Smokey Joes fastfood van outside Villa Park. As Premier League clubs create fan zones to collect yet more money from stadium visitors, a local economy of food trucks, pubs and small restaurants are holding their ground.
SURVEYING his territory, Tony Aujla is pleased. His business, after all, is all about location, and he has a prime one.
Like a general surveying a battlefield, he points to his right: a short walk that way is Aston train station. Over to the left is Villa Park, with its grand, brick-lined facade, home of the city’s Premier League team, Aston Villa.
On game days, hundreds of fans disembark trains at the former every few minutes and scurry – or, in some cases, amble – in the general direction of the latter. That is what makes Aujla’s patch so perfect. All of them have to walk past this precise spot. Should any of them require sustenance to complete their (not especially arduous) trek, he is there, spatula in hand, to sell them a burger. Possibly with cheese.
Aujla has been a fixture outside Villa Park, in one place or another, for more than four decades, but Tony’s Burger Bar has been here, on this enviable and specific real estate, for three years – one of a handful of vans, all of them occupying much the same space, all of them offering roughly the same menu, all of them wreathed in the steam from their fryers.
Recently, however, they have had to contend with the arrival of a rival on a slightly larger scale: an official fan area intended to lure customers, and some of the money in their pockets, away from the vans and straight to the club itself.
In March 2022, Aston Villa repurposed Lions Square, a trapezoid of land in the shadow of Villa Park, into a “fan zone” – a sort of officially sanctioned tailgate – complete with a stage for live music, interviews with beloved former players, a couple of bars and a smattering of food trucks.
It is not the first Premier League team to explore the idea, long a staple of major international football tournaments. Crystal Palace, Liverpool, Manchester City and a number of others have experimented with variations on the theme, and more intend to follow suit: Newcastle have announced plans to establish one outside their home stadium, St James’ Park.
An Aston Villa fan ordering Jamaican carry-out food at Grandma Aida’s cafe before a match.
Identifying the primary motivation behind them does not take any great detective work. There are, according to Phil Alexander, a former chief executive of Crystal Palace, various ancillary benefits to fan zones.
“Operationally, it’s helpful if some fans arrive earlier and leave later,” he said.
Clubs are keen to “enhance the experience” of attending a game, too, Alexander said.
“Traditionally, it’s always been a late fill,” he said.
“People would arrive five minutes before kickoff and leave straight after the final whistle. Improving the in-stadium offering, which for a long time left a lot to be desired, turns it into a whole-day activity.”
Mostly, however, the purpose is the obvious one: Fan zones are another revenue stream to be tapped.
The amount of money to be made from catering – either through clubs’ providing their own or outsourcing to a third party – is relatively small compared with the fortunes provided to the Premier League’s clubs through broadcasting contracts, but it is a margin nonetheless.
“You can’t discount it just because it is hard work,” Alexander said.
Clubs, however, do not exist in isolation. Like most traditional British stadiums, Villa Park does not sit on the fringes of a city, surrounded by acres of empty space.
Instead, it resides at the heart of the community it has occupied for more than a century, both an organic part of the neighbourhood and an engine of the local economy.
Aujla’s van, and those nearby, are just a few of the dozens of pubs, bars, restaurants and takeaway shops that dot the terraced streets around Villa Park, a shoal of remoras all reliant on the great whale at their centre for their existence.
Fan zones, on some level, threaten that tacit arrangement. The whale, in effect, has decided it wants to keep more.
Aston Villa’s official fan zone, where supporters of the team can buy beer, food and hear interviews with former players and club favourites.
Aujla acknowledged he was worried when Aston Villa first announced their plans; his fears were allayed slightly when he strolled up to see what the fan zone had to offer.
There were burgers and hot dogs, his stalwarts, as well as more gentrified, vaguely hipster offerings. (Clubs are conscious of changes in consumer tastes, according to Alexander.)
The key difference, however, was price.
“They’re charging seven pounds (RM42) for a burger,” he said. “We do a triple for that price.”
Others were more confident from the start.
“I thought it was good news,” said Roshawn Hunter, standing behind the counter at Grandma Aida’s, the Caribbean cafe that he and his mother, Carole Hamilton, set up in 2019.
“The more people we have around the stadium, and the longer they stay, the better for everyone.”
The club, conscious of the need to be neighbourly, invited Hunter and a number of other local traders to a meeting last summer to outline their plans and address any concerns.
In the long term, team officials said, there might even be the possibility of Grandma Aida’s taking a stall inside the fan zone.
Aston Villa, like most of their Premier League peers, are exploring a broad selection of options as they seek to expand what they offer their visitors – their customers – in an attempt to monopolise what, and how, they spend.
The architects Populous, for example, designed concourses at Tottenham’s new stadium in London with the express purpose of “increasing the range and quality of food” available to fans, according to a representative for the firm.
The received wisdom, as Alexander put it, is that there is “more than enough business for everyone.” — NYT
