People have told us for years Bradford needed to cut their cloth accordingly and now seem surprised they are a useless bit of cloth nobody wants. The same story gets repeated time and time again. You simply made the same argument don't chase success. Accept less.

Surely the point is that having an old stadium that requires constant costly maintenence can be a millstone around the neck.

On a completely unrelated note, how is the SouthStand replacement coming along?

Just Maybe because they have never bought into cutting their cloth accordingly?

For the record i really hope Bradford can come back from this.. but they do need to learn the lessons this time, probably have to start afresh now and build the club back from scratch, it won't be easy. I hope they can because there are many good fans who are suffering.

I first started going to live RL matches in 1963 to support Bradford Northern after they'd gone bust & then reformed after the efforts of people such as Trevor Foster.
It seems that the Bulls are simply following historical precedent without learning the lessons of history.
No different to the majority of nation states in that regard.

If it's the result of the actions and decisions the game has made then why aren't other GF winners like Leeds, Saints and Wigan in the same position?

What is accordingly? Spending less on players and seeing crowds false? Being relegated and seeing funding fall and crowds cut in half? How many times are we going to say they will step back and rebuild before we address the fundamental stupidity of expecting them to operate an SL infrastructure on championship funding and Championship crowds?

People say the stadium is the millstone around their neck. This won't change by spending less on players, it won't change by 'cutting their cloth' it wasn't changed by giving them 50%funding, it wasn't changed by points deductions or relegating them.

There is a possibility every club isn't the same?

or how about living within your means?
or not throwing free tickets left right and centre.
the fault for bradfords demise is purely and simply with negligent useless owners. don't try to dress it up by pointing the finger elsewhere

So they spend less on players, spend less on marketing, spend less on everything, crowds fall. What do they do then? Spend even less on players? Get relegated; see crowds and funding fall? Then what? Spend nothing on players spend nothing on marketing nothing on anything else and crowds still continue to fall?

This is the game as a whole right now. Keep cutting, accept less, accept worse. Manage your decline.

I think you are unfair to highlight the free ticket promotion. That was tremendously successful in the late 1990s in exposing RL to a completely new market. Bradford became the best supported club in SL for a time, and this wouldn't have happened without a bit of a stimulus. At the same time Leeds were in a very precarious position and could have done a Bradford if Caddick and GH hadn't come in.

The various administrations at the Bulls were obviously not blameless, including Caisley's hatred of Leeds and his peeing contest with GH, leading to the consequences of the Harris affair. Some fans on the Bulls board were well aware of the financial millstone of Odsal long before the on-field decline started, which begs the question of why it wasn't addressed sooner, but for a time there appeared to be genuine optimism that all the problems would have been solved with the much vaunted redevelopment of Odsal that must have been dependent on external sources of funding rolling in. When things started to go wrong on the field under McNamara, the off-field decline was already well in motion.

So it's the clubs fault then not the game if others have shown you can manage and be fine and continue to win GF's. No reason Bradford couldn't have done the same except for their own failings.

Nope that is just something you have made up in your head.

I haven't apportioned blame anywhere.

As I said, not every club is the same. What works for leeds may be damaging for bradford.

Yeah but blaming profligacy and bogeymen is easy and simple and means we can pretend everything is hunky dory and we don't have to address the structural reasons why this keeps happening. It means we don't have to make the tough choices, take the unpopular decisions, or do the hard tasks. We can just simply blame profligacy and bogeymen.

This appears to me to suggest that success on the field is more important to some clubs than others.

In order to maintain their revenue streams Bradford needed to have a strong side, their fan base wasn't huge before SL 5k? that grew with success but as soon as the success dried up the fan base has shrunk to its 5k again.

Wigan/Leeds/Saints - have historically a more robust fan base so they can stand greater fluctuations in success - Leeds' crowds will be down next season but they will still be 13-15k a game.

Without success the appetite for RL in Bradford is pretty small - no wonder it has gone bust so many times.

I think that's far too simplistic. Bradford's problems have been two fold. Firstly of infrastructure and latterly of scale. Odsal is an expensive stadium to maintain. It is in huge need of renovation but the Bulls don't have the stability, security and attractiveness to do that. That is a long term, large financial outlay, they don't have a sugar daddy who can throw that money at them, ! Kindly council or developer who will do it for a sweetheart deal on some land, and they definitely don't exist in an environment with the ability to allow them borrow on confident projections for the next 20-30years.

Now their problem is scale. Odsal is too big for the championship. The fixed costs and overheads are too high for that league. Their break even or even survivable losses are too high to be anything other than a top end SL club attracting top end SL crowds. Now some might say that they should 'cut their cloth accordingly' but they ad a club are too big to be run like a batley or a dewsbury. They don't have a small stadium they own to move in to, and if they did it would only depress crowds further
And leave them stuck if they ever did start moving forward.