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This is one for you 'blackcat' cos you from england and you seem to know your soccer or football.
Can you tell me what is happening with 1st-division club Wimbledon FC? There lowest crowd this season is just 644, and there highest 6538, and there next highest 3908. I also read that they want to move to a new stadium. So what has happened with the club?
Here are a couple of photos from one of their home games this season:
I can help you Cam. I may not live in England but Durham is almost as out of reach from London as Australia is. The fans are angry and they are rebelling.
Wimbledon have not always been a top flight professional club. Most of their existence they were a successful team in the lower non-professional divisions and conferences. Thus they occupied a small stadium called Plough Lane http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/park/yfh45/plough.htm Over the past 3 decades they became professional and slowly made their way up to the Premier League. The culmination of this climb was in 1988 when they won the FA Cup. Riding the high of success the club relocated to Selhurst Park, home of Crystal Palace, and the ground where your photos were taken. That was not a popular move to begin with but Plough Lane was too small and showing its age anyway (it has since been demolished) so the fans did follow.
The club now wants to relocate to Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes is a satellite city some 70 miles Northwest of South London (where Wimbledon are based). It is like moving from southern Sydney to Newcastle. The FA has surprisingly agreed to let the Dons move out of their district and the fans aren't happy at losing their club. Thus there is a lot of boycotting of games etc.
Thanks for that. Gee that is a small ground they used to play at and it looks like it wasn't used ever since Wimbledon relocated in 1991 to when those photos were taken. However it looks in better condition than Knights Stadium in Melbourne.
the top level of that stand looks like it's almost vertical, and here i was thinking you couln't get any worse then the top level of the great southern stand.
That stadium looked like a fantastic stadium for soccer, The local community should support and realise how lucky they are for a stadium like that although there are much better stadia, i personally like the design and the way it athetically looks hopefully the crowds improve.
644 to a game and we thought soccer in this country was in trouble
hey the stand in the bottom picture is very similar to the eastern stand? at olympic park, with the roof not attached to any back wall but held in lace with poles.
this stadium, selhurst Park, belongs to crystal palace fc who currently only play at the 2nd level of english football, unikely to get promotion. theyre currently the 31st best club overall and only average around 20.000 I would think at this stadium, which holds around 25.000
They want to expand the ground to at least 40.000 which is necessary to survive in the top league should they ever get promoted. However opposition to this from local residents have stopped this,meaning the club will most likely move and this ground demolished in not too many years, like many far better grounds, which are already condemned,
the most famous condemned grounds probably anfield (liverpool) and Highbury (arsenal) the picture is of an annoying squatter club borrowing the ground, which as mentioned is being boycotted as explained in an earlier post
Just thought I would elaborate a little on the reason why you can see almost no spectators in those pictures of Selhurst Park. Its effectively all about the concept of franchising sports teams. I don't know how widely it happens in Australian sport but here in England its viewed with contempt.
Wimbledon have always been known - and widely derided - for their tiny levels of support. Even in the Premiership they sometimes attracted fewer than 10,000 fans. The hard core support though has, understandably, been entirely alienated by the proposals to move 'their' club to Milton Keynes. As a result they have effectively transferred their allegiance en masse to a new club called AFC Wimbledon, run by the supporters for the supporters, which plays in a (very) minor league.
This has led to the bizarre sight of 4,500 people turning up in tiny grounds to watch what is essentially parks football where spectators are normally outnumbered by the players. Meanwhile the now hated 'Franchise Club', having lost its old supporter base, but not yet in a position to carry out its move to Milton keynes, struggles to attract more than a few hundred supporters (There is a widespread belief that even the miserly published gate figures are greatly inflated). Even many supporters of the opposition clubs tend to boycott their matches with the Franchise on a point of principle, going to watch AFC instead.
The fans are angry and they are rebelling.
