Championship 23/24

[Cet Homme Charmant]

2 hours ago, SassenachTon said:

Big-Spending Raith.

I just wanted to grab the honour of being the first forum member to follow the correct etiquette as you wisely suggested. We really need to adopt a similar policy for all of our opponents for the forthcoming season. Suggestions anyone?

Plucky wee Partick 

[TRVMP]

3 hours ago, Alibi said:

Not going to gloat given we’ve been there ourself. Anyway does that mean they start next season with a 25 point deduction?

The current rules are -15 in the current season, then -5 the season after that.

[TONofmemories]

Send them spiraling back to whatever country bumpkin hovel they came from. 

 

They could of course cut costs and get an all singing, all dancing portakabin as changing facilities. Fit for vermin i believe. 

[Alibi]

8 hours ago, TRVMP said:

The current rules are -15 in the current season, then -5 the season after that.

Pretty pointless (pun intended) deducting 15 points from an already relegated team, but it might have meant Arbroath would have been in the playoff position. However after the season has finished, would any penalty not be applied to the following season? Especially as they’re not in administration yet.

[Greacen2000]

2 hours ago, Alibi said:

Pretty pointless (pun intended) deducting 15 points from an already relegated team, but it might have meant Arbroath would have been in the playoff position. However after the season has finished, would any penalty not be applied to the following season? Especially as they’re not in administration yet.

I would have assumed that since 23/24 season is already finished, any "current season" penalties would be applied to 24/25.

[Alibi]

I see Scott Gardiner has resigned as ICT chief exec.  Jumped before he was pushed.

[mcintyre_gmfc]

Thistle sign Kyle Turner, and are set to sign both Logan Chalmers and Shaun Byrne. Flashing the cash up Maryhill. 

[TRVMP]

9 hours ago, Alibi said:

Pretty pointless (pun intended) deducting 15 points from an already relegated team, but it might have meant Arbroath would have been in the playoff position. However after the season has finished, would any penalty not be applied to the following season? Especially as they’re not in administration yet.

The "Season" (as defined by the league) ends on the day of the last league match. Admittedly we're in the "Close Season" now. Therefore the 15 points will apply to next season, 2024-25.

In England it works differently; they have a system where, if you go into admin, and you were going to be relegated anyway, they'd hold back the deduction for the following season. That's how Wigan went down in 2020. They finished outside the bottom three, therefore the 12-point spenalty was applied, and that saw them relegated by two points.

SPFL rules:

[Jamie_M]

1 hour ago, mcintyre_gmfc said:

Thistle sign Kyle Turner, and are set to sign both Logan Chalmers and Shaun Byrne. Flashing the cash up Maryhill. 

Mods.

[RossMcC1874]

Is this plucky wee Partick thistle who are strapped for cash. 

All good players tbh but Turner spends more time on the deck than playing horrible wee rodent he will fit in well up there. 

[Cet Homme Charmant]

16 hours ago, RossMcC1874 said:

Is this plucky wee Partick thistle who are strapped for cash. 

All good players tbh but Turner spends more time on the deck than playing horrible wee rodent he will fit in well up there. 

Mods, stamp this shite out once and for all.

[ChampTon]

It's wildly depressing to see other clubs sell season tickets like hot cakes. I understand Raith and Falkirk had good seasons, but Raith are pushing 1000 sold on the first day. 

Is it simply a fact that our fan base is on it's last legs, the current financial climate in the area or that the club don't do more to bring fans in? I'm assuming it's a mix of those and other factors.

Our social media presence is much better but it really feels like what it should have been 5/10 years ago. We haven't really caught up with the "fun and engaging" tweeting in the world of football twitter, however cringe it may appear. 

[Ton in Shawlands]

No Science to it but I've been going to games at Cappielow since the late 70's,  slightly & left the area in the mid eighties. The area has been on a downward population spiral for several  decades (Peak in the 50's?), so catchment is down. The last generation to see top flight football saw it 36 years ago, much further back than most of our 'rivals'. As the hard-core attracted by earlier success get older (I'm hitting 60) & potential new fanbase drops with population, well, really go figure. Morton really needs something to happen.

[dunning1874]

It's very likely going to be cyclical with Raith. Their support and season ticket sales were no better than ours two seasons ago, but they got a positive mood among the support after a takeover then those new owners spent an absolute fortune putting a winning team on the park, with the results and title challenge which followed feeding into growing the fanbase. Maybe this is going to be a permanent shift, but it's far more likely that this growth will last exactly as long as title challenging does - if they go back to midtable obscurity they go back to crowds around the same level as us and Ayr, perhaps retaining 5 or 10% of those who started going regularly when they were good.

While you can ask why our own excellent runs of form haven't brought crowds out to the same degree, we've also had poor to dreadful first quarters in the last two seasons; then when fans did start coming out in numbers for the Partick game casual fans were met with missing the first 20 minutes of the game thanks to Warren Hawke, which wasn't going to encourage them to rush back. You're simply not going to capture the imagination of people who came out for the Motherwell and Hearts games to turn them into season ticket holders with "a good run of form around Christmas is giving us a shout of the top four" the same way you can with a good first quarter that allows momentum to build throughout the season, with the message instead being "this good run of form has established us as serious title challengers" then maintaining that through a season.

