Underachievement

I’ve seen a few variations on this theme lately, but I wanted to give our recent historical underachievement some context. There’s an element of subjectivity about where a club should be in the football pyramid, but there is pretty clear correlation at the macro-level - Premier League clubs are generally bigger than Championship clubs; Championship Clubs are generally bigger than League One clubs; and so on.

Perhaps the best barometer we have of a club’s natural punching weight is its average league attendances, recorded over a period of 100+ years (as recorded here: https://www.european-football-statistics.co.uk/englandcontent.htm). Let’s take a quick look at how many historically smaller clubs are currently above us, and how many historically smaller ones are below us.

Let’s start with Town (up to and including 2023):

7,704 (currently 21st League Two)

Historically smaller clubs above us:

Bournemouth (14th Prem) - 7,354
Rotherham (24th Champ) - 7,479
Peterborough (4th League One) - 6,358
Oxford (5th League One) - 7,298
Lincoln (6th League One) - 5,976
Stevenage (9th League One) - 3,075
Northampton (11th League One) - 6,631
Wycombe (12th League One) - 5,049
Exeter (13th League One) - 5,255
Shrewsbury (18th League One) - 5,372
Cambridge (19th League One) - 4,239
Burton (20th League One) - 3,452
Cheltenham (21st League One) - 3,673
Port Vale (22nd League One) - 7,171
Fleetwood (23rd League One) - 3,195
Carlisle (24th League One) - 6,371
Stockport (1st League Two) - 6,267
Mansfield (2nd League Two) - 5,531
Wrexham (3rd League Two) - 6,045
Crewe (5th League Two) - 4,572
Barrow (6th League Two) - 4,785
Crawley (7th League Two) - 2,274
Walsall (8th League Two) - 6,081
Doncaster (9th League Two) - 7,167
Gillingham (10th League Two) - 6,309
Wimbledon (11th League Two) - 6,918
Harrogate (12th League Two) - 2,298
Morecambe (15th League Two) - 2,392
Newport (16th League Two) - 5,329
Tranmere (17th League Two) - 6,437
Accrington (18th League Two) - 4,116
Salford (20th League Two) - 2,639

Historically bigger clubs below us:

Oldham (10th National League) - 8,778

—

Ok, this doesn’t really tell us much we didn’t already know, but I find it quite stark to see it laid out like this. 32 “smaller” clubs currently above us in the pyramid, and just 1 “bigger” club below. That’s 58% of League One, and 67% of League Two. We are seriously under par, and have been for so long now.

There are of course some special cases in there like Bournemouth and Wrexham, but in the main the common denominator is that those above us have been generally better run this century and have benefitted from modest levels of investment.

I don’t doubt that we have good, smart owners today, and that they are doing their best to clean up the mess their predecessor left behind, but as someone who grew up watching Town punch well above their weight, it pains me to see us fall so far behind so many clubs with considerably smaller organic fanbases.

Of course, history only counts for so much today, and we’re only 10th in the League Two attendance table today. But realistically, had we a team pushing towards the play-offs and an extra 3,000 decent seats in the ground, surely we’d have had no issue pushing towards or above our historic average of 7,704.

Ultimately, what this underlines for me is that if we can’t operate ourselves out of our current longstanding underachievement through smart management of the club, then outside investment has to be sought. If so many of those currently above us can do it, why can’t we?

I think a fans forum during the summer would be prudent, because as much as I am behind AP and JS, there are a lot of questions to be asked once this season is done and dusted (hopefully, with our EFL status intact). This season has been frustrating as fúck.

I made a similar, albeit much less detailed, point on the Tesco v corner shop thread.

You just have to look at much of league 1 and pretty much all of league 2 to see we are operating way below our potential.

When the next wave comes along we have got to ride it and put this awful time in our history behind us.

Having studied the above list of clubs a bit more, I think I’ve worked out what rankles me so much. My first full season following Town was the 92/93 season, and I have this weird thing where struggle to see the stature of clubs as they are today, but rather how they were then. In my mind, I struggle to grasp that the likes of Brighton, Hull and Swansea are bigger clubs than Town, Cambridge and Oxford, because they were less successful at that time. Those early days following Town and the game, when everything was new and exciting, have stayed with me a long time.

But looking at that list of 32 clubs, 30 of them finished below us that season (many of them well below us). Only Wimbledon (still in their Crazy Gang days) and Tranmere finished above us. I know there’s this sensation that we were overachieving then, but I think the scale of underachievement now is much greater than the overachievement back in the 90s.

