Diminishing Crowds...

[OUFC4eva]

Are these declining home crowds a product of playing League Two football for
the fourth season in a row? If a club stays in the same division for too long
it's attendances will reduce over time usually.

Are the declining crowds due to indifferent home performances.We hardly
play out and out attacking , attractive football with thrills and spills?

Is the overall Matchday experience still poor despite efforts to
revamp things e.g 12th Man Bar, music, ex-players returning,
Yellow Army activities. More banners/flags and colour this season.

The English Premier League factor with its ever increasing wall to wall coverage
and even more televised games could be harming the numbers watching the Football League
on Saturday afternoons.

Less disposable income as the cost of living rises inexorably and no pay increases being received
to offset these.Football not as high on the list of priorities therefore.

A soulless , unclean, uncompleted, unatmospheric , all seater stadium is not a welcoming
place to watch football.

[Werthers Original]

It would make such a difference if we only had a high fence at the open end to create a feeling of being properly enclosed

[Dr Bob]

We have started the season well, but unless people are suddenly going to go and buy season tickets, they will have to buy one-off tickets. There is never going to be one single explanation, but I wonder if part of the problem is the high price of buying tickets game by game. Has the club got the pricing structure right, or is it discouraging a response from fans to the decent start. Oh - and I guess the team's poorer home performances than away is for another thread...

[Jimski]

I've only managed to see two games this season so far, but the difference was incredible.

Everything about the day out at Portsmouth was great, lovely old ground, brilliant atmosphere, great performance with the crowd seemingly lifting the players after an indifferent start.

Whereas yesterday the performance was flat, the atmosphere tepid, and the ground has just never felt anything but soulless. Obviously we don't normally play in matches such as that at Portsmouth, but the contrast of that match with with the home "experience" brought home to me how poor it all is at the Kassam, and perhaps then why we struggle to consistently produce decent home performances and results. Imagine us roaring them down the hill in the second half at the Manor...

[Paul Cooper]

OK to be devils advocate this 'soulless stadium' stuff. I am not sure.

I went to the Manor for many years. I saw2,800 v Cambridge and in the last season where we were shocking the ground was generally soulless with an average of what 4000?

Slumdon at home in the FA Cup and when we beat DiCanios lot were 2 of the least soulless atmospheres I have ever had the privilege to witness.

So... in my view it is the lack of excitement at home games with a poor playing style. If we were to be top 3 in a couple of months I suspect that crowds and atmosphere will improve

[Kairdiff Exile]

OK to be devils advocate this 'soulless stadium' stuff. I am not sure.

I went to the Manor for many years. I saw2,800 v Cambridge and in the last season where we were shocking the ground was generally soulless with an average of what 4000?

Slumdon at home in the FA Cup and when we beat DiCanios lot were 2 of the least soulless atmospheres I have ever had the privilege to witness.

So... in my view it is the lack of excitement at home games with a poor playing style. If we were to be top 3 in a couple of months I suspect that crowds and atmosphere will improve

Disagree. Of course the atmosphere at the Manor was shit in our last season there. We finished bottom of the whole ruddy league under David Kemp (our most inept manager ever?) playing the worst football I have ever seen from an Oxford team. That's pretty much the definition of a straw man argument.

The attendances at both grounds are broadly similar, so I don't think there's any mileage in that line either.

The fact is, we used to play in an admittedly anachronistic ground in a suburb near to actual things that people might want to visit, with a huge range of good pubs with character selling decent beer and a good proper few fish and chip shops, bus links to lots of other parts of the city, and a sloping pitch which more often than not was worth a goal when you were kicking down it in the second half. Plus you had a choice of terrace or seats so everyone could please themselves, and in the terrace you could wander about and find old friends. We now play in a plastic three-sided meccano stadium in an industrial estate by a sewage works, where the nearest hostelries are all without merit, stewards obsessively prevent anyone from standing (heaven forbid! in a football ground!) and there's a prevailing smell of shit in the air.

The Ka££am stadium was sold to us as the dream we had to realise if we were ever to grow to 'the next level'. Be honest now, if you had a straight choice, is it where you'd really want to be? I'd be back at the Manor in a heartbeat.

