“You can change your wife, your politics, your religion. But never, never can you change your favourite football team,” goes the old Eric Cantona quote – but over time that sentiment has started to change.
Younger fans, particularly the group broadly defined as Gen Z, are now more inclined to support individual players throughout their careers, as opposed to the usual method of one club ’til death do us part, according to one much-discussed study by Copa90, and the change in younger fans’ approach has some of the game’s older members a little worried.
Generally, the argument goes, young people aren’t following football in the traditional way – not watching full 90-minute matches, not following clubs as religiously as today’s influencer-style players, and generally not being as invested in the sport – and so therefore the sport had become “ill,” in the words of Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez, and therefore needed saving. “By 2024 we’re dead.”
That pervading fear about younger fans is part of the reasoning behind the so-far failed attempts at launching the infamous European Super League, where the plan was for a small group of European “big clubs” to be guaranteed permanent membership, NFL-style, and face each other much more regularly. Those plans fell apart amongst mass fan protests at the notion of a competition without risk of relegation or emphasis on sporting merit, but the idea is still partially alive.
Part of the problem for Pérez, for instance, is video games, which he sees as vying for the attention of the younger generation – and EA Sports has certainly seen plenty of attention with FIFA. During last Thursday’s glitzy reveal of FC 24, EA Sports’ rebranded version minus the FIFA licence, the developer-publisher boasted FIFA 23 has seen over 9bn hours of playtime. At the event, Eurogamer had a brief chance to speak with EA Sports FC’s general manager, Nick Wlodyka, who said that the game is now regularly seeing “100 million players in game in a month.”