“One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad,” Jacques Chirac, France’s president at the time, said about British cuisine in 2005. “After Finland, it is the country with the worst food.”
The UK’s football stadiums have a bleak reputation for cold chips, stale pies and lukewarm cups of the beef-flavoured drink Bovril. But times are changing and they are now at the forefront of a culinary revolution, with a Twitter account dedicated to the phenomenon — @FootyScran, which has amassed close to 600,000 followers.
Those up in the hospitality boxes — once derided by Manchester United hardman Roy Keane as the “prawn sandwich brigade” — have long eaten well at football matches. But people in general admission seats are now increasingly likely to leave a stadium satisfied with the food that was on offer, even if events on the pitch have been disappointing.
One club to have been singled out for particular acclaim are Hull City, who play in the Championship, England’s second tier. The highest-rated dish ever listed by Footy Scran is their katsu chicken, a Japanese dish popularised in the UK by the restaurant Wagamama, which has over 150 branches across the country.
Other recent successes at Hull include gyros — kebab meat in a wrap or pita bread, popular in Greece — and pulled-pork loaded fries.
Henry Crane is deputy general manager at their MKM Stadium, which is also home to top-flight rugby league side Hull FC.
Crane says the recent surge in popularity of “street food” in the UK means football fans have far more sophisticated palates than the stereotypes may have you think. The dishes listed above are often served with a little flourish such as sliced spring onions or sesame seeds on top, giving a visual boost. While adding to the taste, this also helps as pictures of the in-stadium snacks are increasingly widely circulated on social media.
Another popular UK trend is for salt and pepper chips, an Asian-influenced recipe including chilli and garlic.
According to Crane, the tired old stereotypes about British food, and football fans, are outdated.
“It’s a real danger to underestimate people,” he says. “If you go to any market (around the UK), they’re serving these kinds of food — it’s pretty much part of our culture.”
Another big hit at Hull over the winter months has been apple crumble, a traditional English dessert not often seen in a takeaway format. This means the club are effectively serving two-course meals to many attendees. This has a welcome effect on Hull’s finances as well as fans’ stomachs, contributing to a feel-good factor as the club are riding high in the Championship under new Turkish ownership.
Ben Veenbrink is managing director of the Stadium Consultancy, a sporting venue infrastructure management firm. He says the likes of baseball and cricket see far higher food and drink sales than football, while spending at concerts is “enormously” higher.
Football is different from many other sports in that its spectator “dwell time,” to use the industry jargon, is very short.
English fans tend not to get to stadiums early, as is the culture in other countries. Unlike in other sports which last many hours — or in Test cricket’s case, several days — and have long breaks in the action, football supporters will generally not want to miss a moment of the 90-minute game, and the half-time interval is just 15 minutes long.
But Veenbrink says football stadiums are taking their culinary offerings far more seriously now, adding that while fans might once have been seen as a captive audience who had nowhere else to spend their money, clubs are increasingly aware they are competing with local restaurants and pubs for people’s custom.
He says the average spend for general admission customers tends to vary between €2 (£1.70, $2.20) and €8 depending on food quality, and the capacity to provide products to meet demand. He says the profit margin tends to be around 50 to 60 per cent, depending on whether food is done in-house or outsourced.
Culinary offerings are becoming increasingly adventurous but it is important to think about what works and what doesn’t, says Crane.
“There’s no point getting the tweezers out and doing a Michelin-starred dish if we can only serve five (of them) at half-time,” he says. “The quantities are as much the challenge as anything else.”
Foods work well if they can be prepared in advance and served quickly. Noodles, for example, are not a good idea as they taste best served straight out of a pan and go soggy if left sitting around.
Crane says the feedback at Hull has been “ridiculous” and “overwhelmingly positive”, leading to a major sponsorship deal with Cranswick, which the club described as the first “street-food partnership” outside the Premier League, and he directly credits the Footy Scran account for boosting interest in the club’s offerings. (The page also highlights examples of foods served at games that are not quite so appetising.)
As well as highlighting the options at professional clubs in England’s Premier League and the three divisions of the EFL, the account also gives examples from lower down the football pyramid — which often look surprisingly good.
Another popular theme is “footy scran” from venues and sports around the world.
Although the street-food revolution has come on in leaps and bounds over the past few years, recent times have not been easy for the stadium hospitality industry.
Staffing has been a particular challenge, with a volatile economic situation and the disruptive effects of the Covid-19 pandemic making it hard for stadiums to find workers. Like the security industry, many long-serving hospitality staff moved on to other things after being forced to take some time out during the pandemic, which led to a lot of turnover.
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Match-day catering is unusual in that many stadiums will only be serving for 20 to 25 days a year, with fixtures that can change at relatively short notice, which is not ideal for people planning their work schedule around life’s other commitments.
Brentford are now in their third straight season as a Premier League club and a spokesperson told The Athletic that the club’s hospitality offering is increasingly data-driven — matching their reputation for unearthing diamonds in the transfer market.
Food at Brentford’s stadium (Brentford)
There is little point serving highly-rated fare if people cannot buy it without missing some of the match and one of the big focuses is “queue reduction”, with Brentford, like many other clubs, using screens via which meals and drinks can be ordered.
Fans at their Gtech Community Stadium can also pre-order food using a phone app, which has generally worked smoothly — but not always. When the app launched, pints of beer were erroneously listed at a price of just 30p, which attracted national media attention. The club honoured orders up to six pints per order at that price and the mishap did have an upside, helping to raise awareness and use of the app.
Brentford also work with local businesses — for example, serving curries and samosas to reflect the large Indian community in their part of west London, which tends to go down well with fans.
Crane says that although it might be a stretch to suggest people are travelling to Hull’s games solely to try the food, it has helped attract opposition supporters who might only attend a certain number of their team’s away games a season and now make sure Hull is one of them because of what is available to eat.
One ground that is often mentioned as particularly strong on the food front is the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which opened in 2019 and is regularly described as one of the world’s best. The culinary offering is at the heart of that.
Whereas at the old White Hart Lane stadium, the spend per head was about £1.75, in the new stadium it is around £16, which means an increase of several million in revenue per game, Christopher Lee, a managing director at Populous, the architects who designed Spurs’ new home, told The Athletic.
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This demonstrates how food has a big part to play as clubs try to make more money and stay on the right side of the sport’s increasingly stringent financial regulations — meaning good food can help finance exciting new signings and the many other costs of running a football club.
(Top photo: Hull City)
2024-01-07 15:25:26
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