What happens next? Safe standing

In Part Four, Stand United’s founder looks at whether recent developments provide any grounds for hope that fans might be able to stand at Sheffield United games in the future.

Before we begin, we’d like to take the tempreature on Safe Standing. No need for photo ID, just put your tick in a box…

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Joseph Clift

Baking sunshine, a cracking atmosphere, and standing for the whole game. In a season of admittedly unfortunate events that I’ll be trying hard to wipe from memory, Brentford away (way back when relegation was just a mere inevitability) stands out as a highlight. 

Despite the result – and, for some reason, wallet inspectors at the turnstiles – it was simply a fun away day. It was also the chance to scout out a new stadium and an opportunity to see another safe standing area up close. 

A season of safe standing

We’re coming up to two years now since safe standing became officially open to all clubs to look at introducing. This season in particular, clubs have really begun to move at speed on this as there’s been a recognition that this is something that can be beneficial to clubs and fans alike. 

The trip to the Brentford Community Stadium, and those since to Old Trafford and St James’s Park, make up ten away trips where we’ve had safe standing in some or all of the away end – Villa only introduced it later in the season after our visit robbing us of an eleventh. 

This season then has been a bit of a tipping point for safe standing. From a handful of those initial clubs trialling it in 2022 while the rest of the league watched on, by the end of the summer thirteen of the current Premier League will have safe standing in some form, with one more (Everton) committed to it for their new stadium. 

This isn’t just something that clubs need to wait to be an established Premier League club before getting on with it either. Next season, the majority of clubs with safe standing will actually be from the EFL, with fifteen of the current clubs set to have it in place. We’re talking different capacities of course, but with League 1 and 2 clubs having invested in it, the door really is open for any club to introduce safe standing.

Are United anywhere near joining them? Or will Barnsley, one of those clubs that have announced plans for it, beat us to introducing safe standing first in South Yorkshire?

United’s new stance  

“We’re completely supportive of safe standing, obviously like the idea of it, and we’re aware that our supporters would embrace it as well...but we won't do it until we redevelop a stand. When we do that we'll definitely incorporate safe standing into that stand.”

CEO Stephen Bettis’s appearance on Football Heaven in March marked the first time that the club has publicly said it would seek to bring safe standing in – albeit with one big, hefty, Kop-extension-sized caveat. 

This is something that, on the face of it, is great to see a commitment to. When the Stand United campaign wrote to the club in 2021 on safe standing, backed by a number of our fan groups, the reception was somewhat cautious to say the least. 

In retrospect, that’s perhaps understandable – the Kop fan migration issue was at that point bubbling away in the background, and we now of course know the full extent of the financial pressures the club was under in the Championship. 

Clad tidings

With finances reset this season we have, like an over-eager steward in Brentford, been prising open the purse strings and having a good look inside. 

In the course of the last few months, we’ve found the funding to sort out some of the delayed infrastructure investments – addressing the hotel’s cladding issue and bringing the interior of it back up to scratch, and several million to buy and develop the site in Dore for the new training ground. We’ve even agreed to buy back the two plots of land at Bramall Lane that Kevin McCabe had been clinging onto.

So with all this off-the-pitch investment seemingly warming up at pace, is safe standing any nearer to being on the club’s infrastructure to-do list, or is this a nice-to-have that will remain tantalisingly out of reach?

It comes down to that caveat: when we “redevelop” a stand. 

Are we talking about a refurb that, say, removes the pillars on the Kop, or would this need to be one of the extensions we’ve planned in the past?

In the same interview, Stephen Bettis goes some way to answer where the club is on that.

“Nightmare”, or just a lack of will?

“Logistically it’s a nightmare, and you’re going to make a lot of people unhappy at points, because you’ve got to move them around and shuffle them around, and then can they return to their seats because if they turn that into a safe standing area and they don’t want to stand…you’re going to make a lot of people happy, but you’re going to make a lot of people sad.”

In essence then, the club considers it too tricky to convert a section of an existing area. 

But how tricky is this actually in practice, particularly for somewhere like, for example, the back 10 rows of the Kop (~1,500 seats, for roughly the cost of one Jamie Hoyland in 1990)?

There’s a bit of both-sidesism suggested by Stephen’s comments that somewhat downplays the popularity of safe standing. Would we really upset as many fans as those that would embrace it? Nationally, the Football Supporters Association’s fan surveys have consistently shown 90% of fans being supportive of having an option to stand, a figure that tallies with Stand United’s own survey of United fans on whether to trial it at Bramall Lane. 

Having delved back into the original data from our survey, if we look at the Kop specifically, the support is even higher: 247 of the 500 fans in our survey sat in the Kop, 235 (95%) of whom said they’d welcome a trial of safe standing. If we just look at season ticket holders on the Kop specifically, 184 of the 195 surveyed (94%) would welcome it. 

This is, of course, just a snapshot of what United fans think. 500 fans isn’t really a large enough sample to get a completely accurate picture of what everyone on the Kop thinks, but it does give an indication. And sadly, despite a number of suggestions over the years for them to do its own research on safe standing, it’s 500 more United fans than the club has ever asked on this subject.

Safe standing of course isn’t for everyone. But it is popular for the vast majority. And if the barrier to this right now at Bramall Lane within our existing structure really is that the club are simply too worried about upsetting fans, they could quite quickly discover how big an issue this is for those that any change would impact.

A role for our Fan Advisory Board 

In terms of what happens next, this really depends. If this is an issue left to fix only when we extend a stand, are we ever likely to see this happen? 

All talk of doing the South Stand extension mooted over a decade ago has all but disappeared, leaving the plans to extend the Kop the only one loosely on the horizon. With the plans for it gathering dust since 2009, briefly picked off the shelf by our owner in 2020 to paperclip on a ‘When we’re established in the Premier League’ note, given how this season has gone you have to wonder whether this extension will ever be built. 

Our new Fan Advisory Board was given a similar response on this topic in their first meeting in March. As the fans’ voice in these matters, the Advisory board could really make a difference through their unique position representing the fanbase and encourage the club to take safe standing forward – and challenge the club to address the issues stopping the club from moving quicker.

Let’s take the suggestion of a modest 1,500 area on the Kop. The club could simply survey season ticket holders on those rows to ask whether they would be happy for their seat to be part of a safe standing area on the Kop. This wouldn’t need to be with a commitment to bring it in immediately – just simply a question on how they would feel about this, with the results shared with fans through the Advisory Board. 

A survey could obviously include as many rows as the club would be willing to consider for an area, but beginning with an area at the back of the Kop – which includes the section of it that regularly stands anyway – makes sense as a starting point. For any new season ticket holders buying for next season in that area, they could buy this on the understanding that it may be turned into a safe standing area in the future.

Up and down the country, clubs have converted existing seating into new safe standing – managing in the process the exact issues that United have flagged they would also face. We are not unique in this. QPR converted part of their family stand, with all the potential pitfalls this could have raised for season ticket holders there, and introduced it without fuss after consulting their fanbase. 

After a season like this, we’re all hungry for something positive. As fans up and down the country are looking forward to safe standing coming to their grounds, let’s make sure we’re not last to the party.