FoxesFan#1

I’m similar to you, slightly younger and it was more the early 90s that I grew up with. All players are now a poor version of their former incarnations. They have no personality either. Character wise they’re not even a patch on the footballers from the early 2000s. I only regained my love for the sport when I stepped away from big club football and started to follow a non league team nearly 5 years ago. There is life away from the big clubs, you don’t have to commit to the whole season and it’s easy to go with friends that can’t overly commit either. The quality of football isn’t too far off what we had 30 years ago, not the same I get it, but a good competitive and honest level. I wish fans from other clubs would snap out of the zombie like behaviour too but I doubt it. The only way it changes is if supporters remove their attention from it and stop going. Leicester literally had the perfect storm which is more of the reason why so many dislike them now. If it weren’t for relegation, then the other gripes would have been ignored.

I'd happily go back to 1990s football, none of the current nonsense dished up In fact it came to my realisation I was losing love for top flight football when they did the first (I think) of the regular light shows v Liverpool in the 19/20 season - I just watched thinking my time is coming to an end supporting this sort of football nonsense. Good luck @ozvaldo with the banner, I hope the cameras pick up the display, disappointed to be missing it as I sold my ticket on re-sale (fed up of wasting money with my seat empty most matches)

Hi @OntarioFox and anyone else interested! This website is superb for tracking official attendances all the way down the leagues. Click on the teams and you’ll see match by match crowds all the way back to 2012 https://www.footballwebpages.co.uk/national-league-north/attendances

Superb write up of your experience, it looks like a great day out. I ditched the clown show too and support my new local team since 2020, I’m aiming to be at Leamington away on Monday but I can’t make the last game of the season so I’m not happy or impressed that my Mum organised a family event for that day! I’ve moaned and whined for weeks but it’s not got me any further with getting out of the event. My brother in law (and his family) came down a few weeks back and watched Brackley v Buxton with us. He hadn’t been to any game since visiting Man Utd in 2017 and since then he has been to two Radcliffe games in NL North. He’s got the bug back too. Keep those reports coming as it’s great to read them.

That's incredible, just shows us why non-league is so good these days. I've seen so many matches where a bottom of the league team can look as good as a top team. I was at Brackley v Oxford City today for a 1-0 win to put us tied in top spot with Kidderminster. Almost 1700 in today with vast majority being home fans. Lewis Hall was in attendance supporting his brother which was nice to see.

I can completely resonate with your story too as mine is almost identical to yours Actually there isn't a single point you made that differs from my perspective now from old grounds to the awful treatment of supporters. I lost all the love for the top flight (and wannabe PL clubs too) especially in 2020 when it became apparent that we were no longer important to these clubs anymore. The big clubs were never going to help the smaller outfits so from that point on I wanted my footballing funds to go to non-league and not to big clubs anymore. As soon as the NL North re-opened for that brief window I headed to a couple of nearby non-league fixtures at Banbury and Brackley with the latter winning a myself (and a good mate) over instantly. I dropped my ST for good last week and it felt good getting that burden off my shoulders which became an utter chore near the end (including last season where I stopped going after a few games). I managed to sell my Liverpool ticket on the official LCFC ticket site so I may head to one final game to say a farewell but tbh I'm not overly fussed at even doing that now. I'm sure relatively good times will be back for LCFC but I won't be returning for them unless on a rare occasion I'm lucky enough to get a digital ticket gifted to me on the lovely new restrctive system they have put in. With them being back in the mix with 20+ similar sized wannabe PL clubs they will most likely see much less success going forward and at best brief flirts with the PL. Do you know what I will not miss... sitting crammed next to supporters getting frothed up about a bad pass and getting home feeling like you've had a round in the boxing ring! I'm only Messi height and build but my word those seats are getting worse as our fellow humans seem to be growing in size these days encroaching onto the surrounding seats somewhat!

