https://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2023/apr/24/watford-season-ticket-fans-pozzo Some good comments below too. This one made me chuckle. "I can relate to some of this……I still hold a season ticket with West Ham - just about - but that disconnect feeling is still very strong with me since the move to the London Stadium aka Porn Park (or maybe better still the Dildodrome…. read that from a poster on here recently)……the move to Stratford was wrong in every way……..no point going over old ground, so I won’t bother, but I wish some giant sink hole would swallow the place completely…..and we could start again - in a football stadium." Giving up my Watford season ticket was not just easy but an inevitable decision Turning your back is deemed treachery but the frayed cords of connection have snapped and this team make me feel nothing Last year a poll found that British adults make, on average, 122 decisions every day. A decade earlier a professor at Columbia University found that Americans make about 70. In 2011 a survey of Britons commissioned by a video game developer put the figure at a damningly low 27, essentially painting British adults as a breed of permanently hungry morons most frequently vexed by issues such as “what to have for dinner”, “what to have for breakfast”, “what to have in my sandwich”, and “tea or coffee”. All three surveys polled precisely 2,000 people, suggesting that researchers into decision-making are terrified of making independent decisions. In 2006 Cornell University found that people make 221 decisions a day about food alone (though they only surveyed staff and pupils at Cornell University, who probably do a bit more thinking than average). Meanwhile the estimate most commonly cited online, of uncertain origin, suggests we in fact make 35,000 decisions a day and an article published by the British Medical Journal in 2020, with references and everything, put the figure at “between 10,000 and 40,000”. In short, researchers have been producing wildly contrasting and evidentially suspicious figures on this subject for decades, varying so much that if I started taking decisions at birth (probably a bit optimistic) some believe I will by now have made about 479,000, and others more like 710,000,000. Either way, I’ve certainly had enough practice to find them less painful than I sometimes do. If Malcolm Gladwell was anywhere near right with his 10,000-hour rule, I would be a master decision-maker by now, a veritable virtuoso of dilemma-dodging. I would be bulldozing my way past common quandaries like a belligerent but brilliant and misunderstood cabinet minister striding briskly down a corridor crowded with conspiring snowflake enemies of the people. Instead the past fortnight has been pure torture. The decision in question: should I give up my season ticket? And then the issues arising from it: what does it say about me that I’m even considering it? What kind of supporter am I? What kind of person? There’s no need to drag out the suspense, for the decision has been made. For only the second time in my adult life I could feasibly hold a season ticket at Watford next year but have chosen not to. The last time it happened they promptly won their division, so this may be just the boost the club needs. Either way this is not the end, but I think it would benefit us both if we spent some time apart. In many ways, the decision was not just easy but inevitable. The club is obviously a shambles. A charitable assessment of the team would be that over time they have been issued with so many different tactical instructions by so many different coaches that, come match day, a bewildered starting XI play as if at least a dozen different gameplans are in simultaneous and wildly chaotic operation. They play like a choir in which most members sing their own song in their own language and to their own tune, while the remainder just mime. The result: a technically impressive, completely meaningless noise. “You’re never going to achieve anything if you’ve got complete inconsistency running through your team,” says Chris Wilder, the current head coach. Who wants to sit through that 23 times a season? One voice never heard in this cacophony is that of the owner, Gino Pozzo, who has ignored English journalists for a decade and recently deigned to commit to a public meeting with a group of supporters for the first time ever, albeit at an unspecified future date and in an unknown format. Never have I experienced such a disconnect between a team and their fanbase. A year ago I watched a group with which I felt no real affinity stutter to relegation from the Premier League and hoped that in the relative obscurity of the Championship our relationship might be redefined and I would somehow come to see in it a reflection of myself. This year they have been lazy and underachieving (not those bits of myself, you bastards!) and the last frayed cords of connection have snapped. We have come, in the end, to treat each other with total disdain. Like the participants in many failing relationships, it is clear that we both dread the time we spend in each other’s company. We barely even acknowledge each other: they run around occasionally looking interested; I sit occasionally making strange groaning noises. And then we both leave. Also, my seat isn’t that great. There will be some people, unfamiliar with the concept of paying to be repeatedly inconvenienced, miserable and cold, who do not understand how any kind of dilemma exists here. The idea of doing this to yourself is manifestly imbecilic. But for football supporters, turning your back on your team is treachery. Our job is not just to enjoy the good times but to endure the bad. Turning up to watch a successful team means nothing; it is buying expensive season tickets for rubbish ones that defines us. More than that, it is only by enduring the bad that we can appreciate the good. Misery is an investment in future happiness. But still, enough. There have been bad times before. I have watched teams that made me feel angry, players who made me feel terrified and bewildered, and still I came back for more. Far more worrying is a team that make me feel … nothing. Over time an unwritten contract develops to bind each fan with their club. Its precise wording will be unique to each individual and in the final analysis I found my team in breach of that contract this season and have chosen to exercise a break clause. I truly hope I regret it. Now, what’s for breakfast?
