Battle stations: Fans focus meeting confirmed

Its great to see these stats. Just shows the amount of bull this board thinks it can get away with feeding us. The stats don’t lie. Pretty much a continual downward trajectory under Bonser at a time when football was/is booming.

Without the inspired appointments of Graydon and Smith, I hate to think what that graph would look like!

Taking a shorter timeframe: the 1983-84 Liverpool Semi Final Year to last season:

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That’s another factor. Since sacking Lee, he’s appointed off the top of my head, Merson,Broadhurst,Money,Mullen, Hutchings Smith,O Driscoll, Whitney and Keates.

Only two of those were unmitigated successes. Many are some of the worst we’ve had. He’s lost the touch with which he could mitigate the rest of his influence.

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Yes I would be there and why shouldn’t I be there? The graphs show clearly that the gates go up if we have some success on the pitch over a prolonged period.Unfortunately when we had some good players in the Championship the gates did not go enough to sustain that. Other similar sized clubs have had the same experience.

Well he appointed 3 good managers Nicholl,Graydon and Lee who did really well for us…since then only Smith comes into that category in my view. The jury is out on DK at the moment and the next few months will tell us a lot.

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Graphs like this aren’t much use unless you have a corresponding trend.

This graph looks acceptable, some highs, some lows, and we end pretty much where we started.

However, if you plot the national trend, it paints a different picture.

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Not Money?

I don’t disagree Phil, I was merely gathering data on our own attendances at this stage.

If I have time I will try and get some more info to look at trends and see how we compare.

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Are we also the only club in the history of English football who have seen a significant drop in average attendance following moving to a new stadium?

Not convinced by him …we were in a lower division and he did get us promotion but as soon as things got a little tougher he went! He hasn’t done much since either.

Wrexham haven’t had success on the pitch have they?

In 1986 and 1987 their average was 3432 and 2521. This is how I remember their crowds throughout their time in the football league.

Now they are fan owned but find themselves in non-league. Attendances? 17/18 4,649 and this season 5,239.

The difference? A community feel and not feeling like everyone is a customer paying into once mans pension fund.

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Nevertheless, contrast that with his first appointments. I’m not sure he appointed Hibbitt, so his first 4 were Nichol,Sorensen,Graydon,Lee. I’m not sure Sorensen’s season was that bad,and he got rid of quickly anyway. I’d say there’s a definite downward trend.

It’s totally expected that gates will increase when thinks are going ‘well’ so to speak. The reality however is (as pointed out by others) our gates don’t increase by anything like as much as other clubs and then very very quickly revert to a low datum.

The reality is that the club NEVER does anything (and never has under JB’s ownership) to motivate, incentivise and attract floating or new fans…

Shambles management means shambles results (not footy results I hasten to add but results of the success of the organisation etc - although obviously the 2 should be intrinsically connected with us being a football club :roll_eyes:!) and in general, that’s what we’ve had for the past 30 years…

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I think you are right there and if you look at the graphs you can see our very poor gates in the years after Fellows Park. A number of factors play into that:
1 We were relegated the very year the new stadium opened.
2 The team was weak and we nearly went bankrupt. Our main striker Rimmer was sold to pay the wages…the Council loaned us £250,000 to keep going.
3 The stadium was a massive disappointment. I had friends who refused to go!

It took until about 1994/95 for the finances to improve because of the Commercial activities, then Nicholl was appointed,the team improved and gates went up.

I see no real significant rise in attendance in this period? Considering the football we were playing under Nicholl I always thought the attendances were ■■■■ poor and continued to be until the miracle of Ray Graydon.

Points added to your comments:

1 We were relegated the very year the new stadium opened. -
**Very unusual for this to happen. I don’t know statistically but it strikes me that many clubs do very well immediately after locating to a brand new home…**

2 The team was weak and we nearly went bankrupt. Our main striker Rimmer was sold to pay the wages…the Council loaned us £250,000 to keep going.
_Just shows that JB was no sugar daddy when he got control and basically used the opportunity to create his now wealthy position from our demise (financially speaking…)****

3 The stadium was a massive disappointment. I had friends who refused to go! -
Looked OK when new purely because it was new and so much better (cosmetically) than FP. Soon after it aged quickly and when you look at it now, it’s like Jeff’s management style - dated and unfit for purpose!

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I don’t entirely disagree with you but there is another factor and that is our proximity to 4 bigger clubs. We clearly did little after our relegation from the Championship to induce more people to come and the last few seasons have been awful from a customer service point of view as others have said.
I have been appalled by the stories of poor food and dirty toilets. These are the basics and is one of the reasons that I support the efforts to make things better.

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Be interesting to see then how other ‘smaller’ clubs faired against larger close rivals in major, heavily populated conurbations such as Greater Manchester, London, South Yorkshire etc etc

Well to fair to JB I don’t think he had the money then. He wasn’t like some Chairmen a multi millionaire and after the Ramsden mess the club was in dire straights.

So you think that if JB goes (and it is time for that) our gates will see a large increase. I am doubtful about that but I hope you are right.