Football fans get paid to watch games
Imagine getting paid to sit at home and watch sports on TV. Now you could, if you are lucky enough to get in on a new university research project.
Boffins want to pay people to monitor the way they behave while watching football on TV and record the way fans communicate with each other.
The £400,000 project is being carried out by researchers at the University of Glasgow and will film fans in the comfort of their own home.
They say fans should act normally whether that means cheering, jumping up and down, shouting at the TV ... or if you are Newcastle fan, holding your head in your hands.
The project is designed to help the development of new mobile technologies that will help fans communicate with each other.
Stuart Reeves, a research assistant, said: "We want to find out what fans talk about and their reactions to events at a game.
"The aim is to design applications that can help them record events during the match, communicate in the gaps between play – before a game, during breaks in the game, at half time, after it has finished – and create a memory of the day.
"We’ve found that sports fans are very insightful and are skilled at knowing what is going on in a game. They are often highly critical too, but that is part of supporting a team so we want to design a system that will support their debate and their commitment."
The researchers will even pay extra for fans who will be interviewed about the role football plays in their lives ... chances are they want something more than the average knuckle-dragging West Ham fan has to offer, sorry.
For details of how to take part in the study contact Stuart Reeves on stuart@tropic.org.uk - something tells me someone is going to have a full inbox by Monday morning.
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