Reply With Quotebased upon cardiff and the hinterland population , which is the question that was asked ?Originally Posted by Eric the Half a Bee
I reckon that's about right
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I think a mid placed championship club is what we are
Occasionally we might go up and hopefully we will stay up but thats going to be about it
I would love us to do a Leicester and win the league with route one football just to piss everyone off but I can't see it happening
We are a medium sized club and have spent far too long in the lower leagues to considered anything else
based upon cardiff and the hinterland population , which is the question that was asked ?
I reckon that's about right
Considering that being a mid placed championship side has been the lowest achievement of this club in over a decade, I think your thoughts of where we should be are placed a tad low.
Norwich will average 25k. Derby 23k. Forest 22k. Wednesday and Stoke will get more than us.
We're a club whose attendances will fluctuate. Top flight we could make the top 10 with a bigger stadium. Championship we won't make the top 6. We're not alone in having big drops in attendances after relegation. We're not the worst club for fans leaving after relegation, not by a long chalk.
Clubs like Villa, Newcastle and Norwich have very strong attendances in the Championship based on years of local people supporting their side. We don't have that.
I've always thought the City was the greatest team in football the world hard ever seen
We should , given our catchment area be in the top three
But the south wales sporting public is fickle
It likes to back the winner , its likes the big event
Such as the six nations
Or in our case when a big club is playing city , we can sell out for them or a promotion run in
But I am afraid a lot of people don't care about the bluebirds in south Wales, many care for man united and liverpool and that leaves the rest of us ......some being more frequent visitos than others
Our support is up and down to a massive degree
Dave Jones first game in charge against Leeds? 15000
Not great but at least we won a pulsating game with a fantastic goal by Jason koumas and a late penalty by purse
Next game up was Watford
The crowd ?
Less than 10000
Thats a staggering drop considering only 500 Leeds fans were there in a bubble trip
The conclusion ? Lots of the people there that night were not cardiff fans but there for a big game , they were south wales leeds fans and there are loads of those plastics or they were cardiff fans who simply couldn't be arsed to watch city v Watford
That is the reason , in a number of points why a city the size of cardiff should be getting bigger gates than derby , Norwich, Stoke
Name me another club of our size , apart from Coventry who have been sold down the river , that has support as fickle as ours ?
Its part of the clubs history I am afraid
Portsmouth have struggled in the lower leagues for several years but they have regularly been pulling in 16000 fans
We would see our support collapse if we went out of the championship
Another conclusion could be that the Leeds and Watford games were played on a Tuesday and Friday evening at a time when many fans were on holiday. More relevant probably was that the Watford game was moved to a Friday because it was live on Sky, so it's reasonable to think that had an effect on the size of the crowd.
We are what we are, a naturally second tier club and our gates reflect that - Cardiff and south Wales is not a football hotbed like some other parts of the country are and it is not a place where football supporters tend to gravitate naturally towards the local team. Maybe if we were better at cementing Premier League status when we win it you might get the new supporters coming to the club and staying, but, sadly, we've shown ourselves to be the worst club in the country at doing that out of the teams who have had two promotions or more to the Premier League.
Even a few years in the Premier league wouldn't guarantee sustained support, Boro, Bolton and Stoke have all seen a massive decline in attendance once they dropped out of the Premier league.
I prefer the Championship as it's so competitive and anything can happen, teams very rarely walk this league, having said that I hope we have a real go at promotion and if and when we get there, the club has a real ambition to stay there.
I prefer the championship but to get this club in the faces of the south wales public we need to be in the greedy league .
And for some people even that won't be enough , they would expect us to be competing with the big boys or after a season they would go back to watching Liverpool or Man united on sky tv .
I would love to be a Leicester or a Burnley but at the moment about a decade of being a crystal Palace would be a start as a generation of people would grow up with cardiff city being a top flight club .
Go back to 2009 and look at the ground on the final day of the season. The 'Bob bank' basically the same as the early 1920's. The Canton Stand virtually unchanged since 1922. The grandstand 50% 1930's, top half 1970's. The grange end the only 'new' stand.
