for a laugh I asked a couple of the kids who they supported, and loads of them came running up to the fence shouting 'Villa, Villa'. My mate was gutted given the proximity of their shithole.

He soon cheered up though when we robbed a load of tickets that were left on the counter in the shop.

[olaftab]

Football grounds in the early 80's were not the most welcoming of places to young Asians.

For sure you needed thick skin for more than one reason.

[adrenachrome]

Is 'coconut' racist now?

Not sure if it's racist.

Can you be racist to your own race?

It's definitely an insult though.

It means the same as 'oreo' and 'bounty'

So now our 'Pin the Tail on the Biscuit' is no good. We might as well shut our village fete down.

Lord only knows what the Women's Institute will stick on their marmalade jars this year.

Golly, that is a most pertinent point,  Sir Algie.

Might one respectfully suggest that the WI put a cockbiscuit minus the biscuit on their jars, and that your village serfs play pin the  pork sword on the paedo at their annual bash, thus avoiding both the coconut and the biscuit.

[ktvillan]

Growing up in Smethwick in the 60s and 70s my group of friends included a couple of black lads and three or four from asian/sikh backgrounds.  A couple of the Asian lads supported Albion, went to the games at least  sometimes, and at least one of them is still a season ticket holder.  The rest were all Man Yoo or Liverpool whom they never went to see live until they had grown up, and then most usually at VP, the Hawthorns etc.   Ditto when I worked with black and Asian lads in London, I can't think of any that supported local teams, even if born and raised there.  It was almost always Liverpool.  There's a certain degree of that with people from Irish immigrant families too.  Seems fairly obvious that in the absence of any long standing cultural ties to an area, or any family ties to a club, or any tradition of going to games, a lot of people from other cultures just pick the path of least resistance, and attach themselves to the most successful team or the most entertaining team.  And you can't really blame them I suppose.

As it goes, I'm not sure any form of social or cultural engineering should be any of our business, except it might boost the club's income a bit.

[Handsworth Wood Villa]

Why Bradford City fan in a hijab holds key to the game’s future

Watching television coverage of Bradford City beating Aston Villa on Tuesday night, I was struck by the most arresting sight.

As the visitors’ Barry Bannan went to take a corner, he was assailed by an overexcited Bradford fan, attempting verbally to put him off his stride.

Perhaps a choice observation was being made about his height, maybe about his hair’s copper hue, whatever it was probably as well that the pitchside microphones did not pick it up.

Not that there was anything unusual in such behaviour: most fans reckon that the price of entry to a football game these days includes the right loudly to voice disparaging comment about opposition players.

What was striking, though, was the identity of the fan yelling at Bannan: she was an Asian woman wearing a hijab. What is more, she was with a couple of female Asian friends, in a section of the Valley Parade crowd dotted with Asian faces.

If it is possible that someone yelling at a footballer represents evidence of social progress, then this was the most encouraging image of the season.

After all the miserable racist vituperation that has swilled around football recently, here was a Muslim woman, comfortable in the middle of an ethnically mixed crowd, engaging with the game’s traditional possibilities. And in doing so, clearly having the time of her life. How pleasant was that to see?

The good news is that shouty Bradford woman is not alone. For years it was to the game’s shame that Asian people felt excluded from immersing themselves in its glories.

Such was the sense of isolation, British Asian men largely preferred to follow cricket, while young Asian females would never have felt comfortable at a match.

Thanks to some imaginative initiatives, parts of the game are increasingly reaching out to the Asian audience. Which, if nothing else, makes commercial sense: this is a substantial inner-city market residing in the shadow of league grounds. To ignore it is to miss out on the customers living on the doorstep.

And the Asians are coming. At Manchester United home games, television audiences have for several years now seen a family of Sikhs doughnutting the dugout, passing each other sweets as Sir Alex Ferguson stalks the technical area.

At Wolverhampton Wanderers, the growth in interest among the city’s Asians has been growing rapidly since 2007, when a group of six fans formed Punjabi Wolves.

“We just thought: the game belongs to us as much as anybody,” Raj Bains, the organisation’s founder, explains. “I started going to matches in 1979. In the early days it was a bit scary, even with the home fans. But there are no issues now.”

