Long before The Cult racked up i have thought that we are a club on the edge of terminal decline. Its the demographic of the ongoing support base--or lack of it. I just cant see where the next generations of local support is coming from? Many people have put in huge amounts of effort to be a club or TRUE community. The Red/White and Black Day has to be at least 10 years old. Tens of thousands of tickets have been given out to local schools plus a good few Kid for a Quid days.Yet where are the returners? where is the support base? Its not in Charlton,Woolwich,Welling,Eltham.If you went to the local kids,youths none of them know (or want to know) about CAFC. Im sure this was a driving force behind the Valley Express to try and at least maintain a support base and hopefully expand it in Kent where a lot of our fans have escaped to.
The above isnt new its been happening for ten years plus. There is no heritage of support re past family member's with the locals. A huge amount are new comers to the area/London/England.
Take the above and introduce a deluded Cult Member as a CEO who wishes to get rid of the oldies like a version of footballs Blade Runner, who has no idea how to engage with ANYONE , who got rid of the only people who really understood the issues of RETAINING new comers , add in the third level of football and surely its the perfect storm ?
Even if RD and his followers naff off its going to take a generation to build up support and that wont happen whilst in the 3rd level of football.
I think many not going now wont return---its easy these days to stay away---of course there are those (im one) who will still go to meet old mates for an ale or 3.
Still i have seen us at Wembley,win at Wembley, saw our own players wear The Three Lions, win a pot, get 101 points in a season, beat TheGoonershit,Chelsea,Moan Utd,Liverplool,Spurs, Man City.
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Some of us may not think it, but kids are discerning individuals. They will not be entertained by dross or put up with it. They will not support a second or third rate team and suffer being laughed at by their peers.
Dross football in the third tier is on to a hiding to nothing trying to attract anybody new. The only reason our fan base is as robust as it has been is because of the years in our recent history when we have been in the top tier (or challenging to get there). But the last nine years, excluding the excitement of the League One championship winning season, have been boring, poor, dismal rubbish. No child who is not already in their teens will remember seeing anything consistently worth watching if they have been at The Valley.
So, at the end of the day, the only way Target 20k or whatever it is called can achieve their and the club's aim of improving attendances is by improving the product. That means actually scoring goals and winning stuff. And, of course, for the Belgian to sell the club.
All of this, except the Belgian bit, applies to all clubs in the lower leagues but many benefit from extenuating circumstances. Perhaps the most important of these is location. In London and its environs, there are so many others things to be doing. (For example, as a boycotter*, last Saturday, with friends and Mrs cafcfan I visited the Sculpture Park near Churt in Surrey and had an excellent lunch in the pub opposite. It was so very much more fun than I concluded watching Charlton would have been, and so it proved). But if you live in, say Scunthorpe or Rochdale the local football club might seem like a good option. In my view, another factor in the London location thing is the lack of press or other media interest in Charlton. As far as I am aware this lack of interest does not apply elsewhere. Some examples: The daily, The Coventry Telegraph, will provide thorough news coverage of all things Coventry City FC. Similar coverage will be found in The East Anglia Daily Times for both Ipswich and Colchester. What do Charlton get? Virtually nothing in The Evening Gooner and irregular coverage in the SLP and Newshopper.
Without decent football a winning team, promotion and an owner that understands these things we are likely doomed.
* For as long as I can remember, I have worked my holiday schedule around the Charlton fixture list. It's now not happening. I'm in Cyprus missing Oldham & Rochdale at home. in Mexico missing Sheff Utd, in Northern Ireland missing Bristol Rovers and in Florida missing Oxford & Bury as well as several away games that I might have gone to. The sad thing is, I am not even feeling irresolute about it. However much I support the concept of the protests (and I do), the truth of the matter is that like the big kid I am, I really don't want to be freezing my nuts off watching dross football.
Did I say anything that suggested we shouldn't be trying to engage with new locals ?
Many of us where taken to the Valley by Dads ,brothers, uncles--- it is my OPINION that the locals around Woolwich and Charlton don't have that heritage.
Trying to make this thread something " racial" is a fucking joke ---- to be clear go fuck yourselves
Even saw a lad of about 15 get off a bus in Charlton Road last Wednesday wearing the Covered End Choir shirt.
