Results of the 2024/25 fan survey

Thanks to everyone who took part.

 

Absolutely damning for the owners, it's a long report heres some snipets in no particular order.

 

More pies than East Stand kiosk

 

This is an excellent summary

https://www.onthepontyend.com/2025/...eBmztpXDUf6kV8_aem_omsPsIVIrymgWo5n7ejqZA&m=1

 

His blog is well underrated. Been going for years, and one of the things that inspired me many years ago.

And I agree. Terrific summary.

Also - great feedback (and free) for BFC. Fingers crossed a lot of the issues are remedied over the next year or so.

 

If they actually do care, then hopefully, and finally.
They just might notice now, how and why so many fans are annoyed, at how they are running this club!.

 

As someone who knows a thing or two about structuring a survey, looking at the first few questions, I wouldn’t spend any time at all reading the rest.

If you ask poor questions and structure your scoring scales in a way that makes no sense, the data you capture is nonsense.

Shame.

 

That's the issue I see with it. There's a ton of effort gone into it, but some of the questions are steered towards a predictable outcome (probably unintentionally, but it's why constructing surveys of this kind isn't straightforward). Anything along the lines of "would you like this improvement to happen?" as a fait accompli, without any sort of caveat as to what the costs/impact on other things is bound to attract a largely positive response, and there's plenty of questions of that nature.

Other questions have tried to capture too much information within one response, and given confused output as a result (e.g. the ones where they've applied a factor to the response to obtain an average score). They'd have been better asked as two questions to break down the output more clearly.

Overall, my take on it was that there was little in the responses that wasn't already known, or for which the answer couldn't have been predicted in advance based on the phrasing of the question.

I'm not saying this to belittle the efforts of anyone involved in compiling this. A questionnaire on this scale needs to be compiled by people who've studied how to do so, otherwise the unconscious bias becomes visible in the phrasing of the questions, as is the case here.

 

You’re right in what you’ve outlined.

One of the biggest issues we found with clients doing their own surveys was trying to ask multiple questions in one question to make the result impossible to discern, often framed with bias.

I also hate likert scales and whenever I see them, it feels like someone has just copied them off a survey they once completed.

Sadly, the people who should be doing this sort of exercise are the club themselves. They should have enough known data to be able to drill into all sorts of depths and dissect into multiple cohorts without having to ask a huge amount of profiling information.

I was led to believe years ago that clubs actually work really closely behind the scenes and share best practices and ideas. If clubs bandied together to syndicate results and repeat on a cyclical basis, rich data could be garnered to assist decision making in a multitude of areas.

It’s probably a decade ago, maybe more since I did some stuff with a couple of clubs completely gratis. Frankly, there was little appetite to do it properly at several clubs, BFC included, although Sheff Weds were incredibly fan focussed and ran a survey of 1000 randomised attending fans after every game to understand a whole host of views.

That all went out the window when Mandaric took over though.

 

What baffles me is that nobody is asking what the club or FAB are doing with the findings that have had the results back last month yet nobody is asking the question where is the communication the acknowledgment to the people that have put this together the 1500ish fans that have filled out the survey.
Seems like all the fault finding is towards the creators of this with people saying it’s too long or I’ve looked at the first few questions and that’s enough? Why are the questions not aimed at the club or FAB ?
the bigger issue the results of the survey just wondering did you not fill out the survey?

 

"reheated using resentment" - genius
"squad that sometimes looks allergic to urgency" - funny and painfully true

I like his style.

 

I would have thought that, for the Club, the most telling survey was the attendance figures for the tail end of the season where the number of empty seats bore no resemblence to the attendance figure being announced over the tannoy.