Within five years, the organisation has grown to the point it now has more than 800 members. At home matches, they sit in different parts of Molineux. But at away matches the Punjabi Wolves are a noticeable, unified presence, travelling together, sitting together, banging their Indian drums as they approach grounds.

“The drums give us our identity,” says Bains. “But we consider ourselves very much part of the Wolves family.”

Bains has been approached by officials from West Bromwich, Aston Villa and Birmingham City all seeking his advice on starting similar groups.

But he is too busy building Punjabi Wolves to franchise the idea yet. Established as a charity, from the off the group has collected money for good causes.

Last summer, Bains led a party out to India to help in the construction of a housing project they had helped to finance.

“Eight Asian and two English lads went,” he says. “Which was a reflection of our membership. We’re open to anyone: Asian, black, white. The only entry requirement is you love Wolves.” All ages, too. One of Punjabi Wolves’ regular drummers is 13. Which in itself is noteworthy.

Indeed what was perhaps more telling about the Valley Parade ranter was not so much her ethnicity as her age. She was clearly under 20. With her satchel slung round her neck, she looked like she was a student.

And the young really are an endangered species in the game’s upper reaches. In the Premier League the crowds are ageing faster than Paul Lambert as he watched his defenders flail and fail on Tuesday.

Scan the stands during any top flight match and the hairlines are receding, the faces lined, the average age way over 45. The clubs are doing little to address that ageing demographic.

At the Emirates on Sunday, Arsenal are charging visiting Manchester City fans £62 a head, perhaps on the assumption that they all come from Abu Dhabi. There will not be many students in that crowd. Unless their dad has paid.

Down the divisions it is not like that. At Milton Keynes, for instance, the Dons are watched by a crowd markedly younger than that at any Premier League venue. The main stand is packed with families, while gaggles of youths gather in the Stadium MK’s Cow Shed stand, chanting encouragement to their team.

Which is perhaps no surprise: half-season tickets, taking in the rest of the Dons’ League One home campaign, are available to under-18s for £20. That is not per game, that is for all 10 remaining matches, the kind of price affordable for even those whose paper round wages have stubbornly refused to rise in line with inflation.

It is the same at Bradford. Even as the club sank through the divisions, a conscientious effort to maintain crowd levels has seen prices held down.

Assuming she flashed her student card, the Asian woman ranter would have paid only £14 on Tuesday night to watch a riveting cup semi final. After what she experienced there is every chance she will be coming back.

It may be the product of necessity – in Bradford’s case maybe even of desperation – but what such a policy has done is mark out a new and different course for football.

While the Premier League plays out to an ever more affluent, ever ageing, white audience that will eventually, inevitably, die off, clubs like Bradford have found the path to renewal.

In fact, it could be said that what I was looking at when I saw that young Bantams fan in the hijab was this: football’s future.

Article in The Telegraph today

Here is the picture of the Bradford City fan

[pauliewalnuts]

I noticed that girl during the match, several times she was there giving the corner taker all sorts.

Good on her.

[VillaAlways]

It was fantastic to see.Bannan looks absolutely terrified

[Archbishop Herbert Cockthrottle]

Maybe we should get George Galloway to stand for Ladywood at the next election.

[Gaztonniller]

They want to get invested in a large part of our culture, they have a choice, it's the club's (and current supporters) job to make sure we are giving them a reason to choose us. It isn't glory hunting, its the fact they have a choice.

They had a choice and they chose to support a top club.

That is glory hunting.

You say you want to move to New York and so you have chosen to support a New York NFL team.

That is not glory hunting since you are effectively supporting a local team.

You chose the Jets because they were better but I would class that as minor gloryhunting.

It would be like someone from West Bromwich supporting Villa.

It's gloryhunting on a local scale which is much more acceptable.

Gloryhunting on a national scale is unacceptable.

By that argument, if winning the league cup this season attracted more interest in the club from minorities inside/outside of brum, then no doubts they'll be some fans all too quick to throw that glory hunter term at the new support generated.  And some people wonder why new support aint coming through the turnstiles