Erling Braut Haaland

[ForestBlue]

Hope Haaland stays for a few seasons but obviously I hope Everton turn out to be his bogey side who never scores against.

The mark of a big club in my mind is how big their away support is and Citeh always had large away support, even when in the 3 tier of English Football (what ever they called it at the time)

 

[stony]

The counterargument is that you lifted the league title as many times as Burnley, Derby County and Portsmouth prior to the arrival of present ownership. You have the advantages of the cups and not having done all the time in the lower divisions that those clubs did.

Your club is a bit like the less attractive kid sister who aged much better than her hard-living, beauty queen sibling. Give it another five or ten years, and you're probably nailed on to have the kids think you were the beauty queen, and not her.

It's a better position to be in than ours, as the child beauty queen who suddenly got left in the dust by the ugly duckling younger sibling when puberty hit.

Your counter argument arguably contains more nonsense than your original post.

 

[Kurt.]

Always had a lot of respect for Man City and their long standing fans. My mums brother lived in Altringham and was a huge city fan throughout the 70/80/90’s and there was always a large contingent of fans who would travel up from my hometown every week. When city were down in the doldrums for a few years their fan base remained loyal and their crowds were consistent high even down in the lower divisions. I would guess no other club who found themselves in a similar position would have maintained such a high level of core supporters and I don’t think many could do it today, imagine the RS in division 2 … they would be lucky to scrape 15 thousand fans a week, the older city fans will always have my respect.

 

[davids]

Always had a lot of respect for Man City and their long standing fans. My mums brother lived in Altringham and was a huge city fan throughout the 70/80/90’s and there was always a large contingent of fans who would travel up from my hometown every week. When city were down in the doldrums for a few years their fan base remained loyal and their crowds were consistent high even down in the lower divisions. I would guess no other club who found themselves in a similar position would have maintained such a high level of core supporters and I don’t think many could do it today, imagine the RS in division 2 … they would be lucky to scrape 15 thousand fans a week, the older city fans will always have my respect.

That's the measure of a club,your support when you're down. If they were bottom 4 the kopites would go back to supporting Yeovil Town etc.

 

[Kurt.]

That's the measure of a club,your support when you're down. If they were bottom 4 the kopites would go back to supporting Yeovil Town etc.

Yep, I don’t grudge them their success now at all.

 

[Martin Alvito]

Your counter argument arguably contains more nonsense than your original post.

You cherry-picked numbers to support your case relative to the RS, so I cherry-picked numbers in reply. The six European Cups in their trophy cabinet, sadly, are what they are. Suggesting that you have more of a history than they do is, frankly, nonsense.

What strikes me is your sensitivity about the whole thing. Winning solves a lot of problems. You're a club with a sizable local fanbase that didn't have the hardware to suit until recently. You haven't had the players that left an indelible mark on the game.

That's all changing, and it would seem overwhelmingly likely that in the next five to ten years you will have an overall trophy cabinet that's right up there, and a generation of kids out there that have never known the club to be anything but serial winners. That's when you become a destination for the world's top players, rather than a Johnny-come-lately whose success might evaporate if the manager decides to take another sabbatical before taking on a new challenge.

That's the measure of a club,your support when you're down. If they were bottom 4 the kopites would go back to supporting Yeovil Town etc.

This is an interesting perspective, as we don't really think this way on our side of the pond. I suspect this is due to the nature of college sports, which naturally produces large, loyal fanbases for land-grant schools with large enrollments whose programs haven't much accomplished anything. Those teams will sell out large stadiums year after year, win or lose, so having good support is the most basic of expectations.

 

[davids]

You cherry-picked numbers to support your case relative to the RS, so I cherry-picked numbers in reply. The six European Cups in their trophy cabinet, sadly, are what they are. Suggesting that you have more of a history than they do is, frankly, nonsense.

What strikes me is your sensitivity about the whole thing. Winning solves a lot of problems. You're a club with a sizable local fanbase that didn't have the hardware to suit until recently. You haven't had the players that left an indelible mark on the game.

That's all changing, and it would seem overwhelmingly likely that in the next five to ten years you will have an overall trophy cabinet that's right up there, and a generation of kids out there that have never known the club to be anything but serial winners. That's when you become a destination for the world's top players, rather than a Johnny-come-lately whose success might evaporate if the manager decides to take another sabbatical before taking on a new challenge.


This is an interesting perspective, as we don't really think this way on our side of the pond. I suspect this is due to the nature of college sports, which naturally produces large, loyal fanbases for land-grant schools with large enrollments whose programs haven't much accomplished anything. Those teams will sell out large stadiums year after year, win or lose, so having good support is the most basic of expectations.

You don't have relegation as such, just a losing season. And the greater distances involved mean you're going to have to fly hours sometimes to find a winning side to watch live.

