Rethinking Football / SoccerShout.com

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I wrote a post yesterday that floated the idea of making League Two an under-24’s league in an effort to differentiate it from the rest of the league.

I raised the notion on the forum I post most often (a Boro forum run by the club’s FMTTM fanzine) and got a pretty comprehensive ticking off by the people who responded. The main objection - quite rightly - being that the idea is unworkable when teams are swapping leagues. Do promoted or relegated teams joining the league have to sack all their older players? Hmmm…good point.

The inspiration for the article, though, was this: What can a League Two club do to make it more attractive to supporters? And is there anything the league can do to encourage such behaviour?

Let’s take Darlington as an example. The club is about 15 miles west of Middlesbrough. The town’s population is just shy of 100,000 - pretty close to Middlesbrough’s 135,000 residents. Darlington’s average crowd this season is less than 4,000 - a shambles compared to Boro’s much-maligned 26,500 average.

So what could Darlington do to get a few more people through the door?

• Brand themselves as the place to come and see up-and-coming footballers (and back that up by attracting some decent kids, training them, and giving them lots of playing time).
• Take the best five young players that Boro will loan them on season-long deals.
• Cut their prices a bit so that a dad and his two kids go could see a game for twenty quid.
• Move their games to Thursday nights to escape from the weekend crowd.
• Move their kick-off times to 6:30 p.m. You could take your kids and be home for nine o’clock. You could go for a pint after work and then straight to the game (and have change from twenty quid).

Any or all of these tactics would be fairly easy to implement and I’d bet they’d have a positive effect on the attendance figures and the overall financial health of the club.

Darlington have tried something else this season - play better football - and it didn’t work. As far as the league goes, they’re having their having their best season for a while. But their attendance figures are still anemic and they can’t get more than a four-sentence match report from the BBC. Ouch.