Why have southern clubs( not London) and East Anglian clubs never been big?

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Lived in the South West for years, you get a few hardcore local fans and some glory boys from the Premiership elite, but generally nobody gives a toss about football really. Go into a pub on a Saturday afternoon and you are more likely to see Exeter v Wasps on TV than Jeff Stelling.
 


Benjamin said:
Ice hockey was never a sport that drained support from the football obsessed attendances of the region. Durham rink might have been full at peak of success which meant Hartlepool/Darlington levels of support. And many turning out on Sunday evening spent Saturdays at SJP or Roker
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Well many turning out will have been at RP, you lot had Whitley Bay to support.

They were regularly national champions man and all ruined by your chairman trying to copy the sporting club model at Barcelona, some would say ideas above your station, some might say delusional
 
bahtat said:
Rugby was certainly a big factor in the late 1800 in the south and is still today. For instance Northampton Saints rugbY club are a far larger entity than Northampton Town Football Club

Bristol also has a very well supported rugby club


I know the northern league was a strong amateur league post www2 but there was an abundance of amateur clubs in the south. Wimbledon for instance didn’t turn professional until what the 1960s and in Cambridge Cambridge City an amateur club was far bigger than Cambridge Utd who played in the old eastern counties league. It was similar in oxford with Oxford city larger then Headington Utd now Oxford Utd
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Quite right about Cambridge city, their old ground was quite big as I remember
 
andysfootball said:
Using your philosophy and the form of clubs post war

Ipswich have won the league once and have been runners up twice, won the fa cup once and the fairs cup once.

Portsmouth have won the league twice and the FA Cup once.

And Charlton, Watford, Wimbledon and Southampton are all is the same class as us with one FA Cup win.

On a sadder note Newcastle have won the FA Cup twice and the Inter City Fairs Cup once.But we can't class them as southerners.

If you look at our current league position and passed history it's fair to say that we are and for seventy years have been a very simalar football club to Ipswich and Porstmouth with both of them recording more big wins.
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how come you mention Ipswich winning the league but not us who’ve won it more times than most
 
Lived in Kingston for a short and went to away games in reading, Bristol Portsmouth and places like that, most people either not interested, like other sports or support one of the London clubs
 
Ramona1234 said:
PLymouth has massive potential if anything good ever happened for them. Bristol have two teams which divides things. Pompey seem the most fervent. Southampton currently the biggest , but purely down to current staus and new ground.
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It’s mostly a Rugby area though (Plymouth, south west), you could say something similar with Wrexham, no teams in North Wales etc, why can’t they pull half a country into their stadium?
 
Wandofaleftpeg said:
Quite right about Cambridge city, their old ground was quite big as I remember
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Don’t talk to me about Cambridge City ffs.
First time I went to Cambridge Utd we drove, got there early, saw floodlights ower the roof tops, saw free street parking, saw pub, marra parked car off main road with LH turn into our route away for quick getaway, sorted.
Into pub, couple of hours drinking with virtually no one else there bar a few old boys reading the racing pages, football focus, pool table, dart board, bandit, juke box, landlords daughter serving, prematch lad heaven. Ten to three she pipes up: cutting it a bit fine aren’t you boys?
Her dad had made himself scarce after we’d bought ten pints in 30 mins and sent her downstairs to take over. He was no mug, we were. To be fair she rang a taxi to get five donkey eared mackems all the way across town sharpish......to the set of floodlights we were actually playing under.
 
With the exception of Bristol none of the Southern England population centres have a greater population than the Northern and Midlands industrial cities.

www.citymetric.com

Where are the largest cities in Britain? - City Monitor

Britain's cities are surprisingly hard to define, so it all depends how you count. Here are a few ways to do that.
www.citymetric.com www.citymetric.com

Bristol and the surrounding region is also traditionally pretty big for rugby and for local football it can't have helped when Rovers had to leave their stadium in the 80's and share a ground with Bristol rugby. When things like that happen I think some supporters are lost for good...they don't come back. Same thing will happen to Coventry if they are not careful.
 
Probably due to the fact that London is absolutely massive compared to all other Southern towns and cities and the London clubs can poach any decent players within a 100 miles, since they have bigger support and finances.

You can buck the trend for a time if you have a decent manager (Clough at Derby/Forest, Robson at Ipswich, Redknapp at Portsmouth) but the London clubs will assert their dominance soon enough.
 
KENT-FTM said:
It could be to do with class....affluent classes playing Cricket, Rugby etc...

The North invented football...it was their religion.

It's such a difficult question to answer.
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Not quite true. The original rules were dreamed up by ex public schoolboys who wanted to formalise it as different to rugby (rugger and soccer are so public school sounding it's not true). It was the north that led the development of leagues and professionalism. The south retained an amateur ethos much longer, and got left behind in concsequence.
 
Wandofaleftpeg said:
Quite right about Cambridge city, their old ground was quite big as I remember
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I was at the barbers this morning (just across the road from the old Cambridge City ground) before seeing this thread and coincidentally he started telling me how they were the biggest club in Cambridge until the 1960s. They apparently had the largest ground outside of league football and used to get crowds of up to 8 or 9 k
 
Portsmouth and Plymouth seems a fair analogy .. the only difference really is the distance from London; perhaps this has made attracting players to Portsmouth easier. Over the last 50-60 years Portsmouth have probably done as well as many large northern teams. Plymouth seem to have underachieved. As a naval city perhaps they have a high transient population who are there to serve but support other teams?

Bournemouth has been geographically small for most of footballs history – Wimborne perhaps being bigger for the early days of football – their more recent success is probably a reflection of the growth of the town and it merging into Poole and Wimborne to be on a size now able to compete. If they invest well in their infrastructure and stadium, they could have a local fan base large enough to sustain success on the same scale as. Say, Southampton. That wasn’t true 50 years ago.

Bristol is very much rugby city. It also suffers from 2 teams – had they a single club I wonder would they have been more successful? That said, Bristol is only slightly smaller than Liverpool so even that argument doesn’t stack up.

Other big southern towns like Swindon, Basingstoke and Milton Keynes are historically geographically small – as they have grown to bigger sizes since the 40s or been invented as new towns - perhaps, we will see them being more significant in future years though with the influx of foreign ownership of bigger teams maybe they are limited in the growth that they can achieve, until/unless they can get to a size that attracts large scale investment.

We shouldn’t forget that not all northern cities have done as well as geography might suggest – Leeds, Bradford and Sheffield for example are all bigger than either Manchester or Liverpool and none have had sustained success on the scale of either. Rather than Plymouth or Bristol, I would suggest that Bradford with a ½ million population is the biggest underachiever.
 
Therokerroar said:
Discard Midlands and London clubs and focus on clubs on the south, South coast and East Anglia and I wonder why these regions have never been really massive in football terms

I know Ipswich won the Uefa cup, fa cup and went close to winning the league in the late 70 /early 80s but have never been firmly established as a top team in the country.

The Bristol clubs have always languished in lower leagues despite having huge catchment areas

The likes of Torquay , Exeter , Plymouth , Bournemouth have never been big.

Portsmouth can point to a fa cup win under Harry Redknapp but never capitalised on the millions spent on them in the 2000s

Southampton throughout my childhood were always in the top flight but always in the lower reaches. The move to St Mary's hasn't seen them kick on

One thing that's always mentioned with regards to Sunderland is players don't want to move because of its location with regards to London.

But all the above mentioned have that so why are none constant success story storys.

Is it finances ? But Bristol city , Bournemouth and Portsmouth all have billionaire owners........what's your reasons?
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It's because the fans are too posh to cheer on their team and prefer rugger anyway.
 
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