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Premier League puts Huddersfield on the map

HUDDERSFIELD, England – It was not just the size of its new fan base that caught Huddersfield Town by surprise this summer, but the size of its new fans.

HUDDERSFIELD, England – It was not just the size of its new fan base that caught Huddersfield Town by surprise this summer, but the size of its new fans.

Early in July – little more than a month after the club had secured entry to the English Premier League’s promised land, and with little more than a month to go until it made its debut –Huddersfield revealed its jerseys for the season ahead. Within two weeks, all three editions of the jersey had all but sold out – even though the shirts were available only through the club’s online shop and at one of its two stores here.

The club quickly contacted Puma, its apparel supplier, with an urgent request to deliver a new batch as quickly as possible. It will not arrive until September, but when it does, it will be in a greater variety of sizes than before: In another surprise, there had been a surge of requests for jerseys in 3XL and 4XL.

The Terriers, it appears, will have a larger audience in more ways than one this season.

Huddersfield the town, like Huddersfield the club, will need some time to get used to the spotlight. Both had their heyday in the 1920s, when the team won three English championships and the town was thriving and prosperous, its wealth rooted in the textile industry. Since then, said Raj Bains, the author of “Underdog,” a book charting the club’s rise last season, “their fortunes run almost in sync.” Slowly, inexorably, town and team faded.

Now, he says, both are “in the healthiest state they have been for a while.”

The tendency, when discussing those Premier League clubs rooted away from the bright lights and the big cities, is to cast their towns as rust-belt relics, still reeling and resentful from the devastating loss of heavy industry in the 1980s.

The cliche rarely holds true. Huddersfield – to take one example – has a growing craft beer industry. Some of the unused mills on the town’s outskirts have been given over to creative spaces and startups. In the picturesque villages of the Holme Valley, a few kilometres outside town, there are craft shops and coffee bars offering social media courses. Yorkshire flags flutter from almost every other building, a white rose on a sky-blue field. This is not a hopeless place.

And yet – both Bains and Steven Leigh, of the Mid Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce, agreed – it is a place trying to shake off the sense of being a waypoint, a place defined not by what it is, but by what it is near. “It does not want to be somewhere in between Leeds and Manchester,” said Leigh. “It is a place in its own right.”

The value of a spot in the Premier League, with its global reach and its lucrative television rights, tends to be described in financial terms. Even if Huddersfield spends only one season among English football’s elite, it stands to receive somewhere in the region of £165 million (S$292 million) plus, in the event of relegation, two years of parachute payments to ease the drop back down the ladder.

Yet that is just the start of the true value of the sort of exposure that competing in the Premier League brings. To a club – as witnessed by the surge of demand for Huddersfield’s jerseys – there is the merchandising, as well as the increase in ticket sales and an uptick in sponsorship income.

To a place, there is more still, a set of advantages that are cast into the sharpest relief when the place is one like Huddersfield, or Burnley, West Bromwich, Stoke, Bournemouth or Swansea, or the dozen or so other small towns and cities that have enjoyed a taste of even brief membership in the world’s highest-profile sports league.

Some of the benefits are direct, of course: Leigh suggested that, in the case of Bournemouth, as much as £70 million flowed into town businesses related to football – restaurants and bars and hotels – in the course of a single season.

Others are more tangential. Huw Morris, academic registrar at the University of Swansea, said in 2015 that the institution had seen a surge in applications since it earned the right to call itself a Premier League city. “I speak to some of the people who travel the world to recruit students, and as soon as they hear the word Swansea, they associate it with football,” he told Wales Online.

The evidence is anecdotal – one 2008 study found no correlation between the presence of a Premier League team and university applications – but the anecdotes are common: Similar views have been expressed by Staffordshire University, in Stoke, and Cardiff University, which cited a surge of applicants from Malaysia after Vincent Tan, a Malaysian, bought the city’s club in 2010.

Business, too, can benefit from the association, and in Huddersfield it has started already: Huddersfield Town’s promotion has accelerated discussions over HD1, a £100 million retail and leisure development in the area around John Smith’s Stadium, the club’s home. There is even a plan to build a monorail from the town’s train station to the stadium.

But the most significant benefit is not one that can immediately be quantified financially.

Burnley is, perhaps, the best parallel for Huddersfield. It is a substantially smaller city, with a population of just 73,000, making it the smallest place to host a Premier League team. But it would recognise not only many of the historic issues that face Huddersfield – social deprivation, unemployment, the decline of industry – but much of the response, too. In 2013, Burnley was voted the most entrepreneurial place in Britain.

Now, on the verge of its team’s third season in the Premier League in the last four, it is well positioned to assess what being part of the competition can do to a place. Mike Garlick, the Burnley FC chairman, points out the economic transformation, the “away fans and journalists, all needing somewhere to stay,” and the physical one, too: Burnley has spent 12 million pounds building a state-of-the-art training center at Gawthorpe Hall, just outside town.

But he lingers more on the psychological effect. He sees the chairman’s role, which he has occupied for the last five years, as almost a civic one (“You’re a custodian. You own it, technically, but really you’re just looking after it.”) and as his way of giving something back to his hometown.

He takes immense pride in the work Burnley does in the community – sports facilities and educational programmes, financed in no small part by Premier League grants – but also in what the club does for the community just by being a Premier League team.

“It is a great feel-good factor,” he said. “Burnley won the entrepreneurship award the same year as we were promoted. That sort of thing gives a place a winning mentality. It shows you can go and do things for yourself.”

It is that self-confidence, he believes, that is the greatest benefit of a place in the Premier League, of being a Premier League place. Garlick lives in Hertfordshire, just north of London. Yet when he mentions his hometown, “the first thing people think of is football” – not angst or decay, not decline and fall, but success. It changes perceptions, and it does so across the world.

“I have an office in Singapore,” he said. “I was out there a couple of years ago. I walked along a street full of bars, and they were all showing Burnley. From 7,000 miles (11,265km) away. Burnley. The Premier League puts us – places like us – on the map. And that has got to be a good thing.” THE NEW YORK TIMES

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