[Snake]

We don’t have a straight choice, end of, and I disagree with you about the atmos at The Manor in our last season there, especially at the end and the “Kemp Out” period ‘ as we had some hope in those days about a new dawn based on the fact/dream that a modern Stadium and getting out of £20m of debt was not only the solution to going bust but also offered the opportunity to take Oxford United forward, post Taylor Report.

As it turned out Kemp went on to take on the a role of assistant manager at Premier League Stoke, so he wasn’t that bad. The real problem was because his hands were tied as FK fell out with Joe Kinnear in a big way and Firoka failed to understand the tricky and sometimes difficult to comprehend business side of football. Added to that their two big egos clashed so Joe fucked off to do his football stuff and Firoz did the same a couple of years later to specialise in his own profession, which had always been investing in hotels of varying quality and the service industry in general.
The problem is that Joe is Newcastle United’s issue now but Minchery Farm ownership still remains as a loose end for Us.

I know what you mean about the lack of soul on Grenoble Road. With the benefit of hindsight we should have just reformed in 1998 and packed out Court Place Farm on a ground share basis in the lower parts of the football pyramid, as by now we’d be back in Division IV and the matchday experience and satisfaction would be better (albeit a worse view than from the top of the SSU!).

[GodalmingYellow]

All the above, are the reasons for declining crowds, but I suspect the reason for the crowd v Dale is simply that it was a bank holiday on the previous Monday, so many people chose that week for their holidays to use up less annual leave at work, coupled with those with kids having to organise themselves for back to school.

If the next home game is also on a significantly reduced crowd, then that might be the time to start raising eyebrows.

I have to say that I don't think Wilder helps the situation by continually selecting inadequate players out of position, when there is a young alternative available. I am thinking of course of Callum O'Dowda. Yes he is inexperienced, but that is because Wilder isn't picking him. Chicken and egg. The glimpses he has shown in pre-season lead me to believe he should have been picked ahead of Asa Hall, who is no left winger.

[Kernow Yellow]

A soulless , unclean, uncompleted, unatmospheric , all seater stadium is not a welcoming
place to watch football.

Completely agree with that. I don't know how much the club are involved in preparing the stadium for a match day, but on walking into the East stand for the first home game of the season, I immediately noticed two things.

1) The advertising boards under the concourses carried adverts for a radio programme that doesn't even exist any more (Jack FM's football coverage)
2) The booth where the bookmakers used to be was empty, but the betting prices for the last home game of last season were still on display!

Two minor points, but ones which smack of no-one really giving a shit about making the place look professional and tidy.

The lack of a decent pub near the ground is a BIG problem. I walked past the new supporters bar at about 2.15 on Saturday, and it did look better in there than against Bury (the queues seemed to be under control despite a good number of people being present, and the atmosphere looked pretty decent). But personally I am never going to drink anywhere where real ale is not served, and I'm not that keen on bars that look like conference centres.

I was in SSL with my young sons this weekend, and I actually thought the East Stand made a decent amount of noise given the sparse crowd. And I like the flag displays a lot. It was the football on display that is likely to stop my kids wanting to come back again. Despite being wide-eyed enthusiasts, both of my boys pronounced the game 'quite boring'. They weren't wrong.

[Werthers Original]

The football does tend to be boring, but it's made much worse by the fact we're too far from the pitch, and there's an open end where you can see a really dull family leisure park. Why oh why did they build that road around the pitch???

It's very tempting to suggest that we and London Welsh get together to build a proper stadium somewhere else.

[Matt D]

i was really surprised at how low this crowd was. do we really think one below par game and a bank holiday means we don't go? yikes.

as for the manor/mincherry, for my money, the manor was clearly always better, even with a smaller crowd. mincherry can be a good atmosphere, but it needs to be pretty full until that happens. i always found it a bit hard to tell how many were in the manor anyway, but it kept the sound better, and we were standing. small grounds where you're standing close to the pitch are always a winner - which was why non-league was fun in that respect. in retrospect...

hey - burton on saturday!