Also correct, some idiota thought the 20 minute sell-out was due to it being the game we were crowned champions but we all knew inside that we had to get a chance to see the massive leeds in action
Looks like I've entered a whole new world of choice - but as its taken me 20 minutes to highlight one line and I have inadvertently posted the same thing twice, I may not use it that often
I don't think match-going Leeds fans are fickle at all. There are a lot of people in Leeds who nominally do support the club, but never go to games, but I'd put them in a different category, no offence to them intended. When we got demoted from the Premiership, people didn't want to be ripped off and pay top-end, top flight prices for average, second-tier football. I've continued to go, but there are tens (probably hundreds) of thousands of Leeds fans who can't justify it any more. Take any football club in the world and the pattern would be the same if they'd gone through the ****e we have. And note that our away support has held strong ever since our initial relegation, the worst years being 05-07 where we still had one of the highest away averages for the division despite them being disappointing numbers by our usual standards. Ridsdale didn't improve Elland Road; the last time the ground had proper work done before Bates' "improvements" was when it became all-seater in the early 90s as per the Taylor rulings, and the East Stand was built. As for the 70s/80s, I can't say. With the way football was back then, I don't think there was a single club in the country that didn't lose a large section of its home crowds, and if you add the relegation drop you'd expect for any club in the world, 65% makes sense. Again, there was an element of protest and boycott back in those days, I think, with protests against a number of managers and chairmen who failed to get us out of the second division. So that might account for some of the dip in attendance as well. Ultimately, the difference between a club like Leeds and one like QPR is that we're supported nationally and internationally. I doubt that more than 50% of our fanbase comes from, or has links to Leeds. With QPR, I'd be surprised if that figure weren't 80-90%. And that makes a big difference in terms of how consistent your attendances would be, but doesn't mean that your match-going fans are particularly more loyal, or ours more fickle. And I'd say the actual passion levels of the two sets of supporters, if you compare them... well, it's just obvious which club comes above the other.
What do you think we've gone through? Despite all that, in % terms we've never come close to losing as many hardcore fans as you have. Again you're evading the question. How many of your "fans" became fans on the back of money your club spent which it never had and never paid back? And of all the cash generated in the Golden Years, how much of it went on redeveloping your ground? We didn't have someone as shady fronting our club so we're still stuck with the ground we've had for the best part of 40 years. (Reduced capacity of course due to all-seating and not having the money to move.) But hey you earned it right? You were all there right behind the club when you were living the dream. Then when the bill came in.......
That is actually a real and proper football fans reply. Fair play to you Jerel, I have all the time in the world for real football fans. You could of reacted to the piss taking but you didn't. Fair play to you mate.
A drop, yes, but not one as dramatic as ours from Champions League semi-finalists to mid-table League One within eight years. Sorry, I didn't deal with those in my initial post, but edited it in the meantime when I think you must have been writing the above. I answered the percentage and ground improvement points in that redaction.
Regarding your redevelopment, when I dug those stats out, I remember there being a huge upswing in attendance in the Risdale years. I did put that down to redevelopment, if I'm wrong on that front apologies. However, my point about the fan-base (international as well as domestic) you generated during the glory years stands. It was all achieved on cash you never had or repaid. This gamble gave you a huge international profile. One you'd never have enjoyed slogging away in the middle reaches of the Prem or the second tier living within your means. All we're saying is that you consider not only do you come from a place where you're the only attraction in town in football terms but that we're playing a massive game of catch-up in every way imaginable. The stadium is one thing. I'm guessing you've got a decent youth set-up? We haven't. We had no way of financing one. Decent training facilities? Ditto.
The only things Ridsdale added were a couple of exec boxes and a better banqueting suite. The upswing in crowds was down to a lot of the edgy stuff from the 70s, 80s and early 90s vanishing and the clean, young, pure-white-shirted O'Leary team coming through, the public face of a rebranded club (literally, in terms of our new badge). Along with that there was extensive community work which brought back ethnic minorities and young fans who would have looked at other clubs in the 80s. That outreach has sadly vanished since the Bates Era began. That fanbase was almost entirely generated during the Revie and Wilkinson years. Ask most non-local Leeds fans of my age (i.e. the ones that grew up during the Ridsdale Era) how came to support the club and the answer will almost always, in my experience, be 'my dad started supporting them in the 70s'. Realistically, we were never successful for long enough to retain the generation of impressionable youngsters at the turn of the millennium. If we'd won some silverware, maybe things would have been different. But when the fall came, a lot of those kids opted for their local side or Arsenal/Liverpool/Chelsea. So I don't think it's fair to claim our international fanbase comes from unserviced debts. It was rather from cynical hacking back in the 70s. The root point of contention appears to be your claim that QPR fans are by and large more loyal than Leeds fans. I don't see how the things you're mentioning have any effect on that. They're all things that should be conducive to a good team, but our Chairman is preventing that from happening. If he leaves and someone competent takes over who can reconnect the football club with the city, maybe we'll see people coming back to Elland Road. But there's no out-of-the-ordinary level of ficklety at Leeds.
Ouch, poor bugger working on a Saturday! Yeah, just reply whenever you feel like it. I disappeared from the last thread without trace and I won't bat an eyelid if you reserve your right to do that on this one.
