Football fans’ views on the passolig e-ticket system and the decline in stadium attendance: the case of the Turkish football super league

The aim of this research is to investigate the reasons behind the decline in stadium attendance in the Turkish Football Super League since the implementation of the Passolig e-ticket system as well as football fans’ views on this system. The research sample consisted of football fans living in the province of Sakarya. The total number of participants was 500. A questionnaire comprising three parts was used for data collection. The first part of the questionnaire included questions aimed at identifying personal details of the participants; the second part included questions intended to identify their viewpoints on Passolig; the third part asked about their opinions concerning the reasons behind the decline in stadium attendance. The questionnaire contained 38 questions in total, 37 of which were prepared in the form of a five-point Likert scale with an additional open-ended question to identify participants’ opinions of Passolig. Quantitative data obtained through the study were evaluated using the IBM SPSS 25.0 software package, and qualitative analysis methods were employed for coding the questions about participants’ opinions. The study concluded that based on the opinions of the participants, Passolig has not been able to fulfill its intended functions of increasing stadium attendance, minimizing violence, and preventing ticket touting. The participants view Passolig as a means of generating unearned income and understand its implementation as one of the main reasons for the decline in stadium attendance. Besides the implementation of Passolig, high ticket prices, the weak financial situation of fans, and media broadcasts that provoke violence were among the foremost reported reasons for the decline in stadium attendance.

The Progressive Soul of American Prohibition

Traditional prohibition histories make a big to-do about evangelical Christianity. But as Chapter 14 explores, the evangelism of the Progressive Era was not about Bible thumping, or otherworldly damnation. Rather the social gospel—most famously pioneered by the Baptist Walter Rauschenbusch—was about uplifting the poor and downtrodden as per Jesus’s example. Social justice meant doing right by your fellow man, not getting him addicted for profit. Rauschenbusch’s evangelism was socialism with a Christian moral compass. This chapter examines the social gospel, including Henry George’s famed “single tax” on unearned income as a way to remedy the vast inequalities of wealth and power. Neither temperance nor evangelism was antithetical to new medical-science and social-science approaches the liquor question. The chapter traces the effects of this evangelism on the antiliquor progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt in New York politics.