Cod Almighty | Diary
Something will turn up. But it might not be anything good if we just wait for it
10 May 2019
Let's start with a question. When could Grimsby Town last afford to be complacent?
January 1999 perhaps, when a Peter Handyside bicycle kick at Ipswich put us in the play-off places for promotion to the top flight? But the way we then slipped down the table revealed we had a squad under-resourced to be truly competitive in the second division.
Since then? Three relegations should have made it clear enough that business as usual was not good enough. Not only was TV money increasing the concentration of wealth at the top of the game, it was also making it ever more normal for football fans to follow "their" teams without ever actually attending a match in person. "We do our PR on the pitch" sounds wonderfully no-nonsense. You can hear it said in ringing tones and you almost start to laugh and applaud yourself. Until you reflect that with the club perched near the relegation zone, there are scores of other clubs, on televison or a reasonable drive away, doing the same kind of PR, only better.
We have a chairman / majority shareholder who appears to have learnt everything he knows about running a football club in the 21st century from the impoverished 19th century Dickensian Mr Micawber. Even when something or someone has turned up for John Fenty - Mike Parker with his promise of investment, or Operation Promotion with the prospect of resetting the relationship between the club and its supporters - he has wasted little time in spurning the opportunity.
This is not about the board spending more of their own money. It is about the club doing everything it can to encourage fans and potential fans to want to spend money at the club, and then to make it easy for them to do so. With season ticket sales, as with so much else, we fail. Badly.
We put season tickets on sale later than other clubs because... we always have. The club is not to blame for the collapse of Zebra Finance, but is allowing fans to pay in four instalments rather than ten going to meet the needs of the fans who really want to commit to a season ticket but just can't meet the cost upfront.
Then there is the jaded approach to promoting sales. Does anyone really believe we are going to sign a player who will get fans rushing to the ticket office, rather than hurrying to their computer to find out who the hell he is? Rather than rely on the approach that might have worked when we had the money for a Birtles or a Bogle, why not work with what we do have: five recent youth team graduates competing for a place in the first team next season? Put the prospects of the young Grimsby guns at the centre of our publicity as an embodiment of the way the club is rebuilding.
It gets worse. We hope to more or less match last year's season ticket sales from some unknown and unidentified "feelgood factor" or because of the "football fortune" (and if Dickens had made Micawber a football director, he'd surely have had "football fortune" as a catchphrase) not of the Mariners but of Liverpool and Spurs.
Forgive Middle-Aged Diary my scepticism, but the comebacks of Liverpool and Spurs are more likely to generate TV subscriptions than ticket sales at Blundell Park. Hoping for a feelgood factor is just the absence of a strategy dressed up as a strategy. It is hoping that "a rising tide will raise all ships". But the ships it won't raise are the ones which have been beached so long that a once-sound hull has become rotten beyond use. Those ships just sink.
No one is immune to the excitement of a comeback. But what is the club actively doing to turn what Liverpool and Spurs did into an interest in the Mariners? Ron Counte shows how it can be done, as does Marianthi in their response to Ron.
Forwarding this to everyone at work who keeps going on today about how you only see things like that in the Premier League. Pfffftttt. They've no idea.
— M a r i a n t h i
But it takes a leap. It means stepping out of our corrosive complacency to put ourselves in the shoes of the people we want to come and watch the Mariners. Sporadically - in the John-Lewis advert spoof, for instance - people at the club are allowed to show how it can be done. But it needs to be put together and turned into a strategy.