Standing for the anthem may not be enough

A stadium ticketing scheme would score every supporter's anthem by seat, block and county, and publish the results before kick-off. The words would count for forty points. The rest would be judged by a microphone that has never had a cold.

Karaoke and singing apps have scored users' pitch, timing and lyric accuracy for years, and turn those scores into leaderboards among friends and strangers. Sports venues increasingly use phone apps and loyalty schemes to track attendance, reward engagement and sell add-ons around the matchday experience. Gamified rankings, with streaks, badges and tables by region or workplace, are now a standard way to drive participation in everything from language learning to step counts. Stadiums also install acoustic monitoring to comply with noise conditions and to measure crowd volume. The anthem before a fixture is a public, recorded and often televised moment, so participation in it is already visible.

£3.49 per home fixture. Price includes anthem scoring. Scores are calculated from the stadium's acoustic monitoring array and the seat number printed on your ticket. Performances below 40 per cent of the recognised words will be recorded as “present, not participating”. Rankings are published weekly by seat, block and county of residence. A cold is not grounds for appeal. That is the wording that would sit beneath the matchday price in the app of one of the larger stadium operators, under a scheme due to run from the start of next season. It would be the first time a national anthem carried terms and conditions.

The mechanism would be a leaderboard. The stadium's existing noise-monitoring microphones, installed to satisfy a planning condition about decibels, would be pointed inward and cross-referenced with the seating plan. Each supporter would receive a score out of 100 before kick-off: 40 for words, 30 for pitch, 20 for timing and 10 for what the scheme's documentation calls “sustain on the final line”. Supporters who prefer not to be scored could stand in the concourse during the anthem. This would be logged as a separate metric, and the concourse would have its own table.

Dean Poskitt, 61, has sat in seat 114 of the North Stand for thirty-one years. Under the trial, he would learn on the first Saturday that he was 38,412th in the county. “I've been going since I was nine,” he would say. “I've never been anything-th at that ground before.” His neighbour, Margaret Tull, would be told by the app that she goes sharp on the second verse. She would point out that nobody sings the second verse. The app would score what it hears, and it would hear her.

The county rankings would be joined, within a month, by an employer table, since hospitality boxes are bought by companies and the microphones cannot tell a box from a block. A regional water company would circulate its box's average to all staff with a note that anthem performance was not, at this time, a measure of individual contribution. One employee, Ruth Amable, would find the figure on the intranet, under the fire drill results and above the car park permits. “It's in the same font as everything else that ends up in your appraisal,” she would say.

Pubs within walking distance of the ground would begin offering pre-match warm-ups, at £2 a head, with a laminated sheet of the words and a woman from the operatic society who would take the room through the difficult interval in the third line. A primary school in the same postcode would enter its Year 5 choir as a block and rank 187th in the county, eleven places above the club chaplain. A tenor from the same operatic society would be accused of seat farming, having been seen in four blocks in one half, raising averages for cash.

The scheme's director, Alan Fewster, would say that the anthem has always been a shared performance and that the scheme simply makes the performance visible. He would be ranked 1,204th, which the app would describe as “upper-mid”. The lowest-ranked block each month would lose the half-time draw. The lowest-ranked county would be named on the big screen, with its average, and the two counties either side of it would send coaches to the next away fixture to sing at it.

By the spring the small print would have grown. A cold would remain outside the appeals process, but laryngitis would be considered on receipt of a doctor's note, and supporters arriving after the first line would be scored only on the lines they were present for, following a complaint. A county council would print the full text on bus shelters. A second app would appear that plays the anthem into one ear through a small earpiece, half a beat early, and the operator would add it to the price list at £1.99, under the heading Accessories.

Poskitt would pay the £3.49. He would practise in the car park, in the car, with the windows up, from a printout his daughter made in a font large enough to read without his glasses. By the last home game of the season he would be 9,306th. “I sang it exactly the same for thirty-one years,” he would say. “Turns out I was doing it wrong the whole time, and nobody was counting.” The app would send him a badge. The badge would say Most Improved, and it would be visible to his employer.