The club had no real financial backing - until Hammam saw the potential. We've recently been in the PL with 32,000 average gates. Yes, our support is fickle, always has been unfortunately, but now more than ever the size of your home support does not automatically equat to the level of success you can achieve. Notwithstanding Covid, gate receipts for PL and to a lesser extent Championship clubs are a smaller percentage of overall income than ever before. Spend wisely and reap the harvest ..
The new ground obviously mad a big impact. Modern facilities and it spurred an interest in a new generation of fans and older ones returning.
Let's face it Ninian Park was not a fortress, and was basically falling down.
We had a good side under Jones and attendances were poor, around the 10k mark. But it's miles better now. We are not the only club with fickle fans. Check the attendances of clubs like Newcastle and Leeds in the 80s. And clubs with more successful histories than us like Burnley and Blackburn and a few others get less than us these days. The issue is for the club to keep the momentum going in these difficult times.
But the recent attendances have been crap!!!
Lay off the LSD.
Delusions of grandeur (Be a great name for an indie or thrash metal group).
It's quite difficult to pigeon hole the club's status because there are so many factors to take into consideration.
Are we a top 6 club continuously battling it out for silverware ? Obviously not and unlikely ever to be in that position.
Are we in the next tranche of clubs who are regularly on the undercard, teams like Everton etc. No but it's not beyond the realms of possibility that one day we could be.
Are we a massively supported club, such as Newcastle, who are perennial under-achievers. No and likely to stay that way because the North East is obsessed with the game in a way that South Wales is not.
Do we have a famous name, backed up with historical success, such as Forest, Villa, Wolves and Sheffield Wednesday. Yet again no.
In my opinion, we belong with a whole host of clubs such as Palace, Portsmouth, Brighton, Middlesbrough, Ipswich and many more who have flirted with the top flight and occasionally got to major cup finals. That would place us in the top 30% of current football League clubs. From this base, there is every chance that we could progress to the next level but so far that consistency has eluded us.
We have never been a small club a la Rochdale, Scunthorpe, Tranmere etc. A decent sized club grossly underperforming yes but not a small one. In reality, I never felt we belonged in the dungeon but we were there for far too long. We are now at a level where we are comfortable but unlike the 60's and 70's, there is a feeling that the club is ready to kick on and mix it with the big boys on a regular basis. Here's hoping !
I'd say that's a fair and accurate analysis.
Good post,all said is true
When I look back at the late 60s/very early 70s I do think that we really missed a trick, there were the Liverpool/Man U lot at school but nowhere near today’s hype. Most older football fans in the area were City fans brought up in an era where plasticness (is that a word?) was nigh of unheard of. We were regularly getting 25,000+ in the second tier, I remember a 30,000 at a fantastic win against QPR, then there were the extra 25,000 turning up for the cup ties against Arsenal & Leeds, not to mention the European nights. Match tickets being sold at newsagents throughout the area even. If we could have made the final push then who knows what would have happened, we were in a 60,000 capacity ground in good nick for its day. Unfortunately we had a ultra cautious board led by Fred Dewey who just didn’t have the bloody foresight to see what he was sitting on. Perhaps we could have dug in in the old Division One resulting in young fans having no need to turn to the glory clubs. I’m not sure but do places like Derby, Sheffield, Leicester, Sunderland, even Newcastle who were rubbing shoulders with us in Division Two but did make the leap up have fewer ‘plastics’ in their areas than us because their boards went the extra mile whereas ours shit themselves at the thought of going up?
I agree with much of what you're saying in your post Steve, but the period in which City were getting 25,000+ crowds on a regular basis in the second tier was actually relatively brief.
The season averages for the years concerned are as follows:
66/67 - 10,259
67/68 - 13,301
68/69 - 16,870
69/70 - 21,502
70/71 - 21,522
71/72 - 15,510
72/73 - 11,456
The first Cardiff City replica kit I owned was in 1975/76. I remember being the only kid in my year at school who had one. The other kids who had replica football kits were wearing those of Liverpool, Manchester United, Leeds and Chelsea. Obviously that was Sky's fault.
