I agree. I actually really enjoyed our year down there. Some of the stadiums and match days were great. More than anything though proper fans, committed players who are earning more like normal wages not the premier league where the clubs, managers, players and a lot of fans are out of touch with reality
They only need to look at Coventry, they played Accrington Stanley this season, it had about a 28k attendance, however, most the tickets were freebies! I remember going to see us play them at Northampton, as they had to move out of their ground, what a fall from grace but a decent bunch of fans that didn't go giving it large in the same Wolves did when they came down. I remember going to Wolves early in that season under MadDog, jeez they slaughtered us 4-0! You soon get a feel for it down in the lower leagues if the big clubs are going to go back up or not. It will be interesting to see how Sunderland do that's for sure.
With a settled board, clearly I'd fancy us to bounce straight back up. People are basing their arguments for us bouncing back just because of the size of our club, the reality is we don't have a penny to spend and we'll be shipping the few half decent players out that we have left. Going down again is a real possibility if Ellis Short doesn't sell the club in the next few months. I'd say we'll probably be about mid-table, next season.
I'm guessing most top clubs need to clear out their playing staff once they come down to L1, and you will need to maintain the attendances to account for any expenditure under the rules. Even Blackburn who look to have nearly secured their return to the Championship did it with an Ex Gills and player of the season Bradley Dack and we only got 750k for him! As you say Saf the reality is you need to ship your players out. I think Charlton hold the record fee for L1 player transfer, @Tobes would know more about that, because i think he went to Everton. But you never see those sort of figures coming in, tops is about £1M with the exception of half a dozen players in history. I remember us getting Cody McDonald, biggest problem was his wages, I think it was Norwich and Coventry both held on to him but he rarely got off the bench, they eventually saw sense, obviously this was before Coventry's demise.
I think our attendances will be about 20 thousand, next season. If we are doing ****e expect that to drop to about 15k, if we runaway with the league we'll get over 40 thousand for a game or two.
Matth is simply naively wrong here. There's not a set of fans in the world who wouldn't take the piss out of an opposing team who start celebrating winning something only to then suddenly find out they haven't. It is intrinsically a funny situation to everyone else. It's also nowhere near as harsh (or odd) as when fans taunt other teams getting relegated. I still dislike Villa when they cheered us going down in 2009 as it seemed to come from nowhere, there's lots of sets of fans I would have expected it from but we had no previous with Villa. In truth what they did was also normal, even if I think it's far harsher to turn up with pre-done banners celebrating the demise of another team. Oh well, they have their own issues now.
Easy there buddy ... there is an extremist sect that really wouldn't approve of that ... real nutters ... the Always Ultras ... coat please
