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.

So orangeman.
What do you suggest

There was an opus posted on here back in 2009. It outlined a number of ways to promote the club for either minimal or no outlay. What was required was a desire, a will and a group of volunteers to make it work. The premise at the time was that we had about 3,750 as an average and it was a way to get the club nearer 5,000 fans, which at the time would have delivered about £1,000,000 in gate receipts.
Alas.....it would almost be cheaper to bin the Broncos and start from scratch again as any goodwill is gone, there's 500 fans left at best and if the club decide that Wimbledon is their desired destination, I see no point in spending a farthing on marketing and promotion until next January/February, when the Covid situation may be a bit clearer and the club have an idea of interest from Dons fans.

That said. If it were me?

I'd stay at Ealing until we've a squad that looks like it might challenge and if needed, take one or two games to a bigger stadium like the stoop.
I'd put together a 10 year plan, with chances to amend and update it at 1 year, 4 years and again at 7 years. I'd re-engage with the lapsed fans.....maybe in the form of a letter from David Hughes outlining the plan for the club.
I'd streamline and outsource every aspect of the back office, with maybe a General Manager and 2 other full time employees. I'd allocate a set figure for marketing and interview local agencies with a major part of any fees paid for acquisition....
...I'd have the Academy & First Team Squads training together, using the Gymnasium that Dave built







back when he said it was perfect for the Broncos and I'd use any of the savings we make from not having seperate training facilities etc to market ourselves.
I'd run Beer Fesivals at 3 games during the summer.....a la Toronto. I'd have bands on, activities for the kids and bring back Buck'n'Dusty......in short, I'd act like a club and not a team.

But it won't happen. Hughes has bought into someone telling him what he wants to hear and the club will be part time in a matter of a few years....

Over the years from Gutter to Orange, the mantra has remained the same despite a fair amount of abuse from some of us, including me i suspect.

But it is hard not to agree any more. The only thing I would really love to know, but suspect never will is WHY Hughes has done (or not done) what he has to get us to this position despite spending millions.

I have too many good memories, from The Fulham days, bad ones are outweighed by good! If David Hughes had never come along, we may not have even had a club for years now, I would not like to imagine how much he has put in of his own personal finance? In my case, I am more bitter about my home town club, run by an owner, who is it all about himself! the new ground was not his money, it was a friend in Hong Kong, with a very high interest fee! he even has hos own office at the ground, Saturday after the cup presentation, when it should have been all about the players, there he was running out on to the pitch. We all look at matters differently! Thank Goodness lol

Between £20 & £30 million....with an equal or possibly higher figure of central/TV revenue as well as fan and sponsorship monies.
Just short of 1 million fans watched London's Home SL games over the years....there's £10,000,000 in a heartbeat.
Stop saying we'd have no club without Hughes. It's apologetic in spades and it pardons him for the utter clusterfudge he has made of running the club.
We could well be a solid mid table SL side now with comparable crowds to Castleford or Wakefield if he'd have just employed a Rugby administrator instead of Blanchard then Mackay. If he'd accepted that we were lucky to meet lower tier teams on the way to the semis and deserved the pasting Wigan gave us, we'd maybe we'd have not been bolted on to drop.....and before anyone mentions it, Toronto bottled it......yes, we went up, but even then he just expected fans to rock up when we were in SL. So please.....stop excusing his ineptitude by saying without him we'd not be here......he's wasted our money as well as his own!

No One! tells me what I may say! and never will.

Over the years I've been involved with many RL owners, and he's anywhere near the bottom! Never fails to amaze me, how people who put their own personal money into the game, take stick, look at the way League Express constantly knocked Koukash!

You can count on one hand, those owners in our sport, who have put there own major money into a club!

I've said over and over again, I don't see a queue of major financial backers fighting to take over the club! How many have walked away from our club! Let's just hope when the day comes, we need an owner, there is one!

did you carry a watermelon






How many fingers have you got on your hands???






In 202 and again in 2007 we were a prospect......now we're junk bonds. When he put us on the block in 2013 he admitted as much.....he'd reduced the club to a worthless entity.


Plenty. But just because he's an arrogant narcissist who refuses to admit he's wrong, so he continues to plough money in whilst saying his way is right and ignoring the blaringly obvious doesn't excuse him. He has killed the club!

There's no club left to own. There's a team with a toxic brand and staff who seem more about self promotion than actually doing their jobs. Wimbledon is lazy....it really is. The club needed staff who would work hard and do so for peanuts or less......but it seems the current Monkey requires more than a bag of cashews and is delivering nothing in return!
When Hughes goes, that's it. If anyone steps up it'll be for no cash outlay and with the debts wiped clean and then the club has a chance of rebuilding, but as I say, it'll do that from the 3rd tier....why do you think shortcut argyle and perez aren't sniffing around? Hughes has ruined us....that's why!

By the way.....on your first point of "not being told what to say"....welcome to the club. Ive been told to shut up for nearly 20 years and guess what?

Perhaps, look closer to home first! ' arrogant narcissist who refuses to admit they are wrong'

Would anyone want to support our club any more, if they ever managed to find this forum??, they would be put off for life!

How many even bother to post here? 4 or 5? No Wonder! and nothing to do with the club, West Ham fans can be arrogrant on KUMB, but nothing like a few here!

Do you seriously believe the decline in poster numbers here is solely due to arrogant posters and in no way related to the club losing the massive majority of its support base?

If so you are wrong. Two people who used to do away games with me were regular posters on here. Neither watch the club or post here any more. Both cited their reason for ceasing to watch the club, and therefore post here, as disillusionment with the way the club was run at the time they ceased attending. The same reason was given by the person who used to sit next to me at The Stoop in the early seasons. He posted here too He's reverted to being an official at a Iocal RU club now.

They are the three ex regular posters I know who have ceased posting and know why they ceased. All cited the club as their reason for ceasing to attend, which caused them to cease to post. I highly doubt they are the only three cases.

Spot on Halfdan, of the several bodies I dragged to the Stoop & France on a number of occasions & who posted once in a while here, they have all given up. 1 is dead which is fair enough, 1 spends their weekends sailing on the solent, 1 just follows Quins RU & the rest do family things. All have given up attending & posting because of the state of the club & see no future with Hughes about.

Fine.
I'm wrong.
The club were really fine all the time and the disappearance of fans and sponsors as well as our SL status weren't predicted back in 2003 and if it were, it wasn't by me.



Mr Hughes is a genius and his plan for a multi-sport club will come to fruition soon and they'll be queuing around the block to get in to see us. It only failed before because charltonthestoopcharltonbrentfordthestoopthehivetrailfinders was on the wrong bus route....this time it'll be different.



As for folk coming on here or total RL or any other non club sponsored media....there's nothing positive to say at the moment. The clubs a mid table one, with an outbreak of covid, no fans and has a squad of about 6 players signed for next year and are moving to a 9k stadium with 2.5%of the fans needed to fill it.

I was wrong and all those who said I was wrong and who no longer go to games and post in any of the forums were right.....they just don't go any more because of a poster 12,000 KMs away being wrong all the time

Not assured of being able to play at Wimbledon just yet ...they need to get 4,000 fans to a friendly v Shorpe first
[urlhttps://www.afcwimbledon.co.uk/news/2021/july/shorpe-tickets-now-available/[/url

Not quite correct, they also have to get through the 1st league game on 14th August.

Halfdan and Deadcowboy you ae both 100% right