By KIM BELLARD
The most interesting story I’ve read in the last week isn’t from the usual fields of health and/or technology, but from sports. It’s not even really news since it was announced last fall; it’s just that just last week a US publication (The New York Times) reported about it. In short: a Parisian football club does not charge its fans admission during the current season.
Since I wrote about medical debt in the US healthcare system last week, you can imagine where this is going. The club is Paris FC. Last November it was announced:
For the first time in history, FC Paris is offering free tickets to all home games at the Stade Charléty at its reception in Bastia from November 11 until the end of the 2023-2024 season, offering a new and innovative vision of football by us welcome as many people as possible.
The policy covers the men’s second division team and the women’s first division team. The NOW Article clarifies that fans supporting the visiting team may be required to pay a “minor” fee and that hospitality suites will continue to pay market rates.
Pierre Ferracci, chairman of Paris FC, said: “We are proud to support this ambitious and forward-looking project, which goes beyond the simple framework of sport in the values it conveys. We want to bring people around our club and our teams together and commit ourselves with strength and conviction. Given the difficult purchasing power, we are confident that a club can be an ideal instrument for bringing people of good will together and getting involved in social issues.”
Fabrice Herrault, General Manager of Paris FC, said: NOW: “It was a kind of marketing strategy. We have to be different to stand out in Greater Paris. It was a good opportunity to talk about Paris FC.” The club estimates it could cost them a million dollars.
It seems to work. The NOW Reports:
Months later, most metrics suggest the move worked. The crowd has increased by more than a third. Matches held at times for school-age children were the best attended, suggesting the club is successful in attracting a younger demographic.
The idea is not entirely new; Last spring, Fortuna Düsseldorf, a German second division club, announced that it would offer free entry to at least three games this season, with the intention that ultimately all games would be played at home. “We make football accessible to everyone. “We will have free entry to league games in this stadium,” said Alexander Jobst, the club’s CEO, at the time. “We call it ‘Fortuna for all’, which can and will lead us into a successful future.”
In one NOW In an interview last spring, Mr. Jobst added: “We think it’s completely new. We tried to think about how we could do the football business completely differently than before.”
I’m always a fan of trying to think about a company in a completely different way than before.
Fortuna now had two of its three free games, and Mr. Jobst talked NOW last week: “Our average attendance has increased from 27,000 to 33,000. Our merchandise sales have increased by 50 percent. Our sponsorship income has increased by 50 percent. We have reached a record number of club members.”
Definitely sounds like a success.
Keep in mind that in most professional sports, revenue from tickets and concessions is an afterthought; The actual money comes from TV contracts and sponsorships. For example, the NFL only gets 17% of its revenue from fans, the NBA gets 26%, and the MLB gets 31%, while MLS and NHL require over 40% (not such good TV deals!). Fortuna, in case you’re wondering, only makes 20% of its revenue from tickets despite only playing in the second division.
Paris FC now only receives 4% of its budget from ticket sales. “We’re not taking a big risk and we’re not going to lose,” Mr. Feracci said The world. “The balance sheet will be positive, thanks to new sponsorship income and the arrival of new shareholders who have committed to our vision.
Viewers are important, not just as a source of income. We all remember American professional sports in the early days of the pandemic. The NBA finished its 2019-2020 season in a bubble, with players, staff and media quarantined and playing in empty arenas. Most NFL and MLB games this year also took place without fans. Players and television viewers hated the experience; Without real fans, it just didn’t seem real.
“Since the pandemic, there has been a growing awareness of the role of spectators in the ‘production’ of sporting events,” said Luc Arrondel, a professor at the Paris School of Economics NOW. “The presence of fans in the stadium increases the attractiveness of the television product and thus possibly also the value of the television rights.”
Professor Arrondel even argued in an essay (“Faut-il payer les supporters?”) that it might actually make sense for professional teams to pay their most passionate fans to attend in person.
Yes, all of this means looking at business completely differently.
=========
Meanwhile, there is the US healthcare system, which treats its “fans” – i.e. patients – as a source of revenue from which every dollar should be squeezed. For example, do you ever pay a facility fee for a doctor’s visit or pay the inflated U.S. prescription drug prices? It’s not surprising that we end up with all this medical debt. As I wrote last week, “Why are so many fees so high, why aren’t people better protected against them, and why don’t more Americans have enough resources to pay their bills, especially unpredictable bills like those for health care?”
So here’s a thought: out-of-pocket costs account for “only” 11% of national healthcare spending. What if we just got rid of it? The healthcare system’s version of not making fans pay to attend football games.
Now you might say – that’s crazy, how is the healthcare system supposed to raise that 10%? I would say two things: First, we all know that 10% savings are possible in our bloated system; What better way to use them than this? Second, and more importantly, we must admit that the current business model in the US healthcare system doesn’t work.
It’s time to think about ways to make the healthcare business “completely different than before.”
Not making patients pay out of pocket may not be the “right” way to do this, although we could make it worse, but in any case we’d better think of something completely different before the system collapses.
Kim is a former e-marketing manager at a major blues plan, editor of the defunct and lamented magazine Tincture.io, and now a regular THCB contributor