Quote Originally Posted by StraightOuttaCanton View Post
At the risk of sounding as pedantic as you - I really don’t think that in terms of being able to support a Premier League football team a difference of 37,000 people in census terms would be significantly significant. Burnley’s extra ‘total’ population over Merthyr is not even enough to fill some league 1 teams stadia.
I see what you're saying but there has to be a critical mass to be able to support a successful team and there are no other towns as far as I can see with a population in the 40k region with a league club, let alone premier league.
Burnley have a population double that of Merthyr and are an outlier in terms of size to be a premier league club, so even if merthyr suddenly doubled their population they would still also need to be a massive outlier in order to be that successful.