Well after 27 consecutive years being a season ticket holder it is fully confirmed that I am now divorced from LCFC I was adament that I'd not renew and had that final wobble at 4.59 on Wednesday so decided not to fire off my email to request my DD ends along with auto renewal. I felt awful afterwards knowing I'd commited to another season when in reality I'd be lucky to go to 3-4 games I was driving back home from Leicester last night and after 3x M1 lane closures taking the traffic down to 1 lane each time so a worker could have a donut in peace, my mind was made up. So I fired the email off today and fair play to them they cancelled it and as soon as I recieved the confirmation email it was like a weight off my shoulders. A strange story I know, but I fully understand all who have gone through a similar feeling to this and only to renew. I still love the club I watched in the 90s, plus the disaster years in the 2000s and my favourite season was still the L1 08/09 as I got to see lots of fantastic away grounds I had never been to before. It's just since 2020, I had lost my love for the club and in reality all big club football. I could not bring myself to keep going and donating money to millionaires any longer, that let's be honest could not care one bit about their customers (we're not fans now are we) Like I said, fair play to LCFC to cancel it after the deadline and I'm so happy that's it now!

Yeah 100% Leicester good seasons - we don’t want you, but pls stay on a list and be happy overpaying for our membership Leicester atrocious season - please come and support us, we need you! We have huge gaps in the corners to fill. Leicester improve - then jump through more hoops again! You dare share your ticket or not turn up for 95% of the games and we’ll banish you for life! Rinse and repeat

Yeah it's a circus now, good riddance to the PL and if the so-called big clubs want to leave, the door is open for them to go anytime they want!

I think that's a very fair reason to keep going, the social apsect is still very important. You'll enjoy no VAR for sure + I'm sure they'll score a goal again in the Championship! If I still lived in the county I'd have renewed I'm sure as next season should in theory be more enjoyable, but living 50 mins away it became a chore. Maybe we shouldn't travel silly distances to games, not thinking environmental reasons, just it's a long way for a lot of fans to travel. The peripheral often fall away in tough times.

If there's one consolation then all ticket offices are heading to dinosaur extinction levels soon too It won't be many years before clubs don't have ticket offices. It will all be done from a central database, no human interaction. Just someone in the FA or PL making sure algorythms work and they'll not be based at Leicester City either. LCFC have seriously turned up in the perfect storm as I do believe vast majority of people would have accepted the digital ticketing if we'd have been high up the table. Most clubs fans don't care when their team is doing well. They'll happily be herded through the digital ages. I'm same as you, I once loved the club and I no longer love it. I haven't fallen out with football as a game, and I now find myself in the lower leagues whilst they still resemble grass roots etc. I've clung onto my ST for past 2-3 years not caring about the club anymore, had it since 1998 when we had a real club back then Once I didn't want the PL to breakaway but now it can go and leave these shores!

Me neither, only done 4 games this year on my ST, I think I managed to sell it 4x on the official exchange in first half of the season but nobody wants the punishment of a ticket now. Had ST since 1998 and before that went to as many home games as possible Totally agree with your other point, fed up of donating money to millionaires on the pitch that could not care one bit about the fans in the stands Most of them enter the stadiums with head phones on to ignore the fans, and lets be honest they're lucky to be able to be paid like they are to simply kick a ball about.

So sorry as I meant to reply but time caught up with me, yeah Brackley are flying incredibly high in a tough league. 1 point between Brackley, Scunthorpe and Kidderminster with 4 games to go is all that seperates the top three, and with Chester just behind them too it's full of big clubs. I checked out Ramsgate crowds and they are superb, especially being two divisions beneath the NL South. Some clubs have really gained big attendences since 2020 and hopefully it will be sustainable. Looks like Ramsgate was c100-150 per match over ten years ago and now blasting through 1000 per match which is incredible. I'd say Brackley has a hardcore/loyal following of 500-600 and the rest that come along are floaters or away fans. Ironically the worst games of the season are in front of the biggest crowds so the floaters actually see very few wins. The best experience is the run of the mill games when there's less at stake as they tend to win those games easier. I'll be hoping to do two matches over the bank holiday weekend with Oxford at home and Leamington away I still support my old team... that's 1990s Leicester City, ha but not Corporate KPFC and that's why I love the non-league as it reminds us of football from a better time period!

This is really great to hear, I watched Ramsgate play at Brackley earlier in the season in the FA Cup and there really wasn’t much between the sides back then. A good sized and noisy away following too. I did two Brackley games this week (Kidderminster + Scarborough), superb crowds 1,777 and 871 respectively. it’s still a relatively small club but benefiting from a lot of housebuilding in the area!

Love that show, I wonder what the current LCFC staff ‘outies’ feel about the club from their outside lives! Funnily there’s two Leicester’s for me, the one I loved in the 90s and the current one. I think fans should take the ‘Severance’ procedure too to help get through the games!

