My Pub: GBPA sports pub winner 2016, Famous Three Kings

Sporting drive​

I’ve been general manager for three and a half years and, while Famous Three Kings (FTK) was a fantastic sports venue well before I started, I think my academic background has influenced the direction of the pub.

I did a sports sociology degree and wanted to do something with sports development. I didn’t expect to go into this trade necessarily, but the first pub I ran was Off The Wall in Chester, a very sporty and ‘studenty’ pub and we went very quickly from doing £6,000-£7,000 a week to more than £30,000 a week – becoming the sports venue in Chester.

What I found when I arrived at FTK was that while they had done sports well they hadn’t done the pre-game and post-game stuff as well. There was a tendency to put a DJ on the night after the football, expecting people to stay around after the match until the DJ came on. But you need to time it right, so you have your pool of 350 to 400 people and keep them entertained straight after the match. They won’t all hang around and wait.

My last pub before this – the Blackbird in Hertford – was more of a late-night venue and music-based. I’m a massive sports fan anyway, so I tried to bring a bit of that knowledge and experience and add in the atmosphere and music.

More than football

We won Sports Pub of the Year 2016 in The Morning Advertiser’s Great British Pub Awards. And that was down to our passion for embracing foreign and minority sports.

This approach has transformed our client base and sent the pub’s financial performance to another level altogether.

Finland and Slovakia provide the majority of the pub’s growing legion of ice-hockey punters, so Finnish and Slovakian playlists were put together, with the occasional Slovakian DJ popping up to rev up post-match sessions. The FTK has become an ice hockey destination, with people travelling four hours or more to see games.

It is also the go-to Juventus pub in London. And despite being a stone’s throw away from Premier League champions Chelsea, it is matches featuring the Italian champions from Torino that draw the biggest football audience.

There’s a decent Welsh population around here, but also a lot of French, Spanish and Italians. We’re bigger for the French, Italian and Spanish football than we are for English.

All inclusive

Being able to identify with a pub is important, but we won’t pin any particular colours to our mast and instead offer sporting options that reflect the multicultural make-up of the London populace. I have always been very interested in the social side of participation in sport. If people feel it’s a ‘Chelsea pub’ then they become quite protective of their turf, but we push it as a sports pub that’s here for everybody. They are here on our terms. We encourage team colours and flags, but with so many different sports and teams involved, no one can really say ‘this is our pub’.

The sheer diversity of the FTK offer would be hard to replicate in most establishments. Not many can show the diversity that we do. The most we’ve had on at any one time is probably 10 games, across our 20 screens, three drop-down projectors and six separate sound zones, which are key.

Big events

We decided to show a greater variety of sport and more rugby and European football, for instance, which brought us a different crowd.

Our biggest [one-off] events now are rugby, especially Wales games when we’ll have 400 to 500 people in. It was the same in the European Championships, when Wales got to the semi-finals.

Welsh rugby fans love a Lions tour too, but for most, it really kicks in when the Tests start. We opened for the first warm-up games and we were getting 50 to 60 people in for breakfast. I think we can expect that to build and when the Tests are on, I think we’re looking at 400 people, despite the early kick-off time.

Gender balance

The rugby audience is well balanced between male and female but we have made a concerted effort to attract more women through the doors.

Although we aim for a sporting audience, the decor has been thought out to reflect our offer without pushing it in people’s faces or causing unnecessary division. There are artistic sports pictures and black and white photographs of icons like Ali, Senna and Bobby Moore – it’s the type of sportsmen who are unlikely to divide customers.

Friday night is even designated ‘ladies night’, showcasing a bar menu that includes several cocktails, 14 brands of gin and plenty of Prosecco.

I wouldn’t say we trade like a sports pub really. If you walked in here when there isn’t a big game on, you wouldn’t necessarily think it was all sport. We’ve really benefited from generating a great atmosphere around games, but then also providing a good venue for non-sports fans outside of those times.

English football has tended to stay more male-oriented, but with rugby, foreign football and other sports, we tend to find we have a good split between men and women. We never feel like there’s going to be any trouble and I think women pick up on that atmosphere.

The pub’s more equal gender balance will be reflected on screen too as I’m looking to push women’s sport this year. My dissertation was on the portrayal of women in tennis and I found there was a huge difference in the way women are spoken and written about, the number of words and the pictures used.

Serious about sport

We’re Sports Pub of the Year, though, and I think we should be championing things that other people are not showing. We’ve got a fantastic summer of women’s sport ahead, with the Euros (football), the world cups in cricket and rugby and the Solheim Cup (golf). If that was the men’s game, you’d be thinking bumper summer, but women’s sports don’t get the coverage they could get.

We’re trying to do it as we do male sport. If you show things no one else is doing, and do it properly, that’s where it starts and the minority fans begin to come in, realise you’re serious about it and bring other people with them.

Women’s handball is another sport that will get the FTK treatment, we’ve already built a decent following for the male version. There is a good European contingent that comes in to watch handball. In January, we showed the handball and the French and Danish teams did well, which brought a lot of people in. I tried to tell people we had a good January because we made money from the handball and they didn’t believe me.

No boundaries

I showed kabaddi (an Indian contact sport) this year. No one seemed to know about it but it was quite popular. I don’t know all the rules, but I know the basics and when you get people interested, they stay and have another pint.

Like other minority sports it starts small, but we are consistent and people get to know about it and before very long the audiences can grow significantly.

It is about staying one step ahead of everybody else. If we start doing this now, we might not see the rewards straight away, but when others play catch-up in three or four years, we’ll have cornered the market.