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The ladies game is the tip of the iceberg. We've also seen buses bearing their advertising in Gloucester too. DV knows he has to do a hard sell in Gloucester to get the numbers to fill his new stadium. We should be considering high-visibility community work - not just run-of-the-mill football camps and we should also campaign around 'support your home-town club'. We still have a problem of local people not even knowing we're in the city and watching PL or FGR because of the level of football we play at. Local people don't believe the club is going anywhere. We spent 70 years in SL and are the longest serving club at this level. Promotion to NL has to be the minimum we need to achieve to interest people. The blunt truth is that FGR are EFL and we're not. Thankfully their woeful record in L1 and relegation has slightly taken the gloss off them. I wonder if our new owners are aware of the threat on their doorstep.
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FGR have had my daughter's Quedgeley Wanderers team over as mascots a couple of times (sadly we've been "busy" every time). Half-price tickets for parents. Their ladies team players coming to training and signing shirts. Now 3 or 4 of the players go and watch FGR regularly.
Leaves a bad taste in the mouth for sure. But what are we as a club doing to counter it? I haven't seen any community outreach for a long time.
Something to think about for next season.
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They don’t care Neil, we think we are something in this City but we aren’t in afraid, 13 years is a long time and we’ve been overtaken. As others have said, we need to counter it, unfortunately we don’t seem to have made many inroads in 3 years of being home.
“There’s a mole. Right at the top of the circus. He’s been there for years.”
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There's one easy solution to raising the clubs' profile in the city. Achieve a decent run in the FA Cup - into the 3rd round, get a home (or away) draw against one of the 'big boys' - that'll make folk sit up and take notice, even if we do lose the match 17-0.
Except that - it's not so easy as we don't usually bother with the FA Cup too much....
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I suppose we can take some solace from the fact that more often than not they take the free tickets and don't go back when they have to pay.
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I have hope that the new regime will get this outreach sort of thing right. Or at least have a consistent approach to it.
Local teams at every men's first team home game as a bare minimum. Start from the floor up and put in foundations to support this. Need to walk before we can run.
Let's frame the threat from FGR correctly. Their ambition is to move to a stadium with a maximum capacity of 5,000. That might be sufficient for a League 2 club and will probably see them sustaining at that level. Then the underlying threat as to what happens when Vince goes (and he will.. no matter how long that may be). What's our collective ambitions? League 2 minimum..
We've got more going for us if we get things right. That's Patrick and Nicky's job now.
We have made some inroads since our return. Plenty of people I've not seen before at every home game.
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This ^
Bloody hell, you've got good eyesight!
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But isn’t that just favouring them because that’s who your daughter plays for? Or is it more nuanced than that?
“There’s a mole. Right at the top of the circus. He’s been there for years.”
