Engora Data Blog: Attendance at English football: a tale of tragedy and recovery

Mike Woodward's thoughts on data and analytics. I cover management, law, statistics, company culture, hiring, data visualization, Python, SQL and a whole bunch of other areas.

Analyzing sports data is normally a harmless activity, but sometimes, it takes you to much darker places, and analyzing attendance in English football takes you to some dark places very quickly.

This blog post is about trends in attendance in English football and what you can tell from the data. For this analysis, I’m going to flip the script and start to talk about causes first and then show you the data.

(Steenbergs from Ripon, United Kingdom, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Newcastle United vs. Chelsea, 2010-11-28. Note everyone seated and almost all seats filled.)

Football in the UK has suffered from hooliganism almost since the beginning of professional football. There are reports of riots dating back to 1909 and vandalism from 1934. After the Second World War, hooliganism arrived in earnest and by the 1980’s, the English game was in deep trouble. Notoriously, violence followed English teams abroad. Innocent people were caught up in the mayhem and were killed. 

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