2024-02-08 16:56:38
Thunderclap in the world of French football. After several months of negotiations with the Paris town hall concerning a possible purchase of the Parc des Princes, its historic resident, the Paris Saint-Germain announces that it will leave its historic stadium. The club, which wanted to buy the venue in order to increase its capacity from 48,000 to 60,000 seats, saw its request rejected by the Paris Council on Tuesday February 6 and its president Nasser Al-Khelaifi declared to the press this Thursday February 8:
“It’s over now, we want to move from the Parc des Princes. »
A declaration not without arousing the emotion of the supporters.
It is also not without emotion that the fans of the Paris Basket have, this week, said “goodbye” and “thank you!” » at the Halle Carpentier du 13e arrondissement, room that they are leaving for the brand new Adidas Arena, Porte de la Chapelle.
The choice to leave an infrastructure is not always desired. A recent case, on December 25, the Sportica complex, home of BCM Gravelines, an elite national basketball club, was ravaged by flames. Sad end of year holidays. Tributes to what was materially only a sports hall quickly poured in on the web, from the highest summit of the State, with a post on anonymous people who came to show their support, residents of Gravelines, other sports clubs, and even rival supporters.
In any case, the movement is never trivial and different stakeholders, supporters in the lead, must be supported so that the transition takes place as best as possible.
” Like at home “
What has been striking in recent weeks in the messages linked to Sportica and in recent hours at the Parc des Princes and the Halle Carpentier is the almost human dimension given to them. The article published in The Team the day after the fire in Gravelines is quite eloquent: we read, jumbled together, expressions like “heartache”, “a state of shock”, “the barely digested shock”, “reconstruction”, “get over it all”.
It is true that this complex, inaugurated in 1986, was a place of life which ensured an undeniable social bond in this town of 12,000 inhabitants located between Dunkirk and Calais. This small hall with 3,003 seats, which was to be modernized and expanded by 2027, had hosted nearly a thousand Pro A matches, a division that the BCM, a leading sports brand in the North, has never left since 1988. A project to move to Dunkirk had been considered a few years ago but the project was “dead in the bud” as it had aroused so much emotion among lovers of the club, reluctant to abandon the town center of Gravelines.
The attachment theorywhich we have taken and applied to sport in our works, emphasizes the emotional and lasting bond that unites the child with certain figures. By extrapolation, management sciences have used it to explore other more distant contexts, such as the relationships that unite consumers with property ownedto marques or even to places of consumption. More specifically on sports speakers, research has shown how much it contributes to thesensory experience spectators and participates in the identification of individuals with the team.
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Supporters develop a feeling of pride and attachment to the stadium or gymnasium, especially when it has a historical dimension. Some people consider sports speakers to be sacred places and enter in an almost religious manner. The stadium is not a place like any other: it is the most lasting symbol of a team or a club and even a landmark for the local community. After all, don’t we talk about “home matches”, “home victories” and “the advantage of hosting at home”?
Moving means rebuilding an identity
Building the connection between a community and a place is a dynamic process: it has a beginning and an end. If place attachment develops slowly, everything can come to a screeching halt and result in a long period of time during which the individual tries to deal with the loss, repair it, or create new attachments with other people. or other places.
When the place changes, reactions are often linked to causes of movement. The move may be voluntary, in which case the change follows a three-phase process. Before the move, the individual begins to detach himself from his home and the obligations inherent to it. Then he projects himself and tries to anticipate and establish a connection with his new residence. The move itself is generally stressful. Once this has been done, the individual may experience homesickness and one way to get out of this state is to maintain links with their former home and to make efforts to display their belonging to a personal and collective identity at home. new place. Other moves are undergone and follow other processes in which it is sometimes a question of managing trauma.
All this explains why supporters have often been reluctant to have their club change stadiums. When they are forced to do so, either due to accidents like at Gravelines, or by club policy as was the case, perhaps before PSG, in recent years in football for Olympique Lyonnais or the Girondins of Bordeaux, the urgency for the clubs is to find levers to create attachment to the new place. Our works were particularly interested in the move of the Racing 92 rugby club, which, in 2017, migrated from the Yves du Manoir de Colombes stadium to the brand new hall of the Paris la Défense Arena.
We showed in such a case that the perceived value of the stadium, that which exists in the mind of the consumer, is an antecedent of attachment to the place. Hence the importance for clubs to take good care of it by working in particular on the emotions felt when we find ourselves in the stadium.
Build continuity
Like any case study, the example of Racing 92 presents singularities. The plan to move led by president Jacky Lorenzetti had not been the subject of fierce resistance from supporters. Only the residents of the new infrastructure showed a form of hostility.
Other enclosure relocation projects have been the subject of studies: Arsenala London football club, which left its historic home of Highbury for the Emirates Stadium in 2006, for example, or, more recently, on the project of relocation of the Aberdeen club to the Westhill district. These studies – few in number in a European context and almost non-existent in France (a study is underway on the process of moving Stade Brestois 29 from the Francis le Blé stadium to Arkéa Park by 2027) – agree on say that the success of a stadium change project requires the identification and then support of the stakeholders before, during and after the completion of the move.
Ricardo Motti/Flickr — Shutterstock
This support involves public meetings and site visits upstream, for example, but also through concrete marketing actions: the marketing of derivative products bearing the image of the two speakers for example, or why not, the sale of “relics”. This is what West Ham did in 2016, with pieces of their Boleyn Ground stadium, located in the Upton Park area and since demolished. Some elements of the old stadium can also be incorporated into the new to create continuity, such as the famous Highbury clock which now sits atop a stand at the Emirates Stadium.
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