Do you think the club will target these fans now when they haven't for years ?

Not sure what either of the last two posts are suggesting

Fans come to see the product, get a decent squad together in a decent facility. Majority of fans don't really care if the owner gives em a phone call inviting individually to games, they just want to know when and where and is it going to be a decent game in decent surroundings.

From what I take from your comments NB, you think that the club can just dish up at Wimbledon and fans will turn up in droves. I think that you are wrong.

It will take hard work to get people to turn up in decent numbers.

The club has to hope there is a large cross over of fans from AFC otherwise where are they going to come from? Those that attended Brentford & the Stoop haven't turned up at Ealing have they?

The minor issue is that people need to a) know the club exists and b) care enough to investigate what if offers. Not enough people fall into those two categories now



My reading is they are suggesting a fan attraction and fan retention policy may be required and the club may have to do a bit better on this front than it has done for well over a decade. I agree with them. If we just chuck up some posts and announce the kick off time, as usual, there's going to be a problem.



The blunt truth is very few people care about the Broncos right now. Too many bridges have been burnt. Remember Rupe1 promising thousands would return just because they reverted to the name London Broncos? They didn't and there's no way thousands will return just because the club moves to Wimbledon. The club needs thousands, not a couple of hundred returnees.



Yes they do have a head start in they should easily be able to get some curious Dons fans in however if they just bung them a free ticket or two and think the work is done, we know how that will end. We've seen it often enough.

Like say....oh....I dunno....The Stoop? Mclinden....Dorn.....LMS....we had the stadium and the squad.....then we got Hughes as sole owner.....and he slowly but surely dismantled the club brick by brick.

As for Hughes inviting fans....it's not London Broncos Fans who need the call......we know where they are and what time they're playing.

It's

A. Lapsed fans. They know where we are and KO time but can't be bothered for any number of reasons....a call from Hughes might work....

B. New fans. Let's face it. Without thousands of NEW fans, this move is pointless and to achieve this you need to get big and go early........and we already know that Hughes won't bankroll the sort of campaign that's needed.



To be clear ...he inherited a mid table SL club playing in a state of the art Rugby Stadium 14 years ago that cost £247K a year to rent at a time when ticketing income was about £80k a game......now he has a mid table 2nd division club in a football stadium that is costing him £47k less but he only has £5k a game coming in......



Re-read that back before you and other optimistic apologists say "this could be great".....he's tried this trick before and failed.....it's not the name.....it's not the ground.....it's bloody Hughes!

The minor issue is that people need to a) know the club exists and b) care enough to investigate what if offers. Not enough people fall into those two categories now



Butmypoint is those past fans already know the club exists apparently there were 8000 of em at some point.

As for the past so What! Its gone its dome pointless harping on about it, the future is what can be affected, hence my comment

I would suggest the club would be in a better to position to affect the future if they understood the failings of the past.

The majority of those 8,000 or so have made a conscious decision to cease attending. Most no longer have an interest in the club. My point was with the lack of marketing we usually see you need people who both know you exist and care enough to research the offering. Most of the 8,000 or so don't meet both criteria.



Most of those 8,000 or so are long gone and won't come back. I used to come in a group of up to 16. I'm the only one left and there's zero chance of the others returning regularly. A couple have died or moved away, the rest have simply moved on in their lives. A couple of those gone did a fair few away games too.



If the only plan is to rely on old fans coming back without much input from the club, it will be a fiasco.

All that matters now is The Future! the past gone! Let's jus5 wait and see what marketing plans are being looked at? It's not yet decided when we move yet!



The council procedure lasted much longer than I ever expected, it it even worth moving this season! The players are working with a Wimbledon FC charity, it's pointless starting a marketing yet! Whatever is in the budget needs to be used wisely!

As I mentioned previously, AFC want their fans in first. Their 1st league game is 14th August which would leave us 3 league games left i think. 1 of those is Fev. Do you really want a 50 to 70 point pasting to start our new tenure? Has to be next season whether full or part time. We need to start with a winning team & that means big bucks being spent. As Orangeman pointed out, Hughes probably won't fund it.



I did say when it was clear that Merton Council have 2 speeds, stop & reverse so you shouldn't be surprised by the time it's taken.

As I say. Apologists gotta do what they do.





If, as you suggest, we stop harping on about it, at what stage does the penny drop with those in charge that they're repeating the same mistakes that we've made over and over again?



Wimbledon have fewer fans than Brentford had when we moved in there. We had office space at Griffin Park and used their infrastructure there and Chris Warren got posters and leaflets made using the Brentford FC discounts with their suppliers. Brentford fans were invited to come to games, but at the end of the day, we were paying tenants who made money from ticket sales, merch sales from 40-20 in a port-a-cabin and through selling buckets of VB.



We left Griffin Park after 4 seasons including 2 Play-off appearances with 700 more average fans than our last season at Charlton. That's about 20% up......so, if we look at 850 as our average for our last full champ season at Ealing, then we're heading for a best case scenario of another 200 or so fans......but bear in mind, we had Wigan, Saints, Leeds and Bradford coming down in coachloads.....not Swinton and an extra hour going around the M25!



Why is this move even happening? We certainly haven't planned to make a push for SL this year, with an absolute lack of any decent signings being made. There are murmurs (This is RL after all) that SL may well return to Franchising, but only a blind fool would hand David Hughes another licence after what he did with the last one. Or, do people still think SKY will up their cash if London are involved? We certainly haven't signed players for 2022, so unless the NRL have bought us and are shipping an entire squad over, it looks like we're simply moving because someone at the club has told Hughes that the current ground is the reason that they can't attract fans and half decent sponsors.....reminds me of the cricketing supremo.



The smart money will be on us being Part time inside 3 years and back at Rosslyn Park maybe playing a couple of games at ealing and certainly being in the same division as Skolars.....you know, the team we used to play every year in the city before someone mucked up that relationship too.



To be crystal clear here. Wimbledon fans have little interest in anything to do with Rugby League as a sport or even as something to do when their footie team isn't about.....what they do care about is the £200,000 that David Hughes will give them so they can service their debt. Of course they'll make the right noises about "partnership" but we are nothing more than tenants here as we've been everywhere. Hughes wanted a "Barcelona" type club at Charlton, with multiple sports played under the one banner......it was a stupid pipe dream in 1996/7 and it's as daft and improbable now as it was then.



So nope. I'll continue to harp on about the clubs continued failure to understand that more fans = more revenue= more interest=more sponsors = less reliance on handouts. London Broncos fans rarely turned up expecting us to win, but we enjoyed the experience. 3,000 of them have walked away and yet the club will blame everything and everyone other than look at themselves and the owner and accept that the problem isn't a hard one to solve....well, it wasn't a decade or so ago, but a failed move to Wimbledon will make it impossible.