Would you be happy with this guy in charge

From 1980 until 2000 Burnley averaged gates lower than City. That is a 20 year spell. Potential is just that. It is what you can achieve, rather than what you have already done.
In your penultimate sentence, you clarify that money has achieved success. Well perhaps a model akin to Burnley? They are not owned by super wealthy owners.

 

Agree. Look at the personal wealth of Garlick as opposed to Rupp and it is a none starter (although the Tordoff family totally top trump both of them together). I guess clubs like Fleetwood and Burton have hit their ‘glass ceiling’ and cannot go much further. City does have a large catchment area, so could, with the correct management and business model, go further.

 

You're missing a very important aspect of the Burnley model and it has nothing to do with their gates relative to ours. Garlick gambled big time when Burnley were already in the Championship. He and a guy called Banacjek (or something similar sounding) put up a not insignificant amount of their own money and invested it in Burnley's infrastructure and playing squad. That's not unlike what other owners have done, including Hoyle at Town. The kicker, and this is very different from what other clubs have done, Garlick assembled a group of wealthy Burnley fans and got them to invest yet more funds into the club via a bond. This is little more than an IOU. The IOU would be honoured, if and only when Burnley were promoted. If they weren't promoted, the bond was virtually worthless attracting only a small interest payment. Had the gamble not paid off, all of the investors including the owners would have lost their investment for all intents and purposes and would have had to repeat what they'd done the following season and so on, just like Hoyle and many other owners have had to do. Fortunately for Garlick and the others, their gamble paid off, Burnley gained promotion to the PL at the end of the season and the IOU was subsequently repaid. Had the gamble not paid off, nobody would be talking about the Burnley model since it would have had exactly the same outcome as the Forest model or the Brentford model or the Boro model.

These approaches have little to do with potential and everything to do with pumping money from owners and in Burnley's case wealthy fans' pockets into their clubs hoping the manager can turn their 'investment' into success.

 

No, it was very different. The Rhodes bought into the shareholding of the club much of which went to repay the then owner for the loan he had made to the club to pay its outstanding tax bill. More importantly, the club borrowed money from a whole series of investment banks, commercial banks and leasing companies to fund our promotion push and consolidate us in the PL. These banks weren't in it as fans and certainly weren't willing to write off their investment if it had failed; they would want to be repaid at some point. It took a couple of administrations and the sale of VP and the offices and shop to get some of their loans repaid. And that's why we are in the lower echelons today

 

The gulf in money between the PL and even the Championship is enormous. You're right about the PL... in part. A relegated club will receive about £100 mill for failure! The missing part is that they will also receive another £90 mill over the next three years to give them a good chance of bouncing back to the land of plenty, aka the PL. That's what the rest of the Championship clubs who don't receive parachute payments are up against. And access to the PL and the money sloshing arond there and of course the kudos attached to it is why there is a string of Championship owners still willing to splash the cash in the hope of joining their mates in the land of plenty.

For the long term good of the game, I agree that there has to be a better distribution of the money within the English pyramid. Unfortunately that will require the support of the PL itself and all of its member clubs to change the distribution formulae. I don;t see it happening soon. There are too many vested interests.

 

I recognise that gates, although important to many supporters and to generate a positive match day experience, are in financial terms of lesser importance. I guess what I am saying is that Bradford City should/could have the same potential as those that I identified in #92. In respect of Burnley, then I anticipate that their fan base is similar to ours. So anything Burnley supporters can do, then surely Bradford City supporters can do? In regard to Forest, Brentford and Middlesbrough, then I would be quite content to be playing them in the Championship, always with the potential of making it back into the big time (exceptionally unlikely I accept).

 

The 'six weeks of madness' certainly didn't help with our financial position. But the damage had already been done before that. GR liked to focus everybody's attention on those player issues and how he'd been wrong by implication to recruit Carbone, Ward et al. But the reality is the club paid out more in dividends to GR and the Rhodes than it did in those six weeks of madness. That's what precipitated the financial issues and the six weeks of madness made the position worse.

It's difficult to work out precisely whether we would have gone into Admin 1 if those six weeks hadn't happened. We had debt hanging heavily around our necks long before the six weeks and that was compounded by paying out nearly £8 mill in dividends to the owners. When we entered Admin 1, we had total debts of £36 mill and even if those 6 weeks ultimately cost us around £10 mill, imo we'd still have had debts around the £26 mill mark which we couldn't afford to payback. On balance, and this is my conjecture, without the six weeks of madness, we might have had a little breathing space but the first admin would have happened anyway because of all of the debts we had and the money taken out of the business by GR and co. But that doesn't make such good reading as blaming it on the six weeks of madness!

 

Scarily you omitted Wigan from your list! Not a football ‘town’, with no long standing history of success, and certainly a deprived former mining area. They had eight seasons in the Premiership, from 2005-2012.
Blackpool had a season in the Premiership 2010/2011.
Slightly further back Oldham were a top flight club at the start of the 1990’s and were founder members of the Premiership.
I struggle to understand how they could rise to the top, and all except Oldham are a league above. The majority of the ‘small Lancashire clubs’ you mentioned are in the Championship.