He should donate it to one of those mascots that missed out.

‘A couple of very ambitious pieces of business’… one was a teenager from a club on the verge of non league.

ITK-ers on this site and Rich Sharpe have both stated in recent weeks that there is no particular ambition to go up. And that is with a side that has spent the majority of the last two seasons in the top 6. What even is this club then? What’s the point of any of this? So this latest debacle is par for the course, yet they will still be asking the ever loyal 8/9k for their £400 - £530 (maybe even another hike, why not, ay Swag?) in June, some of the most expensive prices in the league for what is in all purposes a ‘development club’. Yet in return they can’t even fulfil the very basic admin tasks of a football club or fulfil the basic mantra of a football club at any level - i.e you strive to be the best you can, with the best possible team you can muster. They play in blue and white shirts down at a (decaying) place called Ewood Park, good job as I don’t recognise much else…

Why would they be? Thought the club wasn’t arsed about promotion and with it said £300 million anyway?

The comments under the official Facebook post of this article is as scathing as on here, is the tide turning on the other socials?

We had 26,000 average crowds the year they joined, the highest for 15 years, ergo by definition they literally had been improving. We were not in decline, simple as that.

Keeping Ke*n on in the summer of 2012 was the biggest factor for such a huge drop (a drop you don’t see anywhere else on relegation).

You are making so sense whatsoever. Crowds were literally at the highest level since the mid 90s as they arrived.

Highest gates since 1996 the year they arrived, 26,000 average crowds. So how were we heading towards 8-10k gates before they arrived? Tied yourself in knots here.

The club worked its arse off to get folk back in the tent between 2008 and 2010. A club that obviously wasn’t expecting to be challenging for titles was back up at mid 90 title era crowds regardless. What an achievement. What pride we had when you looked around Ewood on a match day. Alas, just like our PL status, our booming ST base was rapidly thrown away. I for one will never forgive their arrogance, sorry ‘naivety as they were badly advised’.

You are saying it like it isn’t. In the Venky’s arriving year of 2010 we had just registered a 26,300 average crowd for 2009/2010, the highest since 95/96. The support was in no way declining. These owners are 100% behind the decline.

Indeed Ricky. Krakow wasn’t half bad an all… and Feyennord via Amsterdam! All in about four months! Not very sexy though…

But they weren’t falling as Venky’s arrived. They were at their highest level since the mid 90s, so your whole argument is moot.

Indeed Gav, as I embarked on my fourth European trip of the season to Bayer Leverkusen (also a couple of months away from another semifinal at OT) I don’t recall us thinking it was a non attractive, ‘unsexy’ club we were following…

No fan attraction? Decline? 20,000 ST holders and 26,000 crowds as they turned up says otherwise. Biggest crowds since the mid 90s. The club was in a bloody good place in 2010. The foundations were all there on and off the pitch. A bit of investment on players with those new billionaire owners of ours and who knows what we could have achieved. Alas, our betters in Pune had other ideas…

In decline long before they came? Totally wrong. They turned up here in 2010. In the 2009/2010 season we had 20,000 ST holders and an average crowd of 26,000. No good for 25+ years?! We certainly were ‘good’ up to them turning up. Cup wins, multiple semi finals, top 6 finishes, European campaigns, quality footballers throughout the team. An established PL club was more than good enough for most fans of Blackburn Rovers.

The actual ‘home crowd’ is only a little up from the 80s, remember much smaller away followings back then. That is certainly not the case across the divisions. Odd that you would look to defend the collapse of our crowds under the watch of these owners and shrug your shoulders with ‘well, look at the 80s’ as crowds boom across England.

But that isn’t ‘normal’ anymore as most clubs are currently miles up from the kind of gates they had in the mid 80s.

We currently have c800 more STs than what we finished last season with, so correlates.

Not sure I get your point. Of course they were lower then, football was in the doldrums. However, the fact we aren’t a million miles from those figures now as the game booms says it all.

Everybody’s gates were poorer then. Football has moved on and attendances are currently booming across the game. However, we are fairly unique in going back to those 80s figures, whereas pretty much all our competitors are now seeing substantially higher crowds than where they were in the 80s.

We’ve had an increase this season to a still piss poor 9,300, but that has only taken us to something slightly more respectable after the thirty year lows the Swag era has overseen (7,000 at the start of 21/22). We had c11,000 in that not exactly golden era of Gary Bowyer (and obviously many, many more before these owners darkened our doors).

The average gate is pretty much level to last season. We’ll once again finish with it around 14k. However, ST sales and ergo the overall crowd will be interesting next season though, when we see ever increasing prices coupled with a match going fanbase that isn’t particularly enthused with JDT from what I can see.

The 125th anniversary was great. Special one off kit, events, merchandise, a book published. 150th? I imagine a lot of potential initiatives will be ‘looked into’ but we’ll end up with a few old videos on ‘the socials’.

https://www.rovers.co.uk/news/2023/february/01/ticket-news--rovers-v-blackpool/ It is Cat C (£20 for BEnd and Riverside) when you follow the link to the article, but the graphic advertising the game on social media (what most fans will actually see at a glance) says £25, so looks like Cat B. Just a bit of a shambles down there, ain’t it…