While Plymouth sleeps...

[Guiri Green]

It galls me to say it Dalton is God but Plymouth does not have much more going for it than Exeter. Some advantages certainly but it is hardly the more prosperous city of the two. I think Plymouth needs a significant upgrade to its rail connection and that's just for starters. Thankfully our football club is far better.

Forget the rail. It is a viable airport that it really needs. Not a grass runway, either!

We have an airport just 40 minutes away by road. That’s a lot less than I could get to the airport when I lived in London. What we need are better public transport links to it from Plymouth.

Exactly what I've been saying for a long time. It's currently easier and cheaper to use Bristol.

Great if you have a car or relatives to collect you, but I have neither, and nor would your average businessman be willing to spend £250+ on a cab or 2 hours on a train/bus.

Correct, but it's still easier for a non business traveller to get to Bristol Airport from Plymouth 24/7 without a car than it is to get to Exeter Airport. Over 60s is not much over a Tenner on the Coach, with a journey time which is about 45 minutes longer than driving yourself.

If someone else was paying, ie your average businessman, then use Exeter. I've used it and had one way hire cars to get to Plymouth. I wasn't paying so didn't care.

 

[Guiri Green]

I don't see that happening, because our core support up to now is based on only ever having second tier football. Effectively you have a core support that hasn't seen ANY success (unfortunately third tier championships just don't count as success for a city this size).

Overwhelming evidence from clubs like Swansea, Hull, Reading etc etc shows that once you're in the top flight your core support absolutely balloons thereafter. Because you've attracted a load of people in the first place, you've kept a decent percentage of them as core supporters, and you've also shown the wider population that the club is capable of great things, which in our case would be shattering the 'same old Argyle' curse. Having a great place to watch the football helps as well, especially with families and kids.

Us with our second and third tier yo-yoing and rotting grandstand wondering why we can't attract as big a fanbase as Norwich and Wolves, is like me wondering why Scarlett Johansson isn't banging on my bedroom door.

That Core Support of some of the Clubs we feel are comparable in size will slowly evaporate the longer they stay away from the League that created it. Eventually, not far off from where they started.

 

[Quintrell Green]

Speculating on a future gate attendance means little, when I read in my paper that the Derby County owner will sell his historic club for £1 just to get rid of it. The English owner is losing up to £2m per month. This situation exists for a team in the top quartile of The Championship, with a young manager with a fantastic International and club playing pedigree , who a lot of clubs would crawl over broken glass to have as their coach.

 

[Rokerite]

Speculating on a future gate attendance means little, when I read in my paper that the Derby County owner will sell his historic club for £1 just to get rid of it. The English owner is losing up to £2m per month. This situation exists for a team in the top quartile of The Championship, with a young manager with a fantastic International and club playing pedigree , who a lot of clubs would crawl over broken glass to have as their coach.

Yes, but Mel Morris followed the path of so many businessmen who buy football clubs; he left his business brain at the door. Since 2015, when he became sole owner, he has pumped £161,000,000 of his own money into Derby County with just a couple of failed play-off semi-finals to show for it. Was Pride Park not a 33,000 all seater stadium, with average crowds of nearly 29,000 during Morris's ownership, he'd have been even poorer.

 

[Shankster]

The fact is that without a new wealthy benefactor all of this is pure speculation. The new stand and its associated amenities will serve to keep the club at a stable platform BUT will not achieve more than that, what it does do is make the club more attractive to potential benefactors which I think is why it’s being completed at all

 

[999mattyg]

Are we any more remote than Hull, Swansea, Norwich? Even Carlisle, arguably the country’s most remote city, once achieved top flight status.

And remoteness isn't necessarily a bad thing. A successful Plymouth Argyle would have a large pool with no other fishes of a comparable size in it. It's much better than being one of the numerous Lancashire clubs with only a few miles between them and the big four from Liverpool/Manchester close by.

Unfortunately many premier league clubs have large scouting networks down here, Southampton for one!

 

[justanotherfan]

I think that clubs like Argyle suffer from the Sky effect, a check of the 74/75 season for instance, shows us with gates up to 23000 + at home, I feel that these figures would be difficult if not impossible to replicate since the advent of 24 hour (seems like) PL.

 

[oddball]

Derek 28000 for the Blackburn game on a cold dark winter's evening....the fans turned up but the board did not put that revenue into team strengthening....has been the same ever since...

 

[IJN]

Yeah. How dare they maintain the ground, pitch, floodlights etc etc.

 

[Army green]

Our stadium will only hold 18k before any segregation. The stadium would be pretty full for most games in the championship in my opinion. We average around 10k while struggling to stay in the 3rd tier. It’s prety good to be fair. Especially for a club that has achieved fudge all. We won’t be troubling any of the top two leagues any time soon anyway, we will be talking about potential for the next 25years just like we have been for the past 25 years I’ve been supporting our underachieving club.

 

[IJN]

If you've been supporting our club for the last 25 years why on Earth would you think that we'd sell out for most games in the Championship?

 

[Shankster]

Averaged 10k? Hahahah

 

[Army green]

The words I used was pretty full, I didn’t say sell out. Again if you read the post I said we are getting 10k while battling to stay in the 3rd tier. Therefore i would suggest we could pull in a few thousand more if we was in the championship. Especially when including away attendances. Interest seems to have grown since we was last in the 2nd tier. That’s why.

 

[Army green]

Averaged 10k? Hahahah

What’s funny? That’s roughly what our average attendance will be by the time the season finishes won’t it?

 

[justanotherfan]

Derek 28000 for the Blackburn game on a cold dark winter's evening....the fans turned up but the board did not put that revenue into team strengthening....has been the same ever since...

I think that`s a tad simplistic Alf, my point is that we live in an age of instant gratification and it is easier to sit in your lounge and watch the PL rather than come and experience live football. A team owned by an oil sheikh or russian oligarch, managed by a frenchman or spaniard, peopled by representatives of the united nations, representing some major city that said fans will probably never visit seems to be the order of the day. Lower league and grass roots football is for imbeciles like us, will we never learn, hopefully not. :twisted: