My club and the nearest one to that Armagh City have only about an average attendance of 300 or so each. But if we were to join together I would just stop supporting local football. Even if the new franchise club were more successful it would mean so little to me. Fans of clubs even those close to each other have their own identity lets hope it stays that way.Originally Posted by A face
No Bristol club has ever won the English Championship.
Newcastle have won it 4 times (less than Sunderland, for example) - but the last was way back in 1927.
5 titles have been shared between the 2 Sheffield clubs - the last being 1930.
Leeds have only been champions 3 times in their 102 years of trying.
I'd therefore suggest that, for cities of their size, that was a fairly poor trophy haul.
hardly makes them 'not footballing cities of note' though, does it? - still, i see your point
A patriot is someone who knows how to hate his country properly.
Fair point. I was trying to show that even within the 8 key cities in England, only 4 of those population centres have spawned contenders at the game's top level beyond the short term. If a big city like Bristol (pop. c 400,000) can't produce a successful football team in over 100 years, then what hope do the Exeter's, Carlisle's, York's and Brighton's of the world have...?
If we look at Ireland - north and south - it's our areas of largest population that have spawned our most successful clubs - Dublin, Belfast, Cork, Waterford, Derry. no matter what angle you look at it, success )not to mention survival) within football appears to be linked to the size of population centre a team comes from. And increasingly so.
Funny too, how an influx of wealth can indirectly effect an area's sport. Remember when the off-shore gas/oil boom effected the Eastern side of Scotland? Aberdeen had a good spell and Dundee United also did reasonably well if not setting Scottish footie on fire.
I remember talking with Maurice Malpas in 1992 (he was with Dundee United then) and he said that they were taking top class young lads even from Glasgow from under the noses of the old firm because they had greater funding to spend on scouting, coaching etc as a result of the gas wealth (for want of a better term) seeping into the area via new, wealthy directors/sponsors etc who have become rich from the service industries associated with the North Sea boom.
Sadly, there were/are too many senior clubs in the East part of Scotland despite relatively biggish population centres so I suppose it was inevitable that only a few clubs benefitted even if only for a while.
For example, wasn't Aberdeen the first UK club to have an all-seater stadium?
Didn't last too long though and things soon returned to Celtic, Rangers and....... the rest. The influx of foreign players after Bosman also changed things back in favour of the Glasgow big two.
Seems too that Scotland didn't benefit overall - as much as it should have - from North Sea oil and gas but that's another story.
I'm not arguing with your basic point - the link between footballing success and population - but other factors do come into play; For example, Dundalk and Drogheda are pretty much of a size, but historically, Dundalk are way more successful; I think you'd have to look at patterns of employment and so on to start explaining thinks like that. Similarly, cultural issues come into play as well; look at Galway - a much bigger town than either Sligo or Athlone, but not by any stretch a football town.
A patriot is someone who knows how to hate his country properly.
We're both in agreement here Sonof. The key is to look at success over the longest possible term. Dundalk have been relatively successful - particularly with a good spell in the 1980's - but you could argue that they've gone back to a more appropriate level of success, given their population, since. Likewise - Drogheda's success is only current - will they still be regular contenders for the key silverware in 10 years time ? Only time will tell (though personally I suspect not). Longford had a good couple of years, but have slipped back to being a mid-table club now. Given the size of the town and county, and thereby the potential crowds they can generate, that's no great surprise.
Galway may be bigger than Sligo or Athlone, but none of those 3 towns have done particularly well in Irish football to be honest. Limerick is an even stronger example - one of the bigest cities on the Ireland, yet a woeful history of success.
There will always be exceptions either way - particularly when looking at events in the short or medium term. But I think we're both agreed that the principle of population/potential fanbase and success overlapping still holds.
Portadown would hardly be a very large place 22000 but have had alot of success. I think its alot to do with money invested in club by people connected with it.
They've won 4 League titles and 3 Irish cups, and all in the last 16 years.
Alot to do with investment i would think.
Investment obviously has an impact on teams - particularly in 'weak' leagues like the 2 Irish ones. But is Portadown's relative success as much to do with the fact that since Derry City left the IL in 1972, there simply haven't been any teams form large population centres in the league apart from Belfast ?
Portadown isn't a big place - but where else is in the league ? Bangor has a decent population by Norn Irish stands now - close to 60,000 - but it was c. 45,000 in the 80's, and significantly lower in the 70's before the influx of Belfast people began. Also - due to this influx, a lot of the people in Bangor who follow local football would have loyalties to a Belfast team. This takes literally generations to alter.
Lisburn also has a big population - but cuckoo-club Distillery have only been there for a few years now and have no roots in the place, so the size of that town is irrelevant.