Point taken that relegation and the unstoppable rise of the Premier League monster means we have a lower media profile, and that the apathy and antipathy the current regime have brought about will bring about a decline. But every time I see a kid in a Charlton top, I'm reminded why it's important to keep fighting.
I'm just relieved that Palace shirts are still a thankfully rare sight north of Catford.
Get the team right, get new owners and they will come.
Isn't Bexleyheath the place where most Charlton fans live, with many in Dartford and further out in Kent?
They haven't done much different to us and they haven't splurged huge amounts of cash recently. I don't see why we can't aspire to equal what they are doing, with sensible and dynamic owners who understand that getting new generations through the turnstiles is not about wittering a few meaningless slogans and then thoroughly pissing off your established fan base. I don't think demographics are that important.
So yeah, be the one who says it. Enlighten us as you so clearly desire.
All I see is someone innocently pointing out that you can't simply rely upon people passing a love of Charlton on to their kids. People move, areas change and those who have historically followed the club pass on. There was no negativity attached to the notion of "new comers to the area"; or is it offensive to claim someone isn't likely to have an interest in a football club if they have no ties to it?
A far more mature and proactive response to @Goonerhater post would've been the simple question "How do we capture the attention of the new comers to the area, and show them what's on their doorstep?". Not quite as an exciting narrative when compared to the one you seem keen to push though, is it?
(a) Openly admitting that the fan base doesn't match the demographic of Charlton and the surrounding areas;
(b) Pointing out one reason why, notably we aren't exactly a glamorous club in comparison to other London ones at the moment;
(c) Expressing a desire to see the club match the community better.
Ultimately it's all about (c), you get a few local lads who chance a visit to the club - and if they enjoy it then they will bring more. Football for a fiver was brilliant as I saw first hand how it got a friends little brother interested in Charlton, all because his Charlton supporting friend told him to come along on the cheap.
Unfortunately the club is pretty toxic at the moment, and we have leadership who thinks a competition to win a pie or sit on a sofa is an acceptable method of recruiting and retaining more fans. Fixing this goes beyond cheap tickets and complimentary tickets.
I will add though, that point (a) is largely how I took GH's post. Not really anything to get offended about whatsoever.
I agree with you that a more productive response would have been to ask how we engage newcomers to the area to support Charlton, and I agree that it represents a challenge, especially with attendance costing a lot more than it did back in the days when everyone piled into the terraces and we had 60k every home game. I think our relatively low prices are one thing the Belgians have gotten right, in fact, and I think that this is the first step. A team we can get behind is the next. But after that, there has to be outreach, community participation, freebies...all things that we've historically done well.
So I suppose I was reacting angrily to what I saw as a defeatist howl of despair, with immigration subtly implied as a cause of the death of Charlton. It seems to be shorthand for an attitude of parochialism that believes in 'proper Charlton', families who've grown up Charlton for generations, British families, never missed a game in forty years, and now the new folks next-door, they don't want to know! I've seen their kid, he wears a United shirt. It's the end.
But it isn't the end. Where there's quality entertainment and sporting drama, people will come. The problem is less Roland and Katie (althooooough - they've made lots of mistakes) and more Sky Sports, the EPL, the sheer imbalance of resources in the world game. So CAFC have to keep engaging with the community, have to keep existing above all.
I have sympathy with much of Goonerhater's opening post, but I really don't think that sighingly looking around at all the foreign faces is the right way to approach this. Sure, everyone needs persuasion, but the problem isn't them, it's fucking Arsenal. Clue's in your username, pal!
The challenge is to overcome that - and that's a big one when you're based in a city whose population is forever changing, where your neighbours may be long-term residents, may have born on a different continent watching Africa's finest play in the PL on the box, or may have been born in the Home Counties watching Ryan Giggs play for Man United on Sky (defying your dad who chose to support Leeds on telly in the 70s despite being born in Banbury).
I can only speak as someone who lives in Charlton itself, but I still think there's a lot of goodwill in the area towards the club. It's just a shame that the current owners don't know what to do with it, and see it in purely financial terms.
We're lucky to have the community trust going into schools and doing the hard work and getting the word out there - if it was down to Meire and Cojones, we'd be screwed in that respect. I worked in Shepherd's Bush for the best part of 10/11 years around the 2000s - plenty of QPR shirts around the place, even when they were stuck in the third tier.