One of the prevailing features of modern football is the decline in atmosphere. Many causes have been identified. The move to all-seater stadiums, ticket prices and television are all cited as reasons.
At Chelsea fans are doing something about it. In 2007 Jerry Kendix, a Chelsea season ticket holder who was fed up with the lack of atmosphere at Stamford Bridge, set up The Return to the Shed campaign. Three years on I caught up with him to learn more about the campaign and how it is going.
Jerry Kendix fondly remembers the old days, before all-seater stadiums, when the atmosphere at games used to be “electric”. Since the abolition of terracing in the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster he has noticed the atmosphere at Stamford Bridge getting steadily worse.
The inspiration for the campaign came on a cold December’s day back in 2006. The Blues played Newcastle at Stamford Bridge and won a tepid encounter 1-0 thanks to a late strike from Didier Drogba. The game was pretty forgettable, but Kendix has one memory of the game – the complete lack of atmosphere.
‘The abiding memory I have of that evening was that the whole game was almost witnessed in silence. I sat there and thought: “This is just too much”’.
‘The game was so poor because of a lack of atmosphere and the staleness of everything that I thought “I’m going to have a crack at doing something about this”. So that’s what gave me the idea’.
The Shed End then...
After that initial idea he set to work on laying the foundations of the campaign. He set up a forum and began to contact prominent fan websites.
‘We got together with reps of the Chelsea Supporters Group and Dave Johnson of CFCNet and the guys on Vital Football and The Shed End and we basically promoted the campaign that way and through various other channels’.
‘We got the campaign off and running and we had a forum which I called Club Shed. We invited people to participate either by reading what was going on or just having their name as volunteers or members if you like’.
And with that the campaign was born.
It initially started out as The Return to Shed campaign and aimed to get fans who wanted to sing and chant to sit together at matches in the Shed End. ‘I thought there were, enough people dotted around the ground who could make a difference, who would make a difference, if they were sat in the same place,’ explains Kendix.
But improving the atmosphere is not the only aim of the campaign. Kendix also wants to bring back some of the sense of community that was present back in the “old days” he refers to with so much affection. Back then, going to a match was an entire day out, you knew everyone and you all drank in the same pubs. Now he says people can just turn up five minutes before kick off and there is none of the camaraderie that characterised going to football back then.
And the Shed End now
The first game that was targeted by the campaign was the clash with Middlesbrough in February 2007 and while it was a good start, at the next game against Sheffield United there was a marked difference in atmosphere. ‘By the end of the season we’d had the makings of a success’, says Kendix.
The club began to take the campaign seriously and started to listen to their views. Season ticket holders can now sit in the Shed End. With that goal achieved, Kendix changed the name of the group to Club Shed. It now works much more closely with the club. ‘I’m part of an atmosphere committee – there are three or four reps from the supporter’s clubs who meet up with the ticket manager and Ron Gourlay.’
‘We basically push ideas through, anything atmosphere related. So the club have been willing to help on many issues, they’ve realised that it helps them if we have a better atmosphere in the ground’.
The dialogue hasn’t always been harmonious though. To Kendix’s frustration the club have rejected many of the ideas that they have put forward. Club Shed presented the club with a 10-point plan to improve the atmosphere at Stamford Bridge.
‘What we did was we put up a 10 point plan and presented it to the club and said if you really want to make a difference these are the 10 things that you need to do. We didn’t say bring back terracing but we said the importance thing is to get like-minded people who are going to get behind the team to be in the same area and that either means terracing or more realistically, unreserved seating’.
To his surprise, the club didn’t completely dismiss the idea. In fact, they said they would consider trying it at a Carling Cup game this season. However, after speaking to other Premier League clubs Chelsea decided not to go ahead with it, which was a real blow, according to Kendix.
He remains convinced that unreserved seating or standing in some form would help arrest the decline in atmosphere he has witnessed down the years. But with seemingly little chance of that happening in the near future he has set his focus on other ways of reversing the trend.
‘The main problem for me is that people are still too far dispersed around the ground. What you need is hubs of people that would lead the other along. I’ve seen it in so many other grounds, especially if you go away in Europe – the grounds are really rocking. Primarily because there are 2 or 300 people in one particular section usually behind the goal who…are really sort of cheerleading if you like and leading the rest along’.
Kendix also wants to make it cheaper for younger fans to go to matches. Once you hit 16 you are classed as an adult and have to pay adult prices for season tickets, which can be as much as £800.
Of course the danger with such attempts to make a bit of noise is that it can all feel forced, contrived and stage-managed. Steve 52, who started going to Chelsea games in the 1960s, said: ‘A lot of the people who are involved don’t understand what needs to be done. Also, the younger fans aren’t really capable of recreating the atmosphere of old – different generation, different times’. Mark , 34, agrees, but thinks that it’s better than doing nothing.
Kendix understands such criticism and insists that while there has to be some element of stage-management to the whole process, the campaign doesn’t put forward ideas that are explicitly contrived. People have asked for claxons and drums at games, but they haven’t got off the ground because of this very reason. ‘You’ve got to generate it [atmosphere] somehow so there’s going to be an element of stage management of course but we all agreed that anything that was clearly forced wouldn’t progress’.
There has been a definite improvement at Stamford Bridge, but there’s still a lot to be done.
Kendix says; ‘It’s been a very interesting road that we’ve gone down. We could do so much more if we were allowed to and once we put a few things in place we would let it naturally run its course. Once you put the framework in place, i.e. get the people in the right place, coordinate things with the club, then you just let people sing and shout and do what they like’.
He concludes: ‘But until such time as we get either unreserved seating or an area behind the goals where we can put the 16-21s, people we can actually harness and get them to continue the good work then our work isn’t done. We’ll still crack on in the hope that we can get there one day. We keep banging away at the club, it’s just a case of watching this space really’.
