In recent years, television broadcasters have pumped more and more money into the football industry, resulting in Premier League clubs in particular receiving both more TV money and more TV coverage. This extra coverage, however, has come at a cost to the fan on the terrace. There are more and more instances of last-minute fixture alterations being made to accommodate televised games. These last-minute changes often result in fans having to rebook travel plans, getting home even later, or in some cases staying overnight in a hotel. I personally remember having to rebook trains twice, and book and subsequently cancel accommodation (losing my deposit) as an Aston Villa vs Norwich City game had its kick-off time changed twice because of TV.

In previous work we have investigated the travel times of football fans and how they could be affected by fixture changes. This looked at the additional time and difficult faced by travelling supporters but did not consider the cost of these changes. Therefore in this piece of work we wanted to determine which fixture changes would result in the biggest cost increase for a fan travelling to the game by public transport. For this we used an API from British Rail Fares Queries (http://www.brfares.com/api/ ) which allowed us to determine the both the cheapest possible advance tickets and the cheapest possible ticket that a fan could buy on the day. As in the previous work, the Google Travel API (https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/distance-matrix/) was used to determine the amount of time travelling and whether a fan would have to stay overnight either the night before or after a match.

As we didn’t want to just consider the cost of new rail tickets but the cost of having to potentially spend more leisure time travelling to and from the game due to the fixture change, we wanted to apply a “cost” to the fan for each extra minute spent travelling. The Department for Transport determined a value of £8 per hour for a non-work related journey using their ‘Value of Time method (https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/313222/webtag-tag-unit-a1-3-user-and-provider-impacts.pdf).We consequently applied this cost to the time a fan would spend travelling to and from the game to give an approximate monetary value.

Finally, if the fixture meant a fan would have to stay overnight we added an extra £50 to the journey cost to represent an approximate value of a night in a cheap hotel. Whilst all of these costs make assumptions (that the supporter is diligent enough to buy the cheapest available Advance ticket to travel to the match when they are initially released, that the rearranged game means the purchase of an Off-peak ticket rather than another Advance ticket, that they will not be able to stay with friends) they are a first attempt at capturing the extra personal cost of these TV fixture moves.

The results of this piece of analysis are available here:
Full Results

With the top 10 biggest cost increases shown below.

It’s a good job that no-one chose to televise Bournemouth vs Sunderland…

With the release of the 2016-17 football league fixtures we thought it would be interesting to carry out a similar piece of analysis to the work we did looking at the Premiership fixtures by looking at the effect of moving fixtures on travelling fans.

Already it appears sky sports has not considered the travelling away fans by making the first friday night game Fulham vs Newcastle United with there being no means that the Toon Army could make a return trip on public transport without getting in at close to 6am. A long trip if it returns no points.

Like previously, I used the Google Travel Matrix API to look at the journeys on public transport fans would need to make to get both to and from the game. The kickoff times I analysed were as follows:

• Saturday 12:30
• Saturday 17:15
• Sunday 12:00
• Sunday 16:30

Again as before I considered a fixtures t following tables show which fixtures would fail the test of either requiring a fan to leave before 7am or arrive home after midnight.

Unlike last time though I also considered weekday kickoffs at 19:45. Here I used a slightly different test were it was considered a failed fixture if it either required a fan to leave before 5pm (before end of work) or arrive home after 3am. 

I then went through the Championship fixtures and test each one with the results being below.

If you think you or someone else would be interested in exploring the science behind this work, you should have a look at the Newcastle University degrees in BSc Geographic Information Science and BSc Surveying and Mapping Science.  These degrees have excellent employment prospects, lots of field and practical work and consistently high levels of student satisfaction. I myself am a graduate of the GIS programme

There’s an ever increasing debate in football at the moment about whether TV is effecting both the atmosphere and the attendance of football matches. Often kick-offs at times other than 3pm on a Saturday mean painfully early mornings or demoralizing late train rides for the away fan. Or even worse journeys simply not being possible on public transport. Having previously looked at how long it takes to travel on public transport to a 3 o’clock kickoffs we thought it would be an interesting piece of analysis to look at the potential effect of different kick-off times on all of next year’s Premier League fixtures.

Having spent 2 seasons with an away season ticket my ideal away trip meant not having to get up before 9am and getting home in time for match of the day (although being a Norwich City fan I found this difficult viewing at times).  But living in the north-east I would generally regard not before 7am or home after midnight as a palatable away day. So in order to test fixtures wouldn’t pass this parameters, using the google travel matrix api, I calculated away journey on public transport for all fixtures with the following kick-off times:

• 12:45pm Saturday
• 5:50pm Saturday
• 1pm Sunday
• 4pm Sunday

The following tables show which fixtures would fail the test of either leaving before 7am or arriving home after midnight.

Failed 12:45pm Saturday Kick-offs

Failed 5:30pm Saturday Kick-offs

Failed 1pm Sunday Kick-offs

Failed 4pm Sunday Kick-offs

In summary there are a great deal fixtures which will cause a headache for committed away fans who use public transport. The final table shows fixtures who failed every test and therefore should only really be played at 3pm on a Saturday.

If you think you or someone else would be interested in exploring the science behind this work, you should have a look at the Newcastle University degrees in BSc Geographic Information Science and BSc Surveying and Mapping Science.  These degrees have excellent employment prospects, lots of field and practical work and consistently high levels of student satisfaction. I myself am a graduate of the GIS programme

The volume of a teams away following is often used as measure for the “size” of a club and is heavily debated amongst football fans. But their are many factors that influence this, not least their proximity to other clubs.

With the Football league last week releasing statistics showing the average away attendance for each team playing in the championship (shown below), I looked at whether this was effected by the clubs accessibility to other clubs and how long fans were spending travelling.

With Leeds being located in within fairly close proximity to a number of the northern teams, and Leeds railway station being well connected I wanted to look at the whether this contributed to their loyal away following.

So I used the Google Travel API to look at the total time a football fan would spend travelling if they went on public transport to every away game. The results are below.

From this it appears that there is very little correlation between the average away attendance and time spent travelling especially with Middlesbrough’s travel time and attendance being so high.

As a final thought I looked at using the travel times for ranking the teams be the number of “fan hours” spent travelling.

Following our blog post looking at the distances of football grounds from their nearest railway station, we had a think about other interesting football-related analysis that we could do. Having previously been a holder of an away season ticket, I thought that one interesting comparison might be to investigate which football fans would spend the longest on public transport to visit away games.

In order to do this analysis we used the Google Maps Distance Matrix API (https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/distance-matrix/ ) to calculate the time and distance you would have to travel on public transport between each football club, to arrive at 2pm on a Saturday. The locations of the football grounds were used as the start and end points for each journey since we obviously don’t know where supporters actually live!

Below is a list of the 5 longest away trips between any pair of Football League or Premier League clubs. You could look at this as the nightmare FA Cup draw if you’re committed to going to the game, and the ones you really don’t want to be switched to a Friday night for TV coverage.

The 5 quickest are below – some of these would likely be quicker to walk!

In summary, you really don’t want to draw Plymouth away…