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Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2016 22:27:40 GMT
People can't see it JDL. I made a comment about demographics regarding Ebbsfleet on Kent Online a month or two back (beneath an article about their new stand) and got slaughtered in the replies, from people who think that through buying success, they will soon be filling their stands with thousands of new supporters. It won't happen. If they make the football league they will pick up maybe 4 - 500 more simply through providing a higher standard of football but it won't be thousands. It just doesn't work like that. The problem is that the logic of that means that small places can't have 'big' clubs, which means that anyone who wants to do more than just chug along at their level and enjoy their football has to dream impossible dreams - and then pay the price. But there's always rich fans and business men that think they can break the rule and drag their local club into the FL and make a successful pro club out of it - and they don't want to face the fact that they aren't special, that they can't defeat the cold, hard logic of not enough fans coming through the gates. People will say "but look at Wimbledon" - and yes, they broke into the FL and then got promoted three times on the trot and beat Liverpool in the FAC Final. But they are the only club that's ever done anything like that. And look what happened to them afterwards... Every other club promoted from the National/Conference has either failed, dropped back, or found its level in L2, or, in a very few cases, L1. It happens all the time. Remember when Sittingbourne had pots of money? People didn't turn up and they went broke without being able to afford to put a roof on the new stand. Grays Athletic is another example. A wealthy chairman has fun taking them to Conference National before saying "sorry chaps, I've had enough now so I'm off" and back down to the Ryman they go. |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2016 22:31:34 GMT
Dover are and from my memory always been a decent Kent team and I wish them every success. Far better set up than most of our local non league teams and that catchment area should easily sustain 1000 + crowds so something is certainly amiss. Forget the town itself the whole area south of Canterbury and Ashford should be added to the numbers above, the alternatives ? Margate ? Give me the Crabble any day. Yes you are right, as I said in my last posting they can pool fans from places like Canterbury, Ashford and possibly even 'floating supporters' from Folkestone but you would question how loyal those fans would be if things went south on or off the pitch. Marketing is important of course. Tonbridge work really hard to hoover up potential fans from smaller towns (e.g. Paddock Wood) and villages in the surrounding area by putting matchday posters in shops, garages etc. around the Weald. Improving your catchment area is certainly one way to try and tackle the issue. |
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Post by mrplow on Mar 2, 2016 23:23:25 GMT
The population has got nothing to with Dover, most of their supporters are not even from Dover, the problem is its not fun to watch even though they are pushing for the play offs with a decent squad. Parmenter is deluded if he thinks he can take Dover to the football league without the support like they had in the Ryman league when they passed us. He feels really mugged off by the supporters who used to go and are not coming. It's a waste of time and money...
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Post by frankinstone on Mar 2, 2016 23:25:51 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Mar 2, 2016 23:46:45 GMT
The problem is that the logic of that means that small places can't have 'big' clubs, which means that anyone who wants to do more than just chug along at their level and enjoy their football has to dream impossible dreams - and then pay the price. But there's always rich fans and business men that think they can break the rule and drag their local club into the FL and make a successful pro club out of it - and they don't want to face the fact that they aren't special, that they can't defeat the cold, hard logic of not enough fans coming through the gates. People will say "but look at Wimbledon" - and yes, they broke into the FL and then got promoted three times on the trot and beat Liverpool in the FAC Final. But they are the only club that's ever done anything like that. And look what happened to them afterwards... Every other club promoted from the National/Conference has either failed, dropped back, or found its level in L2, or, in a very few cases, L1. It happens all the time. Remember when Sittingbourne had pots of money? People didn't turn up and they went broke without being able to afford to put a roof on the new stand. Grays Athletic is another example. A wealthy chairman has fun taking them to Conference National before saying "sorry chaps, I've had enough now so I'm off" and back down to the Ryman they go. To be fair Sittingbourne were pulling in crowds of 1100-1200+ for quite a few seasons. It wasnt like Whitehawk with stupid money being spent with crowds of 200-300 people So at least they were getting decent crowds to back up the money being pumped in/wasted....Their crowds only went to shit when the money really ran out |