Exactly this, it’s quite sad that we lost our club to big business and we now face the digital cage being built around us. For any evangelists that see no wrong with digital ticketing it won’t be so kind in the future when you can’t make a game due to illness and you have to upload a doctors sick note! Ha I may jest a little but they make supporting a club a chore and about as fun as working full time. Imagine if they do head down the leagues and there’s 10k spare seats, I bet they’ll relax their control grid but then only to tighten it once they get back on track. It’s ever so predictable. The only thing in Leicester’s favour is that they’re not clever enough to have implemented this themselves but still they seem to be not pushing back up the chain. I for one hope PL football bubble bursts sometime soon. It’s wretched. For someone that once loved this club, I now have no love left for it nor any big club.

Exactly this, it is a control thing and it’s Premier League/big city club wide. The thing they forget which could make life difficult for them is that as crowds plummet (which I hope they do) there will be less of an incentive to chain us to a digital seat. If crowds go below 25k and they start to ban fans for not worshipping the strange cult for a minimum of 80% of the time (or whatever imaginary figure they make up next) then they’ll be in the ever reducing circles territory. I imagine once they drop further away from the PL cult, they’ll be desperate for you/us to turn up again until they can trap us in our digital seats again when and if they ever return to the PL. The thing is as the Devil tarot card shows, we can take off our chains whenever we want! It’s us that keep them on.

This is such a good post, sums it up so very well To add to it, the new generations are much less interested in football now and the old way of being has been severed so badly that it’s less likely we’d see what we experienced in the 90s again. If you want to see a dying sport head to the Speedway (which I still love), the average age is care home numbers now! I’m not joking! I’m sure football won’t ever get into this mess but it is experiencing an aging following so you never know if the golden age has already passed.

Sadly our reality is being digitalised and all leading businesses have agreed to this approach. They won’t admit it to you or I, nor will the news ever tell you what’s really going on. It is quite obvious that we’re being herded across all aspects of life so football has to play its part. The news is often crafted to match. i imagine the club have no choice in this aspect as directives will be coming down the chain. Unless people say.no then the digital cage gets locked further. I’m 100% not renewing and I will fondly remember the old Leicester City I once loved as it still holds dear but this modern version of big club football is absolutely dire. I will wish LCFC all the luck they deserve with their reduced attendances, spiralling costs and cinema style audiences. I may go to one final game either Newcastle or Liverpool to say farewell and that will be it

Looks like you have to email in, I’m doing the same. I only renewed by accident and don’t want to ever again. Only been to 4 games, and that 4 too many!

Nice club, good set up, saw them play at Brackley last year. If I lived in Scarborough I’d do the same.

Excellent thread as always, so good to read about experiences around the grounds. I was at Brackley v Alfreton yesterday, a really tough game as the visitors always make life tough down here. If I’m being polite to their style of football I’d say they’re disrupters! A hard game but Brackley persisted well and 2 goals from Matt Lowe secured it late. He’s on fire this year. We have some real gems in that team including Lewis Hall’s older brother (Connor). A favourite of mine is Ricardo Calder, ex Villa and shows real quality getting past his man. Almost 1000 in for the game and top of the table now. I’ve been going for 4 full seasons now, so barely go to Leicester City now. It’s sad as I miss the old Leicester City I once loved but feel incredibly lucky to have such a vibrant non-league club on my new doorstep.

Yeah I remember the ball hardly staying in play for ten seconds, it was awful Martinelli was the worst one for pretending to be injured. The priest was even called to read him his last rites and then lo and behold he made a miracle recovery to score a disallowed goal moments later. Arsenal were utterly embarrassing that day with their tactics. Glad I’m missing it this weekend tbh

That’s incredible, so good to see NL North similar too, almost anyone can beat anyone!

Really good to hear, it’s a breath of fresh air. I feel the same, especially as the old character returns when you visit small clubs. Much of that character is lost in the mega echo bowls they have at big clubs. I watched a few mins on YouTube of away fans at Chorley buying potato pies in butter and then being given metal spoons to eat them with! I have to admit I’ll give those pies a miss! I was at Brackley today, a hard fought 1-0 win. Enjoyed it fully as always. Just popped 5 mins of Brighton FA Cup match on TV and was instantly bored by it. The atmosphere was atrocious. Just echo sounds as a few booed or sung a little.