The news that the average racecourse attendances for 2019 had again dropped when compared to the previous year should not have been unexpected. What the plain figures fail to translate is the true extent of the fall off in real engagement with the sport.
This is because the numbers are propped up by the theme meetings, summer Saturdays, and in vogue festivals. A truer barometer would have been to compare non -themed, weekday meetings only. I fear that comparing these attendances down the years would make grim reading.
These are the category of meetings attended in the main by racegoers who have horse racing as their number one sport. When they return home, the large majority of their punting will be on things equine as opposed to the plethora of other sports that your long session on the booze, summer Saturday attendees will speculate in rather than scanning the Sunday card at Ponty or the Monday evening one at Windsor.
If we accept that the figures would raise more alarm if those returned from the non- cult days were examined in isolation, then the situation becomes even gloomier when we ask why this is so.
The harsh truth must be repeated again and again, which is the percentage of horse racing fans amongst the generations under thirty five years of age, is massively lower than the generations before and that there is not enough of them to replace the genuine fans of the past as they become ill, infirm, and pass away.
And with a shortfall in funding due to racing's share of the betting pie decreasing, the sport will have no option other than to downsize.
In my area of employment, I have for many years been in a daily e-mail exchange of opinions with a colleague over sport, politics and 1970's television. I am dismayed by the fact that horse racing has changed for the worse. He holds similar sentiments over his first love, football.
He still retains his season ticket at a world famous club that has experienced a resurgence of fortune in recent years. He has been a regular at the games for forty five years, has lived three miles away from the stadium for his entire life, but feels his club is now just a franchise like Burger King and McDonalds.
He has attended less than half a dozen matches this season, even missing a showcase fixture with a famous club from a rival city for the first time since the 1970's, and will either sell his ticket at face value to people in work, or sell it back to the club at a loss.
When the latter happens he cites it as evidence that no locals are interested in the club anymore due to it being hijacked by the assortment of fictional characters he uses to state his case. Josh from Solihull, Jeremy from Cirencester, Cecil from Woking, Farquaar from Harrow, Seamus from Sligo, Fritz from Bonn, Jan from Oslo, Jason from Chicago and Ming from Singapore.
On the now rare occasions he attends, he sits quietly in his speck on the halfway line hoping his team get beat. He dearly hopes their fortunes will take a steep downturn, they get relegated, and that what he terms as the 'modern fanbase' evaporates, returning the club to the locals to re-build from scratch. He cringes when he hears what he refers to as 'numpties' singing continental sounding songs, and is dismayed that Sky portray football as not existing before the advent of the Premiership, with their presenters towing the line as they ' know what side their bread is buttered on.'
I told him that that such an eventuality would be most unlikely to occur in his lifetime. He disagreed,
" Who would have thought United would get relegated six years after beating Benfica !," was his response, "And Leeds have taken two major nosedives since then...and what about Forest and Villa."
As part of his lone crusade, he has been travelling to watch games from lower leagues, watching home games at the likes of Wigan Athletic, Tranmere Rovers, Salford City, Preston North End and Fleetwood Town. He met some Rotherham fans while on holiday in Benidorm and confesses he was in awe of them. " I have so much respect for them," he enthused. " Faithful to their local club through good and bad times."
He also wishes to experience how the ' hijackers' or ' parasites' feel. Twelve months back he joined a members club of a mega rich, rival city club, who have been experiencing heady times. Being a member entitles him to apply by telephone for a season ticket in a short, few hour time period. He tried last summer but could not get through. He will make another attempt this close season.
His general rules on supporting a club are that you have to satisfy two criteria. Firstly, you have to be within close travelling distance, have ties with the locality and can't have passed by other clubs on the way to the ground; and secondly, you have to have paid into the club for many, many years. According to his rules, all of this criteria has to be satisfied.
As he is vehement in these views, they can sometimes upset people. A few years back a work colleague asked him to come down to the basement car park for a fight. He declined, saying he had no wish to put his job at risk but felt that this level of reaction vindicated his beliefs.
There are some parallels that can be drawn with racing and what he believes is happening to his football club. He talks of ' links' being broken in the sense that locals are unable to obtain tickets meaning fathers can't take sons to the game resulting in a new generation believing that it is normal for fans to support a team through a television set.
Racing is suffering because a link had been broken whereby the father would be in the household betting and watching horse racing. This has now been a rarity for some time now leaving a generation who have been brought up to link betting with football, who are now fathers themselves. Link terminally broke.
Whether racing's fans should wish for the sport to hit a crisis, downsize, then operate on a scale with a manageable fixture list, with theme meetings something of the past, I'm not so sure.
It probably will happen sooner rather than later but where you can't make comparisons with footbal is in the sense that while a football club can be reborn with a new stadium built on a different site, once a racecourse is lost to a housing project, as so nearly happened with Kempton, then it has gone for good.
One wish my controversial work colleague hopes will come true is for betting to be banned on football. He claims it's not in the spirit of his sport. Unfortunately, it is too late now for the sports betting explosion to be put back in the box. It's even more unfortunate for racing as such a circumstance would have been a positive game changer.
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