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Welcome comrade.

League One costs that much because of the existence of the Premier League that distorts the potential returns of lower league ownership, creates massive inequality through the pyramid and forces up costs disproportionately to the income capacity of the game at that level. That £30 is not a reason to charge more in the Premier League, it's a reason to tell the whole global financial circus to piss off.

Also, and as much fun as a Shady pile-on is, thats not my intention, but as I've said elsewhere...

Division 3 is shit.

You should try division 4 pal.

I raise you step 3 of the non league pyramid. (Two leagues below the ‘conference’).

But it’s actually great fun to watch. There’s a mix of young released academy graduates, non league cloggers and old league has beens who don’t want to give up. The refs are largely terrible but there can be real excitement.

It’s £15 to get in (although my coaches pass at Harborough gets me in free) nominal amount for kids (but again free if they play for the club at junior level). It’s £5 for a burger and chips and £5 for a pint of excellent local Braybrooke Lager. Free parking outside the ground.

Some great away days to be had too.

I’ve been increasingly sacking off Forest for this, why drive over and hour and pay extortionate prices when this is on the doorstep? That’s only going to increase and does make me a bit sad TBH.

I really do urge anyone with a half decent non league team to go down, you’ll probably enjoy it.

To be fair I can see the appeal in non league for that reason.... it's shit but in a mostly endearingly fun way.

You already know that going in.

League One, Two and National League is usually just hard work watching and trying to derive enjoyment from.

The Championship is arguably more so as it tends to lean toward the shitness of Leagues One and Two but with delusions of being not shit.

Unless you're really up there and having a once or twice if you're lucky every 20 odd years or so 'planets-aligned-everything-clicking-into-place-crest-of-a wave-lightning-in-a-bottle'* type run of things

As we very well know.

*other clichés are available.

I'm in a similar place to you. I enjoy the Northern Premier League and I can see where the money goes so I've signed up to the 100 club, I handover the entrance fee without questioning whether it's value for the quality of football and we even sponsored a game last season. We also went to our first away game and had a great time, we're planning more this season. You can very quickly get to know people and join in and as long as the league is competitive it covers up for the lower technical quality. It's nice to see a young player develop and move on to a higher level of the game, interesting to see an older player keep testing themselves when they've nothing to prove. The crowds deserve to be higher, but there is so much competition for attention now and that's only going to get worse with so many games being put on TV, including 3pm Saturday games in the EFL - although watching that level of football on telly seems odd really, unless you at least have a social space to do it. I can see why people want the higher level though. It's very different being in a 30,000 crowd than a few hundred, and after 40 years I also still see myself as first and foremost a Forest fan, so there is inevitably a slight disconnect with a new club. Hopefully that fades over time.

My team isn't quite on my doorstep though, which requires some extra commitment.

I can also see the lower crowds as a huge positive. Fairly often at Forest I find myself near an uneducated fucking moron, and have to endure them for the whole game. And the battle for a piss in the BC isn’t for the feint hearted.

At least at non league you are able to move away with ease from any fuckwits.

I agree. But that’s 100% not going to happen, & you know it. There is far, far, far too much money swilling around the Premier League / top level football - for owners, TV companies, betting organisations, UEFA, FIFA, agents & players - for there to be the tiniest chance that the turkeys will vote for Christmas.

We might deplore it all (and I definitely deplore it as much as anyone), but that ship sailed with the foundation of the PL - & probably before that, e.g. when Alan Sugar spotted an opportunity with Spurs & the stock exchange.

Anyone who is serious about telling the whole global financial circus to piss off can do so - hence the success of Hipster faves like Dulwich Hamlet, & breakaway outfits like FCUM in Manchester.

But if you want to go on supporting the professional club you’ve supported all your life, the Dulwich Hamlets of the world might be fun, but they will never capture the visceral joy of (in our case) Forest.

I actually think the choice for most people is between watching Forest (other football clubs are available, apparently) & giving up on football altogether. That’s a perfectly logical decision, but don’t be under any illusion that the football machine will even notice; there are plenty more where we come from (& the money men don’t give a flying fuck whether they’re from Sneinton, Tokyo or Lagos). If the “atmosphere” ever declines to the point where the TV companies are bothered, they’ll just pipe some crowd noise in.

Incidentally, this is why I think Tricky’s talk of “community assets” is beyond naive. Top level clubs haven’t been community assets for at least half a century - any more than they’ve been “clubs” (though they still use that term). [Forest were the last genuine club, many years after most had changed, but that stopped sharpish when Clough started winning European Cups (& the board & members realised just how much personal financial risk there was when building what is now the Clough Stand)].

In an ideal world I 100% agree with Tricky, but we’re way, way too late & have zero power.

We can either rail against it or cough up & enjoy the football. I don’t like it, but I made peace with it some time ago… & for much of our long sojourn in Divs 2 & 3 I strongly suspected that (assuming we ever made it back up), there would come a time when the implications of it all worked their way through to the fans. And Lo…

I don't disagree. It's the mis-shaping of the argument, that I am opposing in my comment.

Although, I do think if we're going down the US sports model the remainder of the English pyramid should consider breaking away from the Premier League.

Maybe, though the challenge will lie in deciding the cut-off point. There are probably at least 30 clubs outside the PL at the moment who think they have a realistic chance of doing well enough to get some of that PL bunce at some point soon. If they break away, those clubs can forget that for all time. For the likes of Preston, Bolton, the 2 Sheffield clubs, the Baggies, Norwich, Leicester, Derby, Ipswich, Saints & so on, I’m not sure that’s going to be a pill they want to swallow. And even clubs like Wigan, Hull & Bradford - dammit, even Swindon & Carlisle - have recent enough periods of success for their fan base to think it can come around again.

And that’s before you get to the “fairytales” of Wrexham & Birmingham City. Those Americans have not poured so much money in so they can be happy at the top of the Championship (any more than Marinakis did). They 100% want the Premier League - Blues are talking about a new 50,000 seat stadium; they’re not going to need that for games against Walsall & the Baggies.

Would we have voted to break away 6 or 7 years ago? I very much doubt it.

Plus if the lower leagues were to break away, a lot of clubs would go bust because TV revenue would collapse (remember the impact of ITV Digital?) & “solidarity payments” (or whatever the risible trickle-down stuff from the PL is called nowadays) would stop. But the bills would not.

A revived Super-League, with the rich clubs breaking away to try to secure a yet more secure source of mega-money, is if anything more likely than the lower leagues breaking away.

I'd never noticed before, but if you say that phonetically really quickly, you end up saying "fuck um".

It's like raaaaaaiiiin etc.

Ooh, get you, bitch!

Was it me who was being accused of “un-necessary aggression” a couple of hours ago?

Ho hum.

More televised games at the times Gary Neville doesn't do: www.nottinghamforest.co.uk/news/2025/july/23/two-september-fixtures-selected-for-live-tv-coverage/