What actually fills a stadium
The research on African football attendance says something most commercial thinking about the game gets backwards. Working through what it means for Ethiopian football — including two conclusions of my own that it overturns.
Ethiopian football contains a contradiction that ought to be impossible to sustain, and has been sustained for decades.
On one side: 135.5 million people, a median age of 19.1 years, and roughly 57.4 million of them under 25 — one of the largest youth demographics on earth (UNFPA, 2025). Addis Ababa alone holds about six million people and is growing at over four percent a year (World Population Review, 2026). Add a diaspora of 2.5 to 3 million with genuine emotional attachment to the domestic game. By any structural measure this is a market that should be commercially significant.
On the other: clubs spending an estimated 80 to 90 percent of their budgets on player salaries, with effectively nothing left for developing an audience. Roughly 84 percent of Ethiopian sports clubs are government-owned, producing near-total dependency on public subsidy (Ethiopian Business Review, 2023). And in 2025 the league's only international broadcast deal was not renewed, removing international distribution entirely (Pan Africa Football, 2025).
The usual explanation for this gap is that the football isn't good enough, or that the audience doesn't care enough. The research says both of those are wrong.
A cycle, not a deficiency
What the numbers above actually describe is a loop that feeds itself. Low attendance suppresses sponsor interest. Thin sponsorship limits revenue. Limited revenue prevents any investment in the matchday product. And a product nobody has invested in gives people no particular reason to show up — which returns you to low attendance, one season later and slightly worse.
No individual actor in that loop is behaving irrationally. A club spending 90 percent of its budget on players is responding correctly to the incentive it faces. The loop is the problem, not the participants.
That matters for where you intervene. If the diagnosis is "the clubs are badly run," the remedy is governance reform, which is slow, political, and mostly outside anyone's control. If the diagnosis is a self-reinforcing cycle, then the question becomes narrower and far more tractable: which single link is cheapest to break?
What the research actually found
Four peer-reviewed sources anchored the original research. Taken together they redraw the problem.
Governance deficiencies, inadequate funding structures and weak commercial infrastructure are the primary constraints on league development across Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania — not talent, and not interest.
Rintaugu, E. G., Mwangi, F. K., & Ndiwa, T. (2019). Organizational factors influencing football development in East African countries. Soccer & Society, 20(1), 107–121.
Community identity and emotional investment in Ethiopian Premier League clubs run deep. The barrier to commercial growth is not absent passion; it is the absent organisational infrastructure that would convert passion into attendance.
Semon, H. (2022). Identity and dissent in Ethiopian football fandom (2012–2019). Journal of Eastern African Studies, 16(2), 234–252.
Attendance in developing African football markets is driven by facility experience, social belonging and organisational trust — not by competitive uncertainty.
Richau, L., Emrich, E., Follert, F., & Pierdzioch, C. (2022). New sports stadia for Africa? The impact of sportscape features on attendance intentions in sub-Saharan African club football. European Sport Management Quarterly, 23(4), 1–22.
A persistent gap exists in academic and commercial methodology for African and other emerging-market leagues, with an explicit call for context-specific research.
Schreyer, D., & Ansari, P. (2022). Stadium attendance demand research: A scoping review. Journal of Sport Management, 36(2), 165–180.
The Richau finding is the one that should change how clubs behave, and it is the one most likely to be dismissed by people who reason about attendance from European experience. In developed leagues, a substantial body of work links attendance to competitive balance — the closer the title race, the fuller the ground. It is an intuitive result and it travels badly.
In sub-Saharan African club football, Richau et al. find attendance intentions driven by facility experience, social belonging and organisational trust. Whether the match is likely to be close does not do the work people assume it does. Whether someone can find their seat, sit with people they know, trust that the gate will open when it says it will, and get home afterwards — that does.
Put beside Semon's documentation of how deep club identity runs in Ethiopian fandom, the conclusion is uncomfortable for the conventional view. The passion is already there. It has been there the whole time. What is missing is the organisational layer that would let someone act on it on a Saturday.
