Most liked posts in thread: Three years of crap when will it end

I used to follow Bradford city home and away, all over, whenever we played, in league one and two. But the past couple of seasons have got me so disenchanted I’m genuinely losing interest and falling out of love with the football club I’ve loved all my life. I feel sad about it. It’s not just the performances on the pitch but there’s a complete lack of ambition, communication, belief and even care from top to bottom. This doesn’t feel like our City anymore.

 

Not only has Rupp and Rahic taken us backwards, now under their watch I don't even enjoy watching city anymore. No direction, no plan no nothing. Just survive and take peoples money to get through to another year of aimless drifting. ST's down? Let's hire Stuart again! The treatment of stuart in not being supported with a scouting team, much like not even letting bowyer have an assistant, shows that we'll make a big song and dance about backing managers but as usual we're expecting them to do the job with one arm tied behind their back. Mccall was a panic recruitment to keep fans on side exactly like last time, so yet again we now have to watch him tarnish his legacy to keep the pressure off the owners. Not even mad anymore just sad at how shit we are and continue to be.

 

we've also had a mute director of communications since we beat a non-league side..

 

Agreed, I've mentioned it before.

If your boss is pretty much telling you that he's happy to accept plodding along and mediocrity then how many people, hand on heart, are going to put the extra in just to pick up the same wage?

Ambition, desire and especially drive has to start at the very top so ask yourself, has Rupp or Rhodes shown us any sign of this offer the latest few years of decline?

Edin was rightly hammered for his role in all this but at least he had the b0ll0cks to be visible and stood up to be counted when the flak was flying. Imo, these two cowards steering clear of anything remotely like communication probably makes them even worse.

 

Problem is you can’t trust Julian Rhodes to find an adequate replacement for McCall. The club can’t continue to just say ‘it’s all Edin Rahic’s fault’ it’s just a update for Captain Admin’s old line of ‘it’s all Geoffrey Richmond’s fault’ line he used from for over 12 years. Until changes above are made, we will continue to rot. Relegation is a real outcome for this season. If that happens we are no more and that will be Rupp’s fault...not Julian Rhodes’ because he is blameless in the eyes of his little gang of happy clappers.

Supporting City is like an abusive relationship. You know you need to move on and avoid further pain, but you can’t. Well without the visits to VP it’s getting easy to switch off IFollow...

 

And you’re far from alone. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the next 9 months. Unless we get the right person in to replace Rhodes and deploy a forward thinking plan that completely rebuilds from next summer - manager, players, scouting and recruitment - I’m not sure we’ll ever recover. We’ll continue to flounder and relegation will come within a year or two. And even if not, the level of apathy amongst our fan base will grow and the club will just continue to die off. What incentive do the next generation of young fans have to buy into and support this club? None. We’ve become a laughing stock.

And such is the scale of rebuild needed, that the groundwork for next summer needs laying NOW. An update on the CEO position is needed, the club needs to be talking about the plans it has going forward. A manager change needs to happen to allow the new man a chance to bed in before the summer.

 

I don’t think it’s possible to understate this about the club. Much longer of this apathy and STs will dwindle, the children of those who have moved to Leeds, up the Aire Valley or further away won’t give a shite or won’t travel to games and that’s the club done.

There’s no USP to City, sure you get City for All bollocks but what do they are they a community clubs like Accrington or Salford? Ambitious and wanting to bring youth through to sell like Exeter? The Bulls did a great job 25 years ago in getting big crowds to Odsal and putting on a show. No matter what you think of RL, people attended and in big numbers.
There is so much demand for people’s attention and money these days they need to stand out but they stand still whilst former non league clubs like Harrogate, Accy, Wycombe, Newport, Salford outsmart us. I think we’re safe from relegation this season but we’re another summer of piss poor recruitment away from a relegation fight that may well kill the club.

 

Isn’t the biggest worry that the new CEO whenever he does start is a Rhodes clone.After all Rupp is still the owner and all major appointments will have to be sanctioned by him.He is not going to appoint some maverick with radical ideas like spending money,transfer structures,scouting systems etc.While he is the one with the purse strings I cannot see the major running of the club changing dramatically anytime soon.

 

My daughter was doing exactly this kind of work very successfully as a media intern for arts and sports bodies FIVE years ago! We are such a dinosaur club in so many ways. More afraid of social media than embracing and properly using it to our advantage. Rubbish at communication and thus, as ever, totally taking our fan base for granted. Covid has changed a lot of things and I don't think for a moment the powers that be at VP even begin to understand that swathes of fans around the land have not only got used to not watching live football, they've found many other more meaningful things to do and spend their money on. It's going to be a totally new landscape when fans can go back to watch football - and the club is naive if they think 8,9 or 10,000 plus fans are going to come back to buy season tickets no matter how cheap. Apart from anything else, the McCall honeymoon is well and truly over and that won't help em either. We need upskilling, upscaling and becoming a proper professional outfit in every single bloody way!

 

We've got a mute owner who couldn't show more disinterest if he tried

 

It's so blindingly obvious that it is boring now. The club is quick enough to chirp when things are looking good (See McCall-ball tweet after beating Mansfield 3-1) but when the chips are down its radio silence. A rudderless enterprise.

Even simple things like updates with the tunnel or the new dugouts would be nice. Show the fans that we have plans and are executing on them. And then other areas of the club - social media, where are the player interviews? And I don't mean the pre-match ones on a Thursday with the same old regurgitated rubbish (We go again ) , I mean engaging social media content - 10 questions with player X, think Soccer AM/MOTDx type content. Things the fans can engage with and relate to. There is so much scope for the club to be much cuter about the way they go about things and much of it is so bloody simple (And cheap to boot!) that it is incredibly frustrating that they simply do not bother/care to.

That being said, all the above is irrelevant if they cannot get the infrastructure in place to get a competitive team out in L2 - but that's been covered to death.

 

The biggest issue for me is that when tickets were full price we had a hard core of maybe 5 to 6 thousand. Now tickets are half price and if we continue in the same rudderless direction we could find ourselves back to that hard core figure yet with the income slashed in half. Then to compensate we'll probably say we have to increase ticket prices and even some of the hard core will fall away. This will leave us in a vicious circle where we can't afford to attract new fans with lower prices and at the same time have regular fans dropping away because we have to raise them.

The board really should have been forward planning (yeah I know) and raised ticket prices gradually for the last 3 or 4 years to a realistic level and at least given us a chance of maintaining a reasonable income for when the inevitable reality from the mismanagement started to bite.

 

He could appoint Priti as head coach. She wouldn't be averse to dishing out the bollockings

 

I'm a striker for Bradford City
What are those metal posts with mesh in them

 

Hi I am Dylan and I can run really fast, really really fast.

 

Hi i am Ben.You will never guess who I got to pay my legal fees.

 

The silence is deafening

 

He is a deluded beggar, ‘I’ve identified a suitable replacement’, Rhodes needs to show some nadds and do one Monday morning instead of being Rupps smokescreen on this unmitigated disaster.