Expectations?

I think @BoingBoing is awaiting an answer to his post, stop the hilarity for just one minute and answer his post, you know you want to.
I’m going to ask you again @Fordy117 because I can’t recall seeing your response. What are YOU doing to tell the club you will not accept mediocrity? Have you renewed your ST yet? Do you intend to? And have you applied to join the board so you can air your concerns?

 

Yes, I have renew my season ticket and am considering spending 3k to be able to tell the board.

 

I'm not going to provide you with a list of names, but I'm happy to point you in the right direction.

The leniency, acceptance and even encouragement of Rahic's regime was best seen everytime Rahic delivered a self serving PR exercise.

Regarding the thread on Rahic's statement issued in September:

One of the most if not the most popular comment on there (19 likes) was a post stating that Rahic's apology won't be enough for some and that we should draw a line under the whole situation for atleast a few weeks.

Others comments include but certainly aren't limited to:

"I think most people's mind is made up and that’s a shame."

"I think he is a sincere man. He wants success and doesn't want to harm the club. He seems genuine enough when I hear him speak"

Those two comments sum up the attitude of many on a 25 page thread.

This attitude was also prevalent on the thread addressing Rahic's interview with Bantamsbanter and even when he wasn't pulling on the heart strings we still had absolute gems like this one:

"I for one want to get out their and state I am excited by the infrastructure work, the signings and the young coach we have.

Well done Edin and team.

Keep up the great work." (12 likes)

Or this

"Good luck to the new regime
I hope it works and I will back it until it dont".

There's plenty on here if you have a look.

Why do i bring this up? ( @How, @BoingBoing ill try to address your posts here). It perfectly highlights the mindset of a good portion of our fans which yes, i do believe has an impact on our success.

We have the fanbase to, at a bare minimum, make a sustained push Into the Championship year in year out. Those who have ambition instilled into them are prepared to take the required action to achieve success. Our fans aren't. They are happy to pay £150 for a season ticket to watch the general shite on display and in turn are happy to accept being a small club, not achieving much and relying on player sales and cup runs for success.Double the prices and attendances will drop off a cliff.
This lack of ambition and small club mentality stems from the general acceptance of rubbish. A complete shift in mindset from everyone assosiated with the club (including the fans) would result in action geared towards that mindset which would in turn give us a much better chance of sustained success. This can't happen for as long as we hail players like Breunker and are prepared to give guys like Rahic their 10th chance whilst slowly watching our club dwindle to nowhere.

It's not about acting like a better fan than everyone else, I'm often guilty of some of the above myself. It's an observation of how i think we can move forward as a club and i fully agreed with Bowyers comments on this sort of thing not too long ago.

 

I still don’t understand how the first part ties in with the second part of your post about cheap tickets and we are theforefore accepting mediocrity? It doesn’t even make sense.

If fans immediately question everyone and everything as you seem to suggest then what difference does that make?

I will say it again. The ticket prices and the amount of fans make no difference to what goes on, on the pitch. You need a good squad and the right football people throughout the club to make it successful.

Where did Boywer support your claims about fans accepting mediocrity?

 

He's saying it's worse than mediocre.

 

Still not answered the fecking question mate. Absolutely nothing to do with ‘defending him’. We just have the same view that you write absolute bullshit and can’t ever back it up...!

 

Get out of here @Park bantam, this phonebox isn’t big enough for the 3 of us

 

So YOU have accepted mediocrity because you’ve done exactly the same as the other 14k that renewed despite the horrors of last season?

Apart from moaning like a 3yr old on a fans forum, you’ve done nothing different to affect matters than the rest of us....!

 

No worries mate. What’s the term for lower than mediocrity. Perhaps I should have just said that, but I couldn’t think of the word other than ‘shit’

 

I don't read the forum with my eyes closed. It's not to say that there was no hard feelings towards Rahic at all, there obviously was.

The point I'm making is that he had far far more support than he should have had and this support was particulary evident during pre season. I'm not talking about the odd poster who was prepared to give him a chance either, i could find you literally hundreds of posts in acceptance or in support of his regime. An attitude of "what's happened has happened, let's see what transpires".

