Turkish

When you read some of the sh*t on here you realise why people think Southampton isn't a football place. So many people just don't get it. They seem to live in a football manager world where Eastleigh can make the champions league and if you do well as a manager you can make a board request, like expanding the stadium which will automatically be full if you win a few games. And this bizarre insistence that thousands of fans of other clubs will come to see Saints in their desperation to see premier league football yet at the same time there are tens of thousands of Saints fans who can't come to see Saints because it's too expensive. The world of Internet soccerball spaz boards certainly is a strange place.

Its getting embarassing dumbass, I'd stop now if I were you.

Because this forum is full of utter helmets.

Im sure your comment was a joke but I go to Glasgow regularly for work, in fact I was up there this week and have a number of people I know through work who live there who I would now consider friends. It's a fantastic city. Like every big city it has it's trouble spots and unsavoury characters but it's a great place to visit and a number of people I work with have moved there from England. I must admit if the right role came up I'd consider it as well.

I didn't say success I said size. Rangers got 49,000 for a Scottish third division game, that is more than most top flight clubs get in the top European leagues. As I said they are held back in terms of European success due to playing in a small country with a poor standard of football. If they played in England they'd be able to attract players and sponsorship deals up there with the best in the world and would undoubtedly be a top 4 club. And I'm not quite sure what Chelsea have to do win anything. They are traditionally a big club as well. They were a glamour club in the 60s and 70s, had a tough time in the 80s but from the 90s onwards have been a big club. Nonsense to say they'd be in L2 if it wasn't for Abramovich. They were in the premie league before he arrived.

Some of the comments on here are mental. Rangers and Celtic are massive clubs with massive fan bases. The only thing holding them back is the country they play in. If there was a British league they would be bigger than most English clubs, probably only Man United would be bigger. They'd fill their away ends in every ground in the country. They might both be poor at the moment and Celtic would be lucky to be a midtable premier league club, but the fact remains they are huge clubs and continue to get to massive support depsite the poor standards of their teams and Scottish football in general. Rangers got 49k a world record crowd for a fourth tier match this season! 49K in a league which is probably worse the same standard as the conference south!

Yes i did say this and it's true. Again, i dont give a sh*t if faceless people on a spaz board believe it or not.

In all seriousness if it wasn't for this forum i'd have no idea how massive we were. I'd be clueless that we are potentially the fourth best supported club in England which would probably put us in the top 15 in the world and had a catchment area which spanned half of Britain. I'd be completely in the dark about how easy it was to get to the champions league, all you need is a good academy and a decent manager. I would never have known that it is entirely possible that although we are struggling to fill a 32,000 staidum, we could easily fill one much bigger if only we attracted new fans by offering really cheap prices that were only available to them and i had no idea that there were literally millions of floating fans waiting for us to become a top 10 club so they can support us. And of course, as is the case of Charles Green, any other club that has these sort of ambitions or talks about bettering themselves is deluded and arrogant. Whereas we are visionaries with ambition and drive. Thank god for Saintsweb for opening our eyes to all this.

most of them are taller than him.

Sorry, where? He said there were no statistics available of crowds when we were in our peak in the early 80's i showed him there are. How is this the faceplaming you love so much?

Im not going to give you a history lesson in why crowds are bigger now than they were in the 80's, if you cant see the reasons why then you really should never comment on football attendances again. So how do you propose we attact new fans. I take it "being good" is one of them, which to reach the levels of the other clubs you mention such as Chelsea and Man United is going to cost hundreds of millions of pounds in transfer fees. How else?

So we're back to relying on away fans in the home end to fill our stadium then. Genius! You also posed the question that would away fans of these clubs follow their team up north or come here of they just wanted to see a game of football? It was in plain English so I'm most surprised you failed to grasp it.

There are records actually. The Dell capacity in our glory years of the early 80s was 24k and our averge crowd was about 18-20k So what did the Dell have to do with it. why are we going to tap into these tens of thousands of fans with nothig else to do when their team is away on saturday now when we've never done it at anytime in our history?

So quite a minority then. When I worked in Basingstoke most locals supported London clubs or Man U and Liverpool. Your local stats back this up. It's probably to say based on this northern Hampshire is as much, if not moreso a London club catchment area than a Southampton one.

How many people in Basingstoke do for example, support Saints compared to London clubs and Reading?

I think what he's saying is we can fill a bigger stadium by filling it with away fans in the home ends and hoping when London teams are away a lot of their fans decide to come and see us instead. That does seem to be it, which may I say is a quite brilliant business plan.

/\ well they don't seem to be doing it at the moment when this could be their first chance to see premier league football locally in 7 years, so the answer seems to be, no, they won't come here when their team are playing away.

Tsk Fry. It's not price slash, that would be ridiculous. It's dramatically reduced prices, There is a big difference.

Some of you won't like this. It it seems to be the case according to David James http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/article-2216364/David-James-says-anti-racism-campaigns-football-causing-unnecessary-trouble.html In summary Less black managers because fewer of them do coaching courses Those that do do have been given chances some have failed, some like Chris Houghton have done well And a telling quote 'I struggle with the racist issue because I don't see it' He goes onto say on this link that anti-racism groups have an agenda to keep themselves in existence and doesn't see racism anywhere! http://www.metro.co.uk/sport/914798-david-james-racism-in-football-is-an-agenda-serving-myth This can't be true!!! it does All seems pretty straightforward and common sense and what some have been saying on this issue for a while though.

Not really in my head was it. You admitted yourself if we expand and offered slashed, err I mean dramatically reduced tickets prices, you were clueless as to knowing how we could make sure these tickets only went to people that can't afford it at the moment. the ones you want to attract and not current match goers taking advantage of cheaper tickets, moving seat and leaving their unaffordable seats empty. Thereby they are all taking all the cheaper seats paying £200 a season less, their more expensive seats are now empty and still too expensive for those that can't afford it, our crowds stay the same, revenue goes down as existing match goers are now paying less and we have 8,000 new seats empty and £20m worth of debt. It's not p*ss taking, You don't seem to like it and had no answers when the huge holes in your brilliant Bayern Munich model were shown to you, so that is what you resorted to calling it.

The only people that seem to think its nessasary are ones that post on Internet spaz boards. In fact if it wasnt for this forum id have no idea we were such a massive club.

Such a dell sized mentality. Build it and they will come.

That you would do c30k a year in. would you go for an older, cheaper car with a low mileage, say something like an old shape BMW 3 series which you can get pick up with about £5k with 50k about an 04 plate or go for a much newer model and pay a fair bit more, like an 08-10 A4, 3 or 5 series?

THats quite amusing for you.