I'm not saying it's realistic for the club to do the latter without the entirely legitimate funding of Raith or gambling the whole club's future on promotion like Partick, but that's the critical difference with Raith.

[The Bewilderedbeast]

I think that the perennial problem of being too close to the arse cheeks doesn't help up either.

I.know that the journey from the likes of Kirkcaldy and Dunfermline to Glasgow is only about 30 mins longer than it is from Greenock and the Port but we will always suffer from these two.

A good example of this is my grandson plays for one of the younger Morton age group teams. Which the exception of one other father ( who is a Morton fan)the talk around the pitch during training is all about C****c.

Even to the extent that just after the training started and they'd ordered strips, one of the coaches commented on how good the kids would look all dressed in their hoops, one of the mothers shouted "aye, green and white wans"

As I say, we'll always suffer from being too close to Glasgow. 

[SpoonTon]

I don't think it's terribly complicated. When new owners/investor comes into a club with the aim of funding a club moving up a level or two, it creates a buzz which attracts additional supporters. It happened with us in the early Rae days. The fact that we paid transfer fees on players like Williams and Weatherson, attracted players from a higher level, and made significant stadium improvements helped to create something that people wanted to be part of. To think that we had over 5000 fans for a January league match against Gretna. It's about the buzz created around the feeling of potential that investment brings. 

 

[Toby]

40 minutes ago, SpoonTon said:

I don't think it's terribly complicated. When new owners/investor comes into a club with the aim of funding a club moving up a level or two, it creates a buzz which attracts additional supporters. It happened with us in the early Rae days. The fact that we paid transfer fees on players like Williams and Weatherson, attracted players from a higher level, and made significant stadium improvements helped to create something that people wanted to be part of. To think that we had over 5000 fans for a January league match against Gretna. It's about the buzz created around the feeling of potential that investment brings. 

 

Don’t disagree with the general principle of your post, but that Gretna game isn’t a great example to use, as a lot of the goodwill had dissipated by that point.

Having already pissed the 2004 title against a wall and lost out the following year to Brechin and Stranraer, I looked out the programme from that match. At the time we were five points behind Gretna, who had a game in hand, winning the title was unrealistic anyway.

How we managed to get such a crowd for that game is a bit bizarre.

[TRVMP]

10 minutes ago, Toby said:

Don’t disagree with the general principle of your post, but that Gretna game isn’t a great example to use, as a lot of the goodwill had dissipated by that point.

Having already pissed the 2004 title against a wall and lost out the following year to Brechin and Stranraer, I looked out the programme from that match. At the time we were five points behind Gretna, who had a game in hand, winning the title was unrealistic anyway.

How we managed to get such a crowd for that game is a bit bizarre.

I was sitting in front of some of the youth players at that game and when Templeman blew his one-on-one they all said pretty much simultaneously "he was never scoring that."

[Toby]

4 minutes ago, TRVMP said:

I was sitting in front of some of the youth players at that game and when Templeman blew his one-on-one they all said pretty much simultaneously "he was never scoring that."

We came back from 0-2 down that day to equalise that day only for him to miss that chance in the last minute iirc. Given that the game was in January, he must have been shipped off on loan to Brechin (in a higher division) within a couple of weeks of that.

[SpoonTon]

21 minutes ago, Toby said:

Don’t disagree with the general principle of your post, but that Gretna game isn’t a great example to use, as a lot of the goodwill had dissipated by that point.

Having already pissed the 2004 title against a wall and lost out the following year to Brechin and Stranraer, I looked out the programme from that match. At the time we were five points behind Gretna, who had a game in hand, winning the title was unrealistic anyway.

How we managed to get such a crowd for that game is a bit bizarre.

I think it's a good example to use, precisely because it doesn't make that kind of sense. Something of the buzz that had been created still existed, so it was easy to attract additional supporters to a match that had a big match feeling (despite failures on the pitch). It hangs off the back of that feeling, rather than anything more rational than that. Motherwell away the following season is another example. We took about as many fans through to Motherwell that day as we had at Cappielow against Hearts a few months ago. The feeling created by the initial investment after Dougie Rae came in, and its accompanying narrative, was a powerful thing. 

I think it's probably accurate to say that the game against Gretna was one of those games which killed a bit of that buzz. As did the Motherwell game and a myriad of other factors (including outside financial factors after 2008, the banality of being back to mid to bottom second tier football, and a lack of investment off the field). 

People want to be involved in the idea of club being taken places. It doesn't matter so much if the destination is as mundane as the bottom half of the Premiership - there's just a feeling of people wanting to be there for the journey. The idea that a club might get promoted during a good season is less powerful than the idea of a club with a bit of money moving upwards.