Love for your club is not always blind. For a fan of Brighton the excitement of the future stirs up worries of the past while a West Ham fan finds his fellow supporters are turning him cold
On May 19, I had the shock of seeing the name of my club, Brighton, used in the same sentence as “Abramovich” – without apparent irony. It came in the Guardian headline: “Brighton finds its own Abramovich with £80m loan”; the man being Tony Bloom, an “internet gambling entrepreneur”.
Tom Davis looks back at the League One season and reflects on how the division is becoming more and more seperated with each passing year
Ostensibly, there’s almost a case to be made that League One is taking on as lopsided and unequal appearance as the Premier League: increasingly a repository for badly run big clubs and smaller members who see a place in the top half as the peak of their ambitions. No other division boasts such a proportional gap between the crowds of its best and worst supported clubs, or such contrasting historical narratives. A decade previously, Hereford, Cheltenham, Leeds and Leicester were four divisions apart – this term they competed as equals.
With the Conference giving varying punishments to different clubs, fans are understandably unsure as to the reasoning behind their decisions. Matthew Gooding reports
Another season is reaching its climax, and the fate of football clubs up and down the country is slowly becoming clearer. But in the Conference, such trivial matters as final league position are often irrelevant when it comes to determining issues of demotion and promotion. For this is a division that has seen at least one club relegated for non-footballing reasons in each of the past three seasons, with Canvey Island and Boston suffering demotions, and Halifax and Scarborough going out of business all together and re-forming further down the pyramid.
With the gap between the Premiership and the Championship getting bigger all the time, the threat of finiancial ruin is getting closer with each passing season
Aston Villa fans won’t want to be reminded of this but they have set a record this season. No club with as many points as they had at the halfway stage has finished lower than third since the Premier League began. Those who had hoped to see the top-four cartel broken up will have to wait – and their patience may be tried for several more years yet. But football is still subject to some quite sudden change, none more startling than what has taken place at the bottom of the Championship.
Tom Davies looks at three more clubs in crisis
One of the genuinely encouraging success stories of recent seasons has been Stockport County, rescued by a fans’ takeover three years ago, promoted via the League Two play-offs last year and well placed in League One until a recent slump. However, the realities of running a club to budget could yet overwhelm County, with lingering debts threatening to push the club into administration before the end of the season and a familiar search for investment becoming the priority.