Club in crisis! Wish someone had told me…
By: Dan Clough | September 27th, 2007
Chris O from Some People Are On The Pitch believes Rovers are in a crisis!
Yes, fair enough, we only had 9,205 at our game last night. But it was the Beer cup on a Wednesday night in a small town.
“After The Blues’ first Champions League game of the season attracted a crowd of ‘only’ 24,973″
That’s Chris comparing Chelsea to Rovers…
“If you’re looking for a more serious situation than that, turn your attention towards Blackburn Rovers.
In the Premier League last season, Blackburn’s Ewood Park stadium was, on average, filled to only 68% of its 31,154 capacity - the lowest of all clubs in the top flight. That works out at an average home attendance of 21,271, but if you take the average from all Blackburn’s UEFA Cup ties played at home last year, the figure drops to 17,592.
It’s therefore unfair to point to the empty seats at Chelsea in their match against Rosenborg claiming a crisis is unfolding. For a real crisis, head up the M6 and look for the Blackburn turn-off.”
I do believe that there is a sizeable difference between Rovers and the Russian billionaire owned Chelsea.
Chelsea is in London, it’s a big place. Blackburn is a small place.
This complaint about Rovers not having enough fans is really starting to bore me now.
Category: Misc
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I know how you feel mate
Posted from
United Kingdom
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here here
Posted from
United States -
Hi… Hope you don’t mind but I thought I’d just drop by to explain my article. Essentially I was trying to stick up for Chelsea (against my nature being a West Ham fan) because on this one-off occasion they had a largely empty stadium against Rosenborg.
Believe it or not, I’ve got nothing against Blackburn at all (apart from the fact that you guys keeping beating us!) It’s just that I did some research into how well-filled the Premier League stadia were last season, and Wigan (along with Blackburn) didn’t fare too well.
I went on to write an article where I asked why the JJB stadium was often very empty in parts, and the Wigan fans were very keen to explain the reasoning behind it - using very harsh language at times.
Yet the result of it was a good, healthy discussion about how difficult it is to attract fans to the ground on match days and I learned a lot from it, particularly about Wigan Athletic itself.
I was therefore hoping to generate something similar in relation to Blackburn. If I offended any Rovers fans like yourself, I apologise. I would, however, be grateful to hear your thoughts on the subject, either here or on my blogsite - http://www.spaotp.com.
Thanks and regards… Chris O.
Posted from
United Kingdom -
Fair enough mate.
To give you my opinion on Wigan:
Wigan is a rugby town and always has been. The football team was not very good until a couple of years ago when they were bought by a rich ex-Rover! All of a sudden they find themselves in the Premiership but the majority of the town don’t care.Rovers attendances are disappointing granted. But the size of Blackburn as a town is only small. In fact the majority of fans come from nearby towns Darwen, Oswaldtwistle, Church and Accrington. Blackburn has a large Muslim community and, to quite a large extent, they don’t go to football. On top of this, as Rovers struggled through the 70’s and 80’s more and more locals supported Man Utd, Man City, Liverpool, Everton and other local teams. The north west dominates football in terms of the amount of teams in the Premier League and it has become hard to attract fans to the small town unfashionable club.
Jack Walker’s takeover and the glory that followed improved the amount of people coming to Ewood but, as the money stopped flowing, we started to struggle and went down. A lot of people stopped going around this time and I would say we lost a lot of fans at that time. (Fickle I know but that’s football and it happens to most clubs when they go from success to failure in a short period of time).
I welcome your comment and apologise if my post came across in a hostile manner, it’s just that you must understand I am merely another fan of the small-town club getting small attendances and don’t like to hear people moaning about it.
Dan
Posted from
United Kingdom -
Thanks for your reply Dan. No hard feelings?
Your come-back was exactly what I was hoping for - informative and interesting. Re: Wigan, I learned that apparently any tickets for home fans that aren’t sold during the week are not sold on matchdays. That was news to me… I was also told that although their attendances may not be large, they are rising more rapidly than most, if not all other clubs. That told me!
Very good point you make about the Muslim community. I personally hope that they *do* start going to matches more and more often as they’d undoubtedly add something to the atmosphere at each game.
Shame that a lot of fans jumped ship when the glory days ended but good to see there’s still a hard core that keep turning up through thick and thin. I recently worked with a Blackburn supporter who was Albanian and he would always travel up from London whenever he could to see the occasional game. Just the sort of thing we like to see, eh?
Anyway, please accept my apologies if I rather clumsily opened up the debate on this subject but thanks so much for taking my (probably badly worded) argument on the chin and giving such a good reply. It’s been good talking to you…
Best of luck against Sunderland today -
Regards, Chris O.
Posted from
United Kingdom
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