 

[stony]

You cherry-picked numbers to support your case relative to the RS, so I cherry-picked numbers in reply. The six European Cups in their trophy cabinet, sadly, are what they are. Suggesting that you have more of a history than they do is, frankly, nonsense.

What strikes me is your sensitivity about the whole thing. Winning solves a lot of problems. You're a club with a sizable local fanbase that didn't have the hardware to suit until recently. You haven't had the players that left an indelible mark on the game.

That's all changing, and it would seem overwhelmingly likely that in the next five to ten years you will have an overall trophy cabinet that's right up there, and a generation of kids out there that have never known the club to be anything but serial winners. That's when you become a destination for the world's top players, rather than a Johnny-come-lately whose success might evaporate if the manager decides to take another sabbatical before taking on a new challenge.


This is an interesting perspective, as we don't really think this way on our side of the pond. I suspect this is due to the nature of college sports, which naturally produces large, loyal fanbases for land-grant schools with large enrollments whose programs haven't much accomplished anything. Those teams will sell out large stadiums year after year, win or lose, so having good support is the most basic of expectations.

An American, that explains everything. My club is almost as old as your country and you say it has no history.

 

[Martin Alvito]

An American, that explains everything. My club is almost as old as your country and you say it has no history.

Ah, so we're all supposed to agree with you on all things cultural, and bow down to your superiority. Small wonder we threw you lot out.

I find that most of the other members of this forum do not share this mentality, which probably has a lot to do with why our countries get on better than we did back then.

 

[stony]

Ah, so we're all supposed to agree with you on all things cultural, and bow down to your superiority. Small wonder we threw you lot out.

I find that most of the other members of this forum do not share this mentality, which probably has a lot to do with why our countries get on better than we did back then.

I said no such thing, stop lying and trying to deflect. You said we had no history. Define that for me? What exactly do you mean by no history?

 

[roydo]

I said no such thing, stop lying and trying to deflect. You said we had no history. Define that for me? What exactly do you mean by no history?

Every club, big, small, has a history. Its a nonsense to suggest otherwise.

Your modern history is a gleaming one. Your ancient (in footie terms), is rather less so. Our modern history is meh. Our ancient one is up there with anyones.

 

[stony]

Every club, big, small, has a history. Its a nonsense to suggest otherwise.

Your modern history is a gleaming one. Your ancient (in footie terms), is rather less so. Our modern history is meh. Our ancient one is up there with anyones.

Football is cyclic, we won't be winning stuff forever. I don't think new foreign fans know this. Especially ones brought up on the American way of sport. No relegation or promotion in over hyped leagues is all they know.

 

[davids]

Football is cyclic, we won't be winning stuff forever. I don't think new foreign fans know this. Especially ones brought up on the American way of sport. No relegation or promotion in over hyped leagues is all they know.

In the States if your support drops a city can lose its franchise,so the stakes are higher. Don't go to the game and spend enough you could find your team playing in another state.

 

[Martin Alvito]

I said no such thing, stop lying and trying to deflect. You said we had no history. Define that for me? What exactly do you mean by no history?

So there's this thing called "reading between the lines". You dismissed my perspective solely on the grounds that I am American. If you appear to be intimating something, and I call that out, I'm neither lying nor trying to deflect.

I suspect that the problem here is American English idiom. "No history" is shorthand for a team or a club whose success is very recent and well outside the norm for the organization. It's not meant to be taken as a literally true statement. It's more a left-handed compliment. A team that has put more trophies in the case in the last few years or decade than it had in the entirety of its past history is one with "no history". It means you're winning, but that there isn't necessarily good reason to believe that success will be sustained long-term.

Teams that have won a lot in the past tend to continue to win, at least here. This is because, by consistently winning, they acquire country-spanning fanbases which produce far more revenue than other teams with more localized fanbases generate. That revenue comes both from direct sales, and from sponsorships. If the team is a flash in the pan ("no history"), the "plastics" as you call them tend to move on quickly when things turn south. As a team builds a longer history of success, that larger fanbase becomes more entrenched and tends to be more loyal through tough times.

As the Premier League has gone global, it has brought that same dynamic into play. You say that football is cyclic. I would tell you that it now is, and likely will be, far less cyclic than in has been in the past. If you want to get and keep a seat at the big table, it can still be done, but it's going to be an uphill sled. Most "no history" teams that slip back down into the mire have their success driven by a player or a manager that moves on. The ones that don't typically have their success driven by a long-term manager in front of a quality back-room organization.

Getting Haaland is the coup that it is because it should enable sustaining the success of the Pep and de Bruyne show for a bit should Pep move on and de Bruyne's form fall off a cliff as he ages. It's one thing to win all the things for a few years, as Pep has, and quite another when that kind of run spans a decade or better, because that kind of run renders it much easier to bounce back from lean times.

 

[Kurt.]

Haaland doing Haaland things ?