For obvious reasons,the animosity grew once the season had started but it doesn't change the point I'm trying to make. The overall, collective mass outrage came too late in his tenure and there were , given the circumstances and what we knew about Rahic, far too many (but obviously not everyone) supporting his regime until it was too late. Our fan base, as a whole, need to be less tolerant of that sort of stuff.

 

I'm considering it too.

 

that's not what I'm saying. I'll try and break it down for you once more. We, as a fan base, have the power to help us become a far more success club than we are-both in current and historical context. The reason this doesn't happen boils down to a lack of intent from the fans. I don't mean that in a venomous type of way, i think it's a simple fact.

Faithful bantam rightly points this out in another thread. A £4M wage budget and A £2M overspend resulting in a break even point that ultimately isnt enough for sustained success. Would our fans be willing to put an end to this? No, because the solution to it would result in many sacking it off all together, so much so that cheap tickets and the averageness that comes with that is actually seen as a more lucrative alternative. The shift in mindset required to overcome this clear lack of intent/ambition will not happen for as long as we have an acceptance of mediocrity.

 

Yes well the last straw for me was when he sacked Stuart. However, I was looking at his tenure of our club with a critical eye well before. After Wembley, when I heard he was reducing the budget was an alarm bell. We needed to push on from there, we couldn’t have kept all of our squad, but we needed to replace with quality, and we were not going to do that on a reduced budget.

Rumours abounded before that time of the goings on at VP. The video had me startled, where Rupp was more or less accusing staff of dipping their hands in the till. A club within a club. It was hard to hear that our club was so badly run by JR and ML that they allowed that kind of thing to be going on.

Nevertheless, I came on here regularly and TCA, and therefore you do get more info about what is going on rightly or wrongly. However, I do take exception to the now growing momentum of fan blaming for not knowing what was going on, and they were prepared to accept mediocracy; the majority of fans do not visit sites like this, and therefore the ‘word’ takes longer to reach the main
populace. I fail to see even if the majority of fans were not happy with the Rahic tenure how they could change things? It wasn’t until Rupp decided to look into what was going wrong that Rahic was booted out of the door.

Fans over the decades have had a mediocracy attitude to City, in that they are prepared to accept we are a lower league club and do not want to strive for better?? I don’t believe that for one minute, the silent majority do want progress or what is the point? However, we do need sensible progression that can only be achieved through progressive investment in all aspects of the club. Yes I do remember the admins and the long slow recovery, and yet here we are again with gambler Rahic bringing players in on high salaries and long contracts!! at least we had the excitement last time; now all we have is misery on top of misery.

I think the club as we know it has about 2 seasons to make progress, the the support will begin to fall away. Languishing in LG 2 for a club our size is not an option in my view.

Can we stop blaming the fans please? Yes they can vote with their feet, but that in itself will just hasten the club’s demise, they can lambast the board and directors but that also will not make things change. The board need to think long and hard about where we go from here, yes fans are largely onside atm, BUT it will turn very quickly if they do not see a full blown plan A and a plan B to work towards. I fully accept that Stefan probably did not sign up for this kind of involvement, and he may wish to withdraw from his investment, but he now has to go all in and recruit the right ppl to run the club, no more half in and half out. If he isn’t going to do it himself and wants to just supply the money that is ok by me, but he needs at least two ppl fully employed executives to manage this club. There are no guarantees apart from one, if he doesn’t go all in and invest, this club will flounder and he will not receive any monies back from his investment. Stay with us, and properly invest when it is needed, and we may reach success.

 

There is nothing to say increasing prices will increase the break even figure in fact it would taking all the clubs activities reduce it

 

I answered the question. I don't intend to have a slanging match with you, despite how many times you try to goad me.

 

To clarify, asumming we don't want to accumulate masses of debt, we'll be operating not too far off our break even point. Running a tight ship over the years is generally how it's been. Low revenue from season tickets means we meet that figure with not much left over to build a competitive squad. We've never had high budgets naturally. Operate within our means and we go nowhere barring a cup run or player sale.

 

We need a managed debt approach, ie we deliberately go into debt, and pay it off over the the following seasons or season preferably. For instance if we want to push on and add a couple of players of high quality, they we do it in the full knowledge that we pay it off the following season with increased prices.