Sponsors do not create audiences. They buy access to audiences that already exist. If the audience exists but cannot be counted, the sponsorship conversation never starts.
The denominator was wrong
My original research described Ethiopia as a low-data, largely offline market, and cited the standard figures to support it: internet penetration around 21.3 percent, smartphone penetration around 15 percent (DataReportal, 2025). Nearly every outside analysis of the Ethiopian market uses those numbers or ones like them.
The same source reports something else: 85.4 million mobile connections — 63.8 percent of the population. I quoted that figure too, and did not sit with the tension between it and the conclusion I drew from the others.
Operator reporting points the same way, and harder. For the financial year ending June 2025, Ethio Telecom reported 46.6 million mobile data users against a total base of 83.2 million subscribers, and 54.84 million telebirr accounts through which 2.38 trillion birr moved in that year alone. Safaricom Ethiopia — a second operator, absent from those totals — reported 14.7 million active customers by June 2026.
These figures are not directly comparable to DataReportal's, and it would be sloppy to pretend otherwise. Subscription counts overstate unique people, because one person can hold several SIMs; mobile money accounts are identity-linked and closer to one per person, but include dormant ones. Different methods, different questions. Still: the distance between "21.3 percent of Ethiopians use the internet" and "one operator counts 46.6 million mobile data users" is too large to be explained by methodology alone.
The problem is the unit of analysis. A national penetration figure for Ethiopia averages across a large rural majority. It is a real number and it answers a real question, but it is not the question a club is asking. The relevant population is not "Ethiopians." It is people who attend Ethiopian Premier League matches — overwhelmingly urban, concentrated in Addis Ababa, and skewed young and male. There is no serious reason to think that group's connectivity resembles the national average, and good reason to think it is dramatically higher.
"Low-data market" is, to a significant degree, an artefact of the wrong denominator.
This is not a small correction. It changes what kind of problem this is. If the audience genuinely cannot be reached digitally, you are facing an infrastructure problem that takes a decade and a telecoms operator to solve. If the audience is reachable and simply has never been asked for anything, you are facing an instrumentation problem — and instrumentation is a quarter's work, not a decade's.
The signals largely exist. Gate counts exist. Ticket sales exist. Someone in the building knows roughly how many people came last Saturday. What does not exist is any structured collection of it, because nobody has been asked to collect it in a form that would survive contact with a sponsor's finance director.
Which kills the hardware I proposed
The original research proposed NFC and RFID readers at stadium gates, running on Raspberry Pi-class hardware, storing data locally and syncing when connectivity allowed. Passive cards for regular attendees. Roughly $150 to $300 per gate.
That design was reasoning correctly from a premise I now think is wrong. Edge hardware and physical cards are what you build when you have concluded your audience cannot be reached any other way. With a corrected denominator that recommendation falls away.
If the matchgoing audience carries phones then admission keyed to a phone number does the same job with no capital expenditure, no hardware to maintain, no cards to replace, and no installation to negotiate with a stadium operator. Ticket purchase or collection can run the same way. The direction of travel is not ambiguous: people acquire more devices over time, not fewer, and any system justified by device scarcity is depreciating from the day it is installed.
The rail for this is not hypothetical and does not need building. Ethiopia has roughly 60 million phone-number-linked mobile money accounts across telebirr and M-PESA. Since October 2025 M-PESA has been integrated with EthSwitch, the national payment switch, connecting it to more than 30 banks and regulated wallets and enabling EthQR merchant payments at over 50,000 merchants. A national, interoperable, phone-keyed payment network already exists, and Ethiopians are already using it to buy things.
Specifying proprietary card hardware for a stadium gate in a country with 50,000 EthQR merchants is not designing for constraint. It is failing to check what has been built since.
The phone-based approach is also better, not merely cheaper, for the thing that actually matters. A card tapped at a turnstile produces an anonymous count. A phone number produces a returning identity, which is what the useful metric requires. The original research proposed measuring first-match-to-return rate, targeting 35 percent within a season. You cannot measure return without recognising a person across two Saturdays, and a phone number does that natively. It also leaves you with something a turnstile never yields: a way to reach that person before the next fixture.