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Post by Scot Stone on Mar 3, 2016 0:24:14 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2016 10:12:21 GMT
It happens all the time. Remember when Sittingbourne had pots of money? People didn't turn up and they went broke without being able to afford to put a roof on the new stand. Grays Athletic is another example. A wealthy chairman has fun taking them to Conference National before saying "sorry chaps, I've had enough now so I'm off" and back down to the Ryman they go. To be fair Sittingbourne were pulling in crowds of 1100-1200+ for quite a few seasons. It wasnt like Whitehawk with stupid money being spent with crowds of 200-300 people So at least they were getting decent crowds to back up the money being pumped in/wasted....Their crowds only went to shit when the money really ran out It was only good at Sittingbourne for three or four seasons. According to their Wikipedia page, they won the Kent League in 90-91 but the financial crisis hit and after some initial successes they were relegated in 1994 - 5. I think they expected more like 2 - 3,000 to turn up. The directors threw the money away on ridiculous building works of course like those infamous main gates which have long symbolised the mistakes made. For sure, some of the crowds they did enjoy in the early 90's were ex-Stones supporters who turned up when we went under, indeed I went there a few times myself. When it started to go wrong, inevitably, people like myself stopped turning up and their real core support wasn't anywhere near large enough to sustain what they were trying to do. At least Jim Parmenter has the good sense to look at the current situation and realise that putting another half a million quid of his own money into a club that can't get more than 600 out for a midweek Vanarama National game is probably verging on insanity. By the way, those gates... upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/Central_Park_Stadium_Sittingbourne.jpg |
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Post by ade on Mar 3, 2016 11:28:30 GMT
Every other club promoted from the National/Conference has either failed, dropped back, or found its level in L2, or, in a very few cases, L1. [/quote] I was going to say Wigan Athletic, but I realise they were elected from the Northern Premier League and not promoted from National/Conference  ? |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2016 11:31:12 GMT
Same, but then I realised they have found their level  |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2016 17:00:01 GMT
In the book 'Soccernomics', they write that the only thing that can dictate consistently high crowds is results on the field, and the only thing that truly correlates with success on the pitch is the amount you pay your players. So basically, they ascertain that if you pay your players highly, you get the BEST players, who in turn win matches and breed success which see's higher crowds come in to watch. It's worked (to a degree) with Manchester City, but surely it's a model that only works at Championship or above level clubs, and as proven by this topic, definitely not as low down as our league.
It looks like people think they can work along this format, invest in an ailing non-league club, pay for all the best players, a great ground and the punters will flock. As has been said, this pretty much definitely isn't the case, a core group will only take you so far and you need the fairweather fans to quickly become a part of that number which rarely, if ever happens (certainly not in small towns). You cannot sustain this model to 1000 fans every week and to think a fan base will triple, even quadruple at non-league with heavy investment is ridiculous.
Although, I genuinely believe there are places with something special in the water - rain or shine, and they'll be there. You go one league above and look at the crowds Grimsby pull in, or up another level to League 2 and look at Plymouth Argyle or Portsmouth who have solid fans who consistently turn out. Even we are a unique case, bringing in the numbers we do - it's certainly not earth shattering, and we'd need more if we did make it to the league but we're obviously punching above our weight for our league attendance wise. It will interesting to see if / when we go up, if average crowds go up and stay up significantly. In terms of Dover, it looks like they haven't and Parmenter might himself be the reason behind that...