For memory, the board in the 1960's/70's consisted of Fred Dewey, his brother Viv and possibly George Edwards. It is a matter of conjecture whether the club really wanted promotion during that period. Certainly the team was more than capable (up until the sale of Toshack) and many people have since drawn the conclusion that we didn't want to go up, based purely on that one transaction. It certainly had a major impact on the club and it's only in recent times that we've returned to the comparatively elevated status that we achieved prior to the sale.
As for the QPR game, it was a great match which we won 4-2. I think Tosh scored a hat-trick if memory serves me right. And QPR had Rodney Marsh and Barry Bridges in their team. We really looked the part and promotion seemed a distinct possibility at that stage.
well we all know that the stories of huge gates on a regular basis at cardiff city are not true
Historically we have been able to pull big crowds but not consistently
Cardiff City being crap in the seventies didn't help and meant that people wore the kits of liverpool , united , Leeds, Chelsea etc
When Arsenal were a force a few years ago I would often see shirts from that club around
However since the formation and promotion of the premier league the locals have been able to watch their heroes live on sky at home or in the pub ...leading to a glut of people in South wales identifying with Liverpool, United, Chelsea, arsenal , spurs
I distinctly remember we were at home in the championship during dave Jones first season in charge and as we left the corporation there were loads of football fans in their man united tops watching the football , live , on sky tv , whilst half a mile up the road their citys football club was playing
That was probably repeated in loads of pubs in and around Cardiff
South wales being fickle about cardiff city ?
No doubt about it
Sky being part of the problem ? Course it is
I might be imagining this but it does seem like you see a lot more kids wearing City tops these days than 15/20 years ago
Turns out spending most of the 90s in the bottom tier just as the PL and Sky took off was a bad thing, who'd have thought it?
Out of over 90 seasons in the Football League we've spent most of that time in the second tier (46 seasons), 19 in the 3rd tier, 17 in the top flight and just 10 seasons in the bottom division. Those 10 seasons, shockingly, saw our crowds dip. We're a solid second tier club, if that makes us small then that makes Bradford City tiny and Bristol Rovers minuscule
I'd say that you're right. By and large, we're old fogeys on here who are, perhaps, out of touch when it comes to the sort of club City are today. We hark back to the twentieth century when we have these discussions about how big a club we are because that's the time when our opinions were formed and, largely speaking, it's the time we know best. However, we tend to forget or ignore the fact that we've had close to twenty years of crowds that have, largely, been 15,000 plus since our promotion in 2003.
For getting on for half a century, I clung to a belief formed in the early seventies that we were a mid twenty thousands club when it came to playing in the top flight - we'd get much bigger crowds than that occasionally when the biggest clubs came here, but our average would be around 25,000. That was why I labelled the Ninian Stand extension "Tan's Folly" and deemed it a waste of money, but I was proved wrong in 18/19 when, as a relegated team, we averaged seven thousand more than that and, in truth, it could have been a fair bit more than that because there were a few matches where our ground was not big enough to satisfy the demand for tickets.
Therefore, could it be true that we don't know our club as well as we think we do? Based on 18/19, I'd say it's not beyond the bounds of possibility for Cardiff City, as, say a modern day Crystal Palace equivalent, to average 40,000 if our ground was big enough.
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I actually disagree with you slightly Bob, which is a rarity. I think we've got the potential for a lot of casual fans but if we established ourselves in the Premier League I think some of the novelty would wear off after a few seasons. 33000 seems about right (we could sell a lot more for the big games but we'd get a lot less for the smaller ones in my opinion)
I’m not sure about the 40000 Bob butt. If the stadium held 60000 maybe the 60000 who would watch Man United and Liverpool would compensate for the 30000 who would watch Palace, Leicester etc.
I’m right in thinking City only sold the ground out on the big matches? Tickets were easily available for the likes of West Ham, Southampton, Palace etc.
Well we were a small club for the 17 years we were in the lower leagues and getting crowds of less than 2000
Bradford City get far higher crowds than we did in the lower leagues
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