If that 280 is the official gate, take this in...

Oxford RL frequently pulled bigger gates than that for home matches during their first two season. (I was a dual Broncos/Oxford season ticket holder.)

Yes, Broncos are now pulling fewer fans than a team widely regarded as a fan free joke.

Unbelievable.

Caveat - home games played in Oxford only

I remember when the target was 5k averages and a floral roundabout. Now it's 5k for the season and a funeral wreath by October.

It's frankly diabolical how little focus has been put on building support. Even the hardcore support has been eroded through lack of engagement with fans and lack of investment in the team.

Barrow managed 2k apparently for their last game. We just make no effort whatsoever. Rather than trying to work with fans, Broncos prefer to pee them off. I honestly think the club does not want fans, I cant see any other explanation. Look at stuff like the website, help with promotion, I would guess there is plenty of expertise among the fan base that would (maybe not now) be willing to help. Club needs a long re think. PL will be great, with 250 people rattling around in there.

I guess I wouldn't mind so much if Hughes, the CEO or even the Lemur Lover came out & explained the great plan they are working to. It might be a rip off of Hans Christian Anderson but at least we would know what the thinking was (if any).

Leaving the limitation of the website to one side, there seems very little from Danny & a lot from Will. All due respect to the Skipper, I'd rather hear from the Coach.

Reading through this, it looks like most of the old guard who have supported the club through thin and thinner are just about done. I know, I'm one of them.

David Hughes took over in what? 2001? There's a part of me that wished we'd have been put out of our misery then.

I wouldn't believe a word that came out of his mouth. It's got to the stage now where ANYONE and not just mouthy gits like me, that dares to call into any activity or lack there of at the club is banned or has access limited on social media.

Long time fans with a track record of defending him and the club, whilst spending thousands in support are now shunned because he's given another unqualified idiot the keys

He employed (and continues to) Gimps, who will do his bidding whilst coming up with every excuse under the sun for the lack of interest. The Name, The Ground, The lack of a Tube Station......but the cold hard reality is that David Hughes is a fan with cash who spat his dummy out so hard in 2013 because of a hammering by Wigan that we nearly folded. That's not the action of a smart business man. Since we were saved in 2005/6, the club has had one CEO of any note. Paul Brown. Since then, we've had a bunch of amateurs running the club. The RFL have tried, with giving access to Marketing specialists and bribing the bloke at the Hive to let us in, but the buck stops firmly with the bloke who has flushed £30,000,000 down the drain because he refused to ever listen to anyone who might have known better.

Wimbledon have a 4 million (IIRC) debt to service and David Hughes paying them £200,000 a year in rent over 10 years will help with that, but if they're budgeting for anything north of 300 on game day for the Broncos they may have to look at other revenue streams.

280 fans, which will include Wags etc....Pub soccer gets bigger gates

Yea, we are pretty much done tbh. I really hate what seems to have happened, and I put no blame on wimbledon at all, I think they have been sold a lemon, and they must be wondering why the long time london fans are so opposed to the move. Its the fact we are moving, not where we are moving to, and the fact of the significant price increase with the weakest squad we have ever had.

Sad to keep reading this thread, but glad you say most! & not EVERYONE! I was at the first game and ever since, travelling 225 miles each way by car for home games.

I still Hope that we will come through all this, that the move to Wimbledon will turn out Positive! In our travels we had that many lows, playing in an athletic stadium one for me!

Without one person financing Our Club for many years, we would not be here today, I can't see any queue of investors? wanting to take over.

Unless they have a master plan up their sleeve you would think given where the club is today, pulling out of Wimbledon would be the sensible thing to do.

It makes you wonder if a new benefactor doesn't come forward fairly quickly then the club is going to be run down to closure.

I would not be surprised if Wimbledon pull out and take the decision away from London... If they have been told we will rock up with 2K fans and be in SL in the next 2 years where attendances will be >2K, and from that made projections on match day revenue, now they are seeing we will have

1) 20% of the projected fans (and then by extension 20% of the gate takings, beer and food takings etc),
2) we won't even be making the playoffs let alone promotion as no money to get in quality players over than the acadamy boys,

does it make sense for them to have us as Tenants. I can't believe rent alone will cover what the Dons need to pay off there loan, they need a cut of the takings, and 300 fans that cut will be very small.

To answer Jaybs, we would come back when the product on offer matches the cost of attending. Right now it does not. And this is coming from somebody who has had 3 ST for 20 years, has bought 3 home and 3 away tops pretty much every year, and paid for parking when available... SO I have put more than my money in over the years.

Wimbledon I feel do need the money! so wishing for that being a reason we may not move, could e a pipe dream! I have got to know many at Wimbledon, and they are keen on us working with them.

I said yesterday there seems no one even thinking about taking over the club, The RFL will not save it, it will be the end for me with rugby league if we collapse, I will still watch it on TV, if any TV company us then even showing it live.

I also hear this from several sources, but then why are no Dons fans coming to our current games to see what we are bringing.. There is no football on right now, so nothing to do at weekends.

If the Dons fans are so interested in RL and us, and are potentially going to significantly increase our gates, then I'd be expecting some of them to be showing up right now. But they are not, as an attendance of 280 tells us, that the 'new fans' who would be replacing the old ST holders, are not showing up.

I'll be amazed if Dons fans come to more than 2 games, and once football season starts again, then if we see 100 of them regularly I'll be shocked.

