Predictably Erratic: Water consumption during Liverpool’s 2022 CL final appearance

Please note: All views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the official position of SME Water… not that SME Water has an official position on football.

Football. As the wildly overused phrase goes, is ‘a funny old game’. With many Liverpool fans still trying to shake off the post-weekend malaise, it falls to me to add some more words to the growing number of column inches that have been written about the events surrounding what was a bang-average Champions League final. Not the travails of fans at the match in Paris though, nor details of the sluggish game itself. This blog will present a look at the game’s funny old impact on people’s behaviour and water consumption habits in Liverpool and Manchester.

Sporadic large-scale changes in demand can cause notable issues for utilities companies in the UK. You might be familiar with the fact that the British National Grid experiences a power surge during half-time of the World Cup final as legions of football fans get up en masse to make a brew, but what happens to water consumption during large sporting events, such as the weekend’s Champions League final? Surely these same people have to fill their kettles, to say nothing of the half-time sprint to the loo. We thought it would be interesting to investigate the impact on demand and to what extent your region’s leading football team being in the final influenced water consumption patterns.

As many will be aware, this year the otherwise imperious Manchester City botched their semi-final against Real Madrid, setting Liverpool and Madrid up for what was hoped would be a replay of the 1981 final in Paris (with Liverpool winning 1-0), rather than the 2018 final – the last time Liverpool met Madrid to contest the cup. Reds fans will no doubt remember that as the match in which Spanish centre-back Sergio Ramos intentionally brought the scintillating Mo Salah to ground, resulting in the Egyptian King’s injury and subsequent substitution.

Enough football trivia though. With it having been stipulated that, for many, Ramos will forever be remembered as a pantomime villain of yesteryear, a cad, a bounder, a… (there are remarkably few safe-for-work descriptions if I’m honest), let’s move on to regional water consumption.

Is it possible to detect a jump in water usage at the highly predictable times when large television audiences nip to the loo in both regions?

Below is a graph showing a central Liverpool area’s water consumption on the day of the match as well as a comparison to the same day in the previous week. In addition to the expected half time loo dash, we can see that on the Saturday of the final, demand was raised significantly all afternoon in the city of Liverpool as fans travelled to be a part of the pre-match atmosphere. The last time this afternoon long peak in demand was evident was back in 2019. In contrast, we also see that during the match water consumption actually dipped below the previous week’s.

Now let’s compare the Liverpool area with a Central Manchester area over the previous three Champion’s League finals:

Below, in 2021, we see both regions experience the half-time loo dash but the Manchester area sees a more drastic impact on the expected flow over the course of the whole game as fans took their seats and didn’t budge. In contrast to Liverpool in 2022, however, it seems likely that City fans were not flooding into the city for the game and so there was no notable associated rise in afternoon consumption ahead of the game.

Mired in the early stages of the pandemic though we were, a final featuring two continental teams did not hit water consumption perceptibly in either region back in 2020.

Back in 2019, both regions were significantly affected by the match, with flow dropping precipitously from 8pm and jumping back up at half time. We can see that, during the match, the Liverpool flow profile had the slightly more pronounced deviations from the expected profile. Notably, there is a post-match peak in water consumption in both regions which we did not see in 2021. It’s likely that the Liverpool peak is slightly later than that seen in Manchester as a result of Liverpool fans celebrating the win.

Conclusion

In general, we can see that, yes, water consumption is significantly affected by the impact of large sporting events. We can also see that the leading team in a region being in the final has a more pronounced effect on that region’s water consumption than is seen elsewhere. It is likely that the significant increase in afternoon demand in Liverpool in both ’22 and ‘19 was due to large numbers of fans from outside the city flooding in ahead of the match to soak up the atmosphere, a phenomenon that is less evident in the Manchester region. While it would be fun (for me) to speculate this was due to a lack of fans, perhaps the most likely explanation is the lingering impact of Covid in 2021 as Britain slowly re-emerged from lockdown.

Similarly, a keen eye might notice that the Manchester region has been more heavily impacted by the Liverpool game than the Liverpool area was by the Man City final. By way of an explanation, back to 2019, it is probable that the all-English final caused an uptick in neutral viewers across the country (though it cannot be ruled out that the significant impact on Mancunian water consumption was as a result of football fans in Manchester throwing their support behind an absolutely dominant Liverpool team who, they commonly agreed, richly deserved the win).

So, we have shown that a Champions League final, and by extension – any major event that glues bums to seats only to free them all at once, can result in a significant change in domestic water consumption. This emphasises the importance of building up knowledge of what can be expected from an area. Whether we are discussing the impact of a scheduled sporting event or a month-long modifier of consumption habits such as Ramadan, the impact of recurring events that impact water usage is, to a large degree, predictable.

SME Water is currently developing a demand forecast model that uses historic net flow data and other sources to build up a model of individual DMA’s expected behaviour. The Paradigm project looks to combine a number of data sources, including weather data and student semesters, to help predict DMA level network demand and expected leakage levels. While major sporting events are not yet part of the model, they provide a timely example of irregular but predictable usage. Were AI in the driving seat in controlling networks in these areas, it may well have hit the panic button when usage dropped so significantly at kick off. As we work towards smarter networks, being able to accurately predict large scale demand events and make the appropriate preparations will undoubtedly yield benefits.

Keep your eyes peeled for updates coming out from our upcoming Paradigm user group in late June.