Football with No Fans; Airlines with No Passengers
German football kicked off again this weekend. In spite of Covid-19 the Bundesliga is coming back with a bounce. But there is one thing missing: football-supporting crowds.
Yes, this weekend, supporters will have to stay home as the games are played behind locked doors so as to stem the possibility of any new spread of the virus. Like many professional sporting competitions, the Bundesliga has been halted for months. In England and elsewhere there appears no return to spectator sports, be it football or anything else for that matter.
Suddenly sports teams are beginning to realize how much of a part the crowd plays in the whole sporting occasion. Granted, not all sports rely on crowds to generate atmosphere – chess, for example – but it helps. It is hard to imagine Wimbledon’s Centre Court without a panting crowd of sun soaked tennis fans, or the quiet but persistent clap and murmur at Lords Cricket Ground. I have seen reports that things are predicted to be so bad without a crowd that, when the English League starts back without fans, Britain’s Sky Sports is considering superimposing computer-generated fans into stands!
On thing the Covid-19 pandemic reminds all of us in business is that you need customers – otherwise you look pretty silly. Just ask any airline. Last week British Airways warned its employees of a possible 12,000 redundancies. The same week Ryanair announced 3,000 job losses as ‘a minimum to survive the next 12 months’; then Virgin Atlantic announced another 3,000 job losses to the already bruised aviation industry. In addition, the aero-engine makers Rolls Royce and GE are in active discussion about a further 20,000 job losses. Of all the sectors hit by pandemic, aviation looks to be worst of the worst when it comes to job losses and the end of a business model for some time to come.
Last week I talked about the “new normals” coming down the track. Travel was one of them, but then, just one week ago, even I could not have foreseen in the such a short space of time how an industry could appear to crumble before our very eyes. Even if global trade returns – sometime, any time in the future – to pre-pandemic levels, business travel may never do so. The rise and yet greater rise of video conferencing is making businesses look not at the cost of such new technology but also at the savings. And it’s not just cost. Why risk moving people around when you can have you’re your staff safely at home and always available via the wonders of video conferencing? They’re happy, you’re happy and it’s cheaper.
And even if we return to a world where vaccines against Covid-19 are available, why bother with travel – and all its hassle – and the risk of yet another different virus? Trust me, airports will become emptier and emptier, not least because of health checks and quarantine rules. The UK is already saying that passengers arriving by air –with the exception of Ireland and France – will have to endure a two-week quarantine.
Who in their right minds is going to travel somewhere and then spend two weeks waiting for the all clear? That would be bad enough when visiting family but for a business trip? Forget it!
Business travellers will disappear quietly from airports. Millions more will decide that a foreign holiday is a thing of the past. The airport experience was bad before now, from now on it will become intolerable. The boss at London’s Heathrow airport is talking of a kilometre–long social-distanced boarding queues. Just imagine that the 5AM holiday flight with a line that long followed up by a plane journey that ends on arrival at your destination with being holed up for 2 weeks before moving anywhere. Millions of holidaymakers will lose the habit of going abroad. It will become tiresome and anxiety provoking and expensive and people are just not going to want to go near an airport. It’s as simple as that, and for the aviation industry it is being grounded for quite some time to come.
Any business has to work on an element of psychological make-believe. Just as sports crowds give the illusion that sports are “life and death” events so much marketing has gone into making travel seem an exciting and luxurious affair – think “jet set” from the 1950s onwards. Today that appears to be nothing but an anachronistic reference. Air travel may become something that we only do when we have to do it – a dreaded necessity. And that means that we may fly very rarely, I repeat very rarely going forward.
Ryanir founder and CEO Michael O’Leary created a hyper-efficient business model that smashed Europe’s state airline cartel to smithereens. But as Ryanair goes down for good, or so it seems, he may wish to reflect on some of the things he has said about Ryanair travellers over the years and how his business model made us all feel – cheap fares or not.
Sometime brand loyalty can at least help stop the decline of a business. In Ryanair’s case, there is little affection for the airline. And as we are no longer anticipating air travel there is no longer any market for what the airline is selling. The last laugh – if a sad one – is with the Ryanair passengers as they wave goodbye to an airline that transported them around Europe with the charm of a parking ticket.
But back to sport, and sports event with no fans, not something to be entered into lightly. The Bundesliga should think twice before playing games with no spectators. Because people may see behind the “magic” of the multi-million pound industry that is European football. And just like the former Ryanair passengers may decide that, after all, people don’t want what is on sale and can live quite happily with the over inflated prices at football grounds needed to serve the over inflated egos of footballers in a world that is beginning to decide what is really important.