Every other team in the Irish League is from a small town or small city. Therefore - Portadown may seem a great success given their size. But their not significantly smaller than any other team outside of Belfast, so when looked at that way it's no great shakes.
I also note that Portadown's success ALL happened in the years after Derry left the league - i.e. when the biggest poulation centre outside of Belfast was no longer represented. I'm sure this is no coincidence.
In saying that steve, Derry City didn't exactly set the irish League alight ( A certain bus YES) but we were no super power.
Very true. Though that doesn't mean we weren't one of the better non-Belfast teams.
In it's 105 year history, the Irish League has been won a whopping 95 times by a Belfast club. It wasn't until 1952 that the trophy even left Belfast for the first time (Glenavon).
With the possible exception of Glenavon, Derry were arguably the most successful of the non-Belfast clubs during our time in the Irish League - as measured by trophies and league positon.
You mention Glenavon (Lurgan) there a place much smaller than Derry who have had success. I think investment is a huge influence. The leagues can be bought but I do see your point mate about size of places having a huge effect.
In recent times, you had the FAI Senior Cup going to Longford Town (pop 7,000) and the FAI Junior Cup going to Westport United (pop 5,000). Hardly big towns and would compare to villages in Northern Ireland and both teams defeated city sides to win their competitions. Fanad United won the FAI Intermediate Cup a number of years ago and the population base is even smaller.
Never play leapfrog with a unicorn!!
Apart from Derry and Belfast I would take the term 'city' with a smile here. Maybe Coleraine as well, not sure of the population statistics there.
However, big population doesn't equal big teams. Otherwise we'd have Limerick and Galway in the premier without any trace of Bray, Finn Harps and Longford...
Look abroad as well: Leeds, Nottingham, Bristol, ... all big population centres, but their clubs are out of the big leagues since quite a while now (OK, they once have been in the premier division, but that's a different thing). More examples would include Venice, Napoli, Trieste, Izmir, Bursa, Archangelsk, Lvov, ...
whereas at the same time rather small places like Villarreal, Gueugnon, Guingamp, Wolfsburg, Chievo, ... have been surviving on top level and are quite stable.
There will always be exceptions - particuarrly when looking at only a single small period of time.
But when you look at the most successful teams in the vast majority of leagues, they tend to be from the biggest cities. Yes - there are plenty of big cities who's teams are crap. Likewise, there are small areas that have periods of success. But name me one small population centre that has had a team that is continuuosly a power-house in their domestic league, over the medium-to-long term ? I don't doubt they exist - but I'd bet that in the very few cases they do it's because they're in 'weak' leagues where crowds are relatively low for all clubs, and money can make a huge difference.
Academic, statistical and anecodtal evidence all points very strongly towards the conclusion that the bigger a team's population centre, the higher its chances of footballing success will generally be. Particularly beyond the medium term.
I heard this fact quite some time ago but in Turkey no club from the capital city, Ankara, have won the league in the last few decades!
Who Cares?!
It's not that surprising really. No club from the Dutch capital - The Hague - has won the Dutch league since 1943 ! No team from the Scottish capital - Edinburgh - has won the SPL for years either ! There are a number of countries - incl Turkey, Scotland, Holland, Brazil - where the capital city is NOT the biggest city. Hence the Scottish champions tend to be from Glasgow - by far the biggest city in Scotland. Likewise with Istanbul - the largest population centre in Turkey.I heard this fact quite some time ago but in Turkey no club from the capital city, Ankara, have won the league in the last few decades!
The champions of Turkey last season were from Istanbul. Of the teams who finished in the top 5, 3 were from Istanbul and one from Ankara - both large population centres. It's not surprising to find that Ankara teams aren't as successful as teams from the much larger Istanbul.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of countries where the majority of league titles HAVE been won by teams from the capital city - particularly where that capital is also the largest city.
Last edited by dcfcsteve; 22/03/2006 at 10:30 AM.
I pretty much agree with that; despite all the Rosenbergs and Deportivos small town teams generally eventually fall back into the middle ranks; where I think we might have disagreed is the idea that 'footballing success' is correlative with somewhere being - and this is hardly a quantifiable notion - 'a footballing town' . Thus, Newcastle, Sheffield and Nottingham despite their relative lack of success (ever in Newcastle's case, recently in the Sheffield teams' and Forest's case) are footballing towns, in that - a) the teams get large crowds even through periods outside the top flight and b) football is the leading sport in the town. For this reason Wigan, Hull and maybe even Leeds will never be footballing towns.
In Irish terms, Sligo, Dundalk and Athlone remain such towns; Galway, Dun Laoghaire and the new towns of Swords/ Naas/ Navan probably never will be - and this probably goes for Bangor as well.
A patriot is someone who knows how to hate his country properly.
Amsterdam is the Dutch capital.
We're not arrogant, we're just better.
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