What survives
One part of the original argument holds regardless of collection method, and it is the part that matters commercially. A valuation built on attendance figures supplied by the organisation being valued is not evidence. Whoever operates the collection system needs to be independent of the club whose asset is being priced — that is the difference between a number a sponsor can underwrite and a number a sponsor is asked to trust.
That was always an integrity argument rather than a connectivity one. I had it filed under the wrong heading.
What breaking the loop looks like
Take the Richau finding seriously and the intervention list stops being about the football and starts being about the experience of going.
- Structured first-match access. Formal partnerships with schools, universities and community organisations to bring first-time attendees in. The barrier to a first match is rarely price. It is not knowing how it works.
- Neighbourhood ambassadors. Trusted local figures equipped to bring groups. This is the social-belonging variable, addressed directly rather than hoped for.
- Matchday friction removal. Organised supporter sections, working wayfinding, coordinated transport. Unglamorous, cheap, and precisely what the research says moves the number.
- A baseline before any of it. A documented prior-season attendance figure, collected the same way every week. Without it, nothing above can be shown to have worked, and a 20 percent improvement is indistinguishable from a good fixture list.
Note what is absent: no stadium construction, no broadcast negotiation, no governance reform. Those are real and they are slow. This list is a season's work, and its output is the first thing a sponsor has ever been able to check.
Where domestic football sits
Scored against the Sports Asset Activation Framework, the domestic club game does not land where its cultural significance suggests it should.
Large gap, long clock. Build toward — not Activate.
That will be an unpopular reading in a room that cares about football, so it is worth being precise about what it does and does not say. It does not say the domestic game is unimportant, or that it should be deprioritised. It says the work this year is pre-positioning rather than revenue, and that treating it as an Activate asset — pitching sponsors now, on numbers that do not yet exist — is the mistake that has already been made repeatedly.
The pre-positioning work is specific: establish the collection method, run a full season of baseline, and get the measurement layer in place before the commercial conversation rather than during it. That sequencing is the whole argument. A sponsor approached with a verified attendance trend is in a different conversation from a sponsor approached with a story.
Two adjacent assets score differently and deserve separating out. Diaspora engagement has a materially shorter clock — the 2024 collaboration between D.C. United and the Ethiopian Football Federation that brought Saint George FC and Ethiopian Coffee SC to Audi Field drew a substantial crowd and established the proof of concept publicly. That audience is reachable today, on platforms that already exist, with no infrastructure to build. And event hosting rights — continental fixtures, regional tournaments — carry their own economics, largely independent of domestic league attendance.
Which produces a conclusion worth stating plainly, because it is where this argument will be contested: international football tourism is a hard market for an emerging league to enter, and the realistic near-term prize is regional and diaspora travel plus hosting rights — not global audiences for the domestic product. The scoring keeps producing that answer. It is less exciting than the alternative and it has the advantage of being defensible.
The gap is not inevitable
The distance between a league's cultural weight and its commercial reality is not a fact of nature and not a verdict on the audience. It is an infrastructure problem, and infrastructure problems are solvable in a way that cultural deficits are not.
The research is fairly unified on where to start. Not with the product on the pitch, and not with a pitch deck. With the unglamorous work of making it easy to attend, and then counting — consistently, independently, and in a form somebody outside the building can check.
Operator figures cited above. Ethio Telecom results for FY2024/25 (July 2024 – June 2025): 83.2m subscribers, 46.6m mobile data users, 54.84m telebirr users, 2.38tn birr in telebirr transactions. Safaricom Ethiopia: 14.7m active customers at June 2026, up from 10.06m a year earlier; M-PESA Ethiopia 5.2m active customers in the quarter to December 2025, following EthSwitch integration in October 2025. Demographic and market figures are as cited in the original capstone research.
This piece revises two conclusions from the original capstone research: the characterisation of Ethiopia as a low-data market, and the physical data-collection infrastructure that followed from it. The academic findings and market data cited are unchanged. Where the original was wrong, it was wrong in a direction worth naming — it accepted a national statistic as a description of a specific audience.