Until there is a concerted effort to rally the local population and ask them to come and be part of what’s going on, it won’t improve markedly. This notion that it’ll magically improve when we’re suddenly three places above where we already are in the league is fanciful. We aren’t just competing for the so called leisure pound, we are competing with a very loud and busy world, full of flashing lights, deafening clatter and people shouting and waving their arms in the air. It’s a really difficult world to cut through in - it’s getting harder by the month let alone the year. You have to really compete for time and attention, and only then can you compete for custom. I will speak with some authority on that as I spend my entire life guiding a company through an increasingly crowded, digitally dominated world. My company has a magazine that sits on newsstands not just across the UK but all over the world - we are available in newsagents and supermarkets from Alaska to Adelaide - and have a combined social media reach of around two million people, as well as yearly online traffic in the tens of millions. Yet even we can’t merely depend on being a ‘known and established’ brand. You’re fighting for attention in a world where even a newspaper that is printed twice a day can’t keep up with the pace of life anymore. It’s relentless and exhausting, and to shrug and put it all down to league positions is lazy and outdated. If we’d beaten Accrington like we arguably should’ve a week ago, we would be in fourth place just two points off second. We smashed a Premier League side 4-0 a few weeks ago, beat another side 6-0 the same week and are one of the top goal scorers in the entire country. If on pitch matters were going to fix this alone, it would’ve been markedly on the up by now. Just scoring goals and winning games is not going to change 6,500 crowds to 8,000+ crowds.
There needs to be a dedicated campaign across all local media - something that carries across a season rather than being geared towards one individual match - getting the message out that this is a team worth supporting. It’s been said before, but it needs a Believe 2.0 that can keep being pushed week after week for the next six months. It needs a buzzword or a motto - you can call it cheesy but it works. Barely anything stands out nowadays without this, from media output in the form of music, movies and games, to politics and world affairs. We are in the age of propaganda and showmanship, everything is a circus now. Just last month I was speaking with somebody involved in the live music industry who is now starting to work on stage shows that incorporate smell. Bright lights and fancy props aren’t enough on their own anymore, and everybody is constantly searching for the next thing that is going to set them apart from everybody else. The world is increasingly over-stimulated and that means that even when it comes to League One football, you’re going to have to do something once in a while to appeal to more than just the core. All this needs is a bit of visibility, some basic branding / marketing and a voice. But it will not dramatically improve purely based on results, I absolutely assure you of that.
This team deserves more people to turn up at the moment, and I think with an extra thousand or two cheering them on could have a really good go at doing something, but the club is going to have to do something to take it, not just sit and put it all down to results or people being skint.