This is not a dig at Dons fans, I'm a RL fan not wendyball, and if it was the otherway and Wimbledon came to trailfinders and we was the landlords, I would not go to any Football games, basically as Football bores me. So I don't see many Dons fans attending (even if they get in free with there Dons ST's)

If I was a Dons fan, reading this forum would not impress me.

Not sure its reasonable for a curious AFC fans to drag themselves to Ealing to watch us, maybe if we were playing in EFL's newest member Sutton Utd's ground or if we were playing on Tooting Bec Common it might be. Everything from August onwards might depend on how well we do & how well AFC do. Not sure AFC's support will hold up if they struggle. You see far, far more Chelsea shirts on a Saturday in Wimbledon than AFC ones.

I agree 100%. The point I am making is that there seems to be an expectation in some places that 1K+ dons fans will magically become London RL suppliers, and start attending games once we start playing there. My point is I just don't see it happening, as just because we are playing at the same ground will not automatically make the football fans come again for the RL. Maybe we get a few when no football is on, but for instance in my family, my wife would let me attend a game on Sat or on Sunday, but not both, she would get very annoyed if I was gone all weekend on sports games. I assume thats the same for most people

Imagine if we had stuck around at Brentford. We could have grown the fan base and a partnership with the footbal club and maybe now be sharing at their new ground.

If anyone (specifically DH) thinks a move to Wimbledon will provide an instant fan base they only need to look at what has happened when we have moved in the past.

The definition of insanity springs to mind.

I wouldn’t worry about that.

Not sure if its good or bad news Crash but I'd assume we play the weekend they are away. So you might be OK (or not as the case may be).

Now if we had a team as good as that which finished runners up in SL under Tony Currie then quite a few might get the bug. Or Tank Gordon's team come to that.

MK Dons fans might find it amusing.

Don't lose any sleep about Any Club wanting to go to Trailfinders! lol, Rugby League was my fist love! West Ham has been for 50 years, I was a member of a Rugby Union club for years, been to many matches at Twickenham, and big Lancashire Cricket follower, of all of them worry more about Rugby League & it's future

Such a small word IF? but when it comes to leaving a ground such as Brentford? Not many of us see The Future!

When we were at Brentford, the bees fans were shaking buckets to raise funds to try and turn their club around.
We were in SL with a 3,700 average, they were in the 3rd tier with 5,700
2 decades on and the difference between joined up thinking and the control of a poundland oligarch are frightening.
Top flight football in a new stadium with a wealthy tenant and a back-office/development system that is the blueprint of the future....or a monkey flogging shirts off the back of a wagon?

As a very new fan, we first had season tickets in 2017, I haven't experienced the decline of the club over many years. So I can't comment on that. It does strike me that the warning signs on the field were there in the few games we played in 2020 - we struggled to overcome Bradford away and were overpowered by Featherstone(?) in the last game before lockdown.

Off the field the Wimbledon move looks like its the victim of some bad luck and poor judgement. The bad luck (or maybe poor judgement) was the second wave of CV19. I guess if we had started the season with spectators, which was the government's plan until the Autumn things may have been better. Mind you practically every viral expert was predicting a second wave. A former colleague is a deputy chair of a major NHS trust and he told me the winter wave was fully factored into their planning.

Having said that we embarked on this season with a combination of an unattractive pricing package for season tickets (we had three bronze tickets at Ealing so a £300 price hike was quite eye watering) and no idea where games would be played. I may have missed something but although the Wimbledon deal is done I don't think we've had the rubber stamp from Merton Council or the date of the first fixture to be played there.

Our circumstances are a little complicated - my wife was advised to shield from CV19 and as a consequence is very nervous about using the tube. So can we drive to Wimbledon? It appears not and coming from Essex we're looking at two hours each way by public transport.

I'm not knocking the club for wanting to use Wimbledon - and maybe for us we just become occasional visitors on weekends free of rail engineering - but it does strike me as madness to move grounds, hike prices, and then revert to the ground where you were originally playing in the middle of a pandemic. You need to attract people back who during lockdwon will have found other things to do. Most people I have spoken to have have re-evaluated things in certain ways so you can't assume as a business that people will return to exactly what they were doing 15 months ago.

The irony of course is that the individual tickets at Ealing (£20/£15) make the £240 season ticket look terrible value. We'll carry on supporting the team and we will get to the games at Ealing that are left. After that we don't really know.

I think I detailed out the increase in cost and time in another forum which I won't requote here, but basically for 3 of us, the ST cost increase plus the cost and time to get to wimbledon on Public transport vs driving to ealing worked out at being 6 times more expensive and taking 6 times as long per game (this is not just the ST price, but comparing the price of parking for one car vs three people train and bus tickets).

When you also consider the product we are going to see if worse than before its not hard to make the call we did

So we have taken the plunge and took advantage of the 4 games for £60 offer. £15 per game is too good to pass up, but feel for those ST holders this season who are actually paying more for the next 4 home games than we are. (although they have better seats so not as bad).

Hopefully a few more like us will have taken up this offer, as where I won't pay £25 to watch mid table championship RL, 15GBP is more aligned to the product on offer (and we can drive and park as well which is a bonus)

One final point, I though we would be give an assigned time to arrive at the ground, but it seems we just got the tickets without any specification of what time we should arrive. This tells me London not expecting many people this sunday vs Whitehaven