As fans, I think it’s important to take stock of that. The last couple of decades or so naturally beat the spirit out of you, but we should remember - this club is much, much better this, and we should never stop aspiring as such.

There's just one thing that undermines this analysis and it's something we loved to tell other club's fans when we were in Div 1:

You don't get a single point for your average home attendance, the size of your ground or how many you take away. You get points for what you do on the pitch.

That is why we are 89th in the league.

It's not just where we are in the league.  It is that we have a ground where the "new Stand" is over forty years old, and the one with the best open view was built and opened weeks before the start of World War Two.

We have been "promised" a new ground since 1960 (Cambridge Avenue) but seem to be walking through mud towards (not) having one.  NOTHING tells us more where we are than there is a thread on here celebrating the fact that we will have a slightly reconfigured toilet in the "new" stand!  My God that's some level of non-expectancy for improvement.

And of course for the last number of decades, we have had the oldest structure in the entire football league.  We aren't just years behind everyone else in football, we're decades behind them!

And we're told that because not every seat is filled on a regular basis (most of them with very restricted views) there's no point in thinking bigger.

Quoted from BobbyCummingsTackle

There's just one thing that undermines this analysis and it's something we loved to tell other club's fans when we were in Div 1:

You don't get a single point for your average home attendance, the size of your ground or how many you take away. You get points for what you do on the pitch.

That is why we are 89th in the league.

Of course you don’t, and again MASSIVE Wednesday find themselves struggling at a level arguably a tier below their natural size, but there should be some kind of vague correlation, and in that sense we are a huge anomaly. If this season was a one-off occurrence then you could argue it’s just a quirk of the beautiful game, but scraping the floor of the basement division is now the norm for GTFC, and it shouldn’t be.

That’s the crux of it as I see it.

Quoted from BobbyCummingsTackle

There's just one thing that undermines this analysis and it's something we loved to tell other club's fans when we were in Div 1:

You don't get a single point for your average home attendance, the size of your ground or how many you take away. You get points for what you do on the pitch.

That is why we are 89th in the league.

Except of course that the more punters you get (in itself related to the ground size and facilities) the more money you have to spend oin the squad.  Fewer punters, lower wages for players ....

Quoted from BobbyCummingsTackle

There's just one thing that undermines this analysis and it's something we loved to tell other club's fans when we were in Div 1:

You don't get a single point for your average home attendance, the size of your ground or how many you take away. You get points for what you do on the pitch.

That is why we are 89th in the league.

This is it for me.  

I share a lot of the sentiment from the original post and having started a few seasons before (89/90) I too find it frustrating seeing nearly every club looking down on us now.

But over 20 odd years we've been consistently excrement.  We've dropped into the Conference twice, something very few clubs have done and certainly not of the level that we perhaps expect to be operating at.  Even our average attendance this year puts us lower mid table of League One if that's our metric.  We 100% sell every seat and each and every one is occupied, we're still outside the League One play-offs.  We're doubling our gate if we want to put ourselves in the promotion chasing places from League One.

Football has moved on in the last 30 years.  We haven't.  That's why clubs have eclipsed us on and off the pitch.  I think our mindset hasn't moved on either.  We can hark back to the days when we gave bloody noses to big clubs and punched well above our weight.  It's all rear view mirror stuff now and whilst they really are halcyon days, we're not going that way.  

I want us to move forward and I want to be better than this current situation.  The ambition is to improve, not to revert back to 1994. We'll never achieve that because it's not in front of us.  Everything has to improve and dramatically if we want to move forward.  It's taking huge effort just to tread water at this level.  Our whole set-up is still, unfortunately, geared towards a third return to the Conference or at best becoming quite stagnant in the middle of League Two.  I'm sorry, it's going to be an unpopular opinion but without a significant impact that's our short-to-medium term future.  That's the point I'm in 100% agreement with Poojah on, there has to be some catalyst to it and for the life of me I don't see anything other than outside investment as achieving that.

We’ve covered this a lot already “attendance” numbers are not that any more for many clubs, although they are for us.

Declared attendances are generally now back at early 60s levels - which, if we had the capacity would put us in the range 9 to 11k for League 1 level. Seems reasonable to assume we could be at that level. Similar to Rotherham now (although I’m pretty sure they are a “tickets sold” club) who are our closest in the overall average.  I’d always thought of us as a bigger club than them in the days of Millmoor and terracing at BP.

Sad to say but I don't see things changing any time soon unfortunately. Becoming competitive at league 1 level seems to be way beyond anything we can get going.

We've got a couple of new bogs to look forward to for next season though so it's not all doom and gloom.