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Post by soulstone on Mar 3, 2016 18:44:11 GMT
Sittingbourne did get big attendances at the time and has a higher population than Dover. What helped Sittingbourne was the demise of our club and also the fact that the G-lls had a really bad side and almost went out of the league. I wonder if our return home has hit Dover as there was a group of fans at Dover called the Maidstone crew.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2016 23:06:16 GMT
In the book 'Soccernomics', they write that the only thing that can dictate consistently high crowds is results on the field, and the only thing that truly correlates with success on the pitch is the amount you pay your players. So basically, they ascertain that if you pay your players highly, you get the BEST players, who in turn win matches and breed success which see's higher crowds come in to watch. It's worked (to a degree) with Manchester City, but surely it's a model that only works at Championship or above level clubs, and as proven by this topic, definitely not as low down as our league. It looks like people think they can work along this format, invest in an ailing non-league club, pay for all the best players, a great ground and the punters will flock. As has been said, this pretty much definitely isn't the case, a core group will only take you so far and you need the fairweather fans to quickly become a part of that number which rarely, if ever happens (certainly not in small towns). You cannot sustain this model to 1000 fans every week and to think a fan base will triple, even quadruple at non-league with heavy investment is ridiculous. Although, I genuinely believe there are places with something special in the water - rain or shine, and they'll be there. You go one league above and look at the crowds Grimsby pull in, or up another level to League 2 and look at Plymouth Argyle or Portsmouth who have solid fans who consistently turn out. Even we are a unique case, bringing in the numbers we do - it's certainly not earth shattering, and we'd need more if we did make it to the league but we're obviously punching above our weight for our league attendance wise. It will interesting to see if / when we go up, if average crowds go up and stay up significantly. In terms of Dover, it looks like they haven't and Parmenter might himself be the reason behind that... Some more population figures for you: Manchester: 514,417 Plymouth: 256,400 Portsmouth: 205,400 Maidstone: 113,137 Grimsby: 88,243 Dover: 31,022 There are some clues in there somewhere Maidstone's official population figure does not include places like Ditton, Aylesford, Larkfield and Bearsted. The population of the borough is 161,000. I don't think we are 'punching above our weight' at all with the crowds we get. Maidstone has a good size population, and plenty of scope for stealing supporters from the London clubs now that we're back in the town. Let's face it, they pay a lot less, travel a lot less and get to see a decent game of football on their doorstep. Grimsby, like Maidstone, has a lot of bolted-on 'towns' that swell the population of the overall urban area to 134,000 which helps to explain where their large support base is coming from. |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 3, 2016 23:13:55 GMT
Dover are and from my memory always been a decent Kent team and I wish them every success. Far better set up than most of our local non league teams and that catchment area should easily sustain 1000 + crowds so something is certainly amiss. Forget the town itself the whole area south of Canterbury and Ashford should be added to the numbers above, the alternatives ? Margate ? Give me the Crabble any day. It's Crabble not The Crabble. |
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Post by Deleted on Mar 10, 2016 10:33:22 GMT
Some more population figures for you: Manchester: 514,417 Plymouth: 256,400 Portsmouth: 205,400 Maidstone: 113,137 Grimsby: 88,243 Dover: 31,022 There are some clues in there somewhere Maidstone's official population figure does not include places like Ditton, Aylesford, Larkfield and Bearsted. The population of the borough is 161,000. I don't think we are 'punching above our weight' at all with the crowds we get. Maidstone has a good size population, and plenty of scope for stealing supporters from the London clubs now that we're back in the town. Let's face it, they pay a lot less, travel a lot less and get to see a decent game of football on their doorstep. Grimsby, like Maidstone, has a lot of bolted-on 'towns' that swell the population of the overall urban area to 134,000 which helps to explain where their large support base is coming from. Interesting stuff - it definitely makes sense, and thanks for posting. I'd love to see anomalies in that: massive cities / towns with low levels of support, or small places with huge followings. It's hard to gauge what the two extremes in terms of teams for those two would be... any guesses? |
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Post by gomeradave on Mar 10, 2016 13:15:08 GMT
Predicting the future in non-league football is very difficult indeed. I remember in the early nineties, when my son and I were running an independent betting shop in Worthing, the late lamented 'Sporting Life' described Sittingbourne, moving into Central Park,along with Speedway and Greyhounds as the 'Man Utd' of non league football. No wonder people give up gambling with tips like that!
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