Teigngull wrote: ↑16 Jan 2018, 08:18
One of the main problems within the catchment area of the club is there is no LOCAL interest for the club. I was born in Kingsteignton lived in Bishopsteignton, Shaldon & now with my family in Teignmouth some say what a lack of ambition, but I have managed to find everything I need jobs, spouse , children & entertainment (inc TUFC) in south Devon I've never felt the need to look far & wide for anything even a football team to support including one of the top teams which in my childhood's were the likes of Leeds, Derby & Chelsea etc.
Anyhow the point I'm trying to get at is, Torbay is full of people who have retired or moved to the area 'from 'oop north' who have no allegiance to our club at all, I work in the local govt sector & a good percentages of supported teams are the likes of the Burnley's , Preston's , Villa , Birmingham & Wolves etc.
People who arrive to reside in this area from the south east of the country, I have found, are more likely to be part of the 'yellow welly brigade' it's all to do with sailing & water sports. The local kids are nigh on guaranteed to be sporting a Man U , Liverpool , Chelsea , Man City shirt these days as it's rammed down their throats constantly by the written press & on Sky , BT , BBC etc how many Torquay shirts do you see parading the streets other than on match days ?
The club must do better in engaging with the local population it has to get in their faces & generate interest , their is so much more it can offer the wider public but it just doesn't try hard enough ( may be that's part of the 5 yr plan ! ) it never has tried to diversify apart from maybe the bowls club.
So, in a nut shell, if you want the business you have to go out & generate it, speculate to accumulate if the club is destined to die well then fair enough but for Christs sake die fighting not with a whimper as is now .
TUFC THROUGH THICK & THIN
COYY
It might sound a bit mad but the club could really learn from Plymouth Raiders basketball club. They get 1k most weeks playing in a tinpot league in a sport that most people in the UK couldn't care less about in a town with a semi-decent football team and a fairly crap Rugby team. Having been to one of their matches recently they also seem to have a strong relationship with local companies and local media and not just from Plymouth but from the surrounding area. To be able to attract fans in such a situation requires a lot of relationship building and a lot of getting out there and changing people's views on the events at hand. They don't have an inbuilt fan base or a core pool of people to recruit from given basketballs' low profile in the UK and yet they draw crowds not much smaller than ours. These are exactly the skills that Torquay United should be looking to develop. Regardless of the differing sports, they could do a lot worse than talking to the commercial people at the Raiders and see how they do it, the skills are totally transferrable.
Good point, I've long thought that a lack of civic pride in Torbay and South Devon being symptomatic of the apathy that exists towards the club.
It's very true, the town has no unifying culture or history to pull people together. It's an artifical construct of the 1800s based upon an industry that has been in decline since the 70s and will never revive to any substantial percent of it's past glory. The only really famous person to come from it is Agatha Christie, it's famous in mainstream culture for Fawlty Towers and only Fawlty Towers and the idiot 1950s throwbacks that run the Council refuse to capitalise on this, refusing to build a statue of Basil Fawlty because it would 'send the wrong message' - what you mean people puking in the harbour is the right message?, in favour of an endless pursuit of a 'class and sophistication' image that the town last had in the 1890s and will never get back.
None of the town's sporting teams ever developed a Pan South Devon identify nor provided the town a sorely needed cultural focal point in the way that random no mark towns like Rotherham and Chesterfield have, they've never drawn many fans from outside the town boundaries - aside from Newton Abboters in the high spots of the 60s. We're a mismash of local Devonians, Scousers/Brums/Scots who moved into the Bay in the 70s/80s and are bringing up families, a load of retirees from elsewhere and a recent influx of Poles. The local economy is so dire that anyone who has grown up in the town with anything about them escapes in their 20s unless they own their own business or work for the NHS. There is a relentless negativity in the town usually eminanting from people who either want it to be like it was in the 70s and try to block any progress or didn't even grow up in the region. There are legitimately people on Facebook groups complaining about the Abbey Sands development when what was there before was a half burned out shell. There is an almost total lack of local civic pride/culture.
This combined with the over commmercialisation of the game, the oversaturisation of the EPL and people's desire to support a winner (even a foreign club like Barca) over a local club that can't tap into local culture because there isn't one is why Torquay United struggle to draw big crowds. It's even worse when compared to Northern post industrial towns of a similar size, with economies just as poor as Torbay's, who's sense of civic self identity is entirely tied up in their football clubs, thus enabling them to punch far above their weight while Torquay punches far below its.
