It’s as logical as all the other metrics people are happy to quote and distort but strips out pretty much everything pre-internet days. You could argue some clubs have more forums perhaps but along with shirt sales it’s probably the best indicator of a clubs global fan base
Totally happy to be corrected here but there’s barely ever a mention of Leeds on here? Last thread except this one I remember was that one about your ground expansion, but that’s a pretty newsworthy thing and the Everton new ground thread had a hell of a lot more posts. This might be an unpopular opinion but I don’t actually mind Leeds and have a lot of respect for them, the Premier League for too many years has been littered with too many Bournemouth’s of the world for my liking so to see the likes of us both back up can only be a good thing for the neutral, and each other as games against each other have to be more inspiring and more to look forward to than Brentford at home.
That’s exactly the issue that Leeds and Burnley both have. You could argue that they both have stronger squads but are now having to work with less headroom (more so Leeds due to having spent 2 years in the Championship) Ipswich are probably a good example for Sunderland when you consider their transfer activity relative to Saints and Leicester
Great question- why do you insist on calling yourselves Geordies?
Some of them look like a Year 9 IT project
What a complete crock of excrement?
Mmmm…that was a blow to my argument I’m not going to lie!
Good place? Fancy them hill walks
It's "SAFC", not "SFC". Show some respect or fuck off. In fact, just fuck off anyway you little tykie twat.
I was quite surprised to hear my grandson say "Nobody supports Leeds at our school". He was born and brought up in Leeds, goes to school in Leeds. Their support is solid but they may be losing support of the younger generation to the Mancs.
There biggest ever crowd was v SAFC. I was there with a huge number of Sunderland supporters.
Tremendous mate -cracking cafes restaurants walks
why do you insist on being a complete cockwomble?
If anything I think all of your looking shows were pretty much very similar clubs yet Leeds fans would have you think we are way below them.This big club stuff is a bit dated for me now given it clings on to our starting years when football wasn't anything like it is today. Even the early years were different to post WW2 when more teams were involved given some teams appeared later in history, Leeds being 1920s. I've had a look at the seasons and this is what it looks like overlapping the season positions with us in red and Leeds in black. Even Pre war you can see their climb into Div 1 and we lower mid table but the war put an end to that
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This is post WW2 and the last 79 seasons so living memory for just about everyone. Without telling anyone who is who, which club do you think they'd consider to be the better of the 2? They've averaged 8.5th position in 40 top flight seasons, we've been 15th in 41 seasons. I'm not sure where you got the "made the numbers up in the top flight" for them as that applies to us even more. Overall in the 79 seasons, they've been 20th since WW2 and we've been 23rd.
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Your last part about "fair chunk of them" watching them struggle could apply to all our fans who've started going from 2012 onwards given our struggles in the PL until we finally got relegated. In fact our last 24 years haven't been 'big' club performances and even less going back to 1985 which is 40 years ago. Don't get me wrong as I'm not saying we aren't a big club, just that we shouldn't really use the very start of our history as a stick to beat others in the way some do.
Just how long do we cling onto our more successful past from well over 70 years ago when football has changed so much over time? We could do in the 70s/80s etc but we've done little since the 50s and the longer it goes on the weaker it gets surely?
At the end of the day, football is fucked now as it's all about who has bigger revenues, the richest owners, location, richest fans, biggest global fan base, can 'cheat' the system finding loopholes etc. Long gone are the days of big crowds meaning a big club or players staying at clubs for any length of time as it's so easy these days for them to uproot and move on. Years ago players stayed longer at clubs as not all could be tempted away like today with multi million £ contracts so building a team now isn't as easy to do as the best players will be poached.
These days for us when it comes to 'big' clubs, it's more like 2 old blokes arguing over a comb when we compare ourselves to other clubs as it's very unlikely it will be like the glory days again when we had a full head of hair and plenty of money in our pockets