Good to see another article speaking out against the shambles we've become. There have been a lot of articles and comments from across the media in recent weeks about what a joke we are, but I doubt anything would be enough to make Pozzo actually speak or do anything. Seems to be that Duxbury has been locked away since the Edwards unpleasantness and the new approach is to shove Manga, and what appears to be his trademark thumbs up, in front of the cameras.
Is he a sports writer ? Probably got the chance to go to much more appealing and enjoyable events over a weekend !
It's a personal choice he has made and fair play to him. A lot of fans' are probably not going to renew their season tickets for the same reasons. We are a total mess, and until something begins to turn positive, less people are going to come to the games. Next season might be different, we might start really well and do a Burnley. I very much doubt it, but the emptiness of the Vic these past home games is a telling statistic to the board that fans' are voting with their feet/wallet and staying away. I fully expect our final game against Stoke to be half empty at best. Players will no doubt want to do a lap of honor... but they might be doing it for three empty stands, congratulating the emptyness the fans' feel towards this rotten team/ownership right now.
I suspect it's more of a "thank you" to the fans for their support rather than "a lap of honour". I'm sure most of them would want to avoid it but they will be criticised if they don't do it, and booed if they do.
I imagine it will be pretty short as none of them will come within 30 metres of the stand. A quick once round the centre circle with a half arsed clap, before disappearing down the tunnel.
I expect they will all jog in different directions, at different speeds, in a completely uncoordinated fashion for good measure.
He's not the only one. Think a mass refusal to renew seasons tickets will hit the owner where it really hurts and gets his attention. It's a principle people need to learn. Decision makers will not listen unless you take to actions that affect them directly on a constant basis. Protest needs to be seen as a natural way of action. Not grumble about things and then sit watching the latest does of moronic television, grumble again and carry on. There's a lot of disenchantment with the state of football as a sport among many fans in general. My interest is more and more shrinking into the international game and then only competitive tournaments.
The only reason I'm going to the Stoke game is to watch the players get a good booing during their lap of shame. I'm sure plenty of others won't want to miss this last opportunity to give this shower of 5h1t a memorable send off
This was easily the best bit of the article: "For only the second time in my adult life I could feasibly hold a season ticket at Watford next year but have chosen not to. The last time it happened they promptly won their division"
I like Simon Burnton, been reading his articles/match reports since late 2000 (the year I became a Watford fan), can be critical of the team's performance even after a win but fair-minded. Much more than Tony Francis (another Watford supporting journalist who wrote for the Telegraph during the mid 2000s), whose style of forced humour a lot of fans enjoyed for some reason but I really didn't like.
It's interesting that there are a fair few Norwich fans in the comments saying they feel exactly the same thing - even though I don't think many would dispute that Norwich's owners don't have the best interests of the club at heart and are particularly distant from the fans.
He seemed to really hate Boothroyd and the style of football I remember in the Premier league as he kept a diary of the season .
Yes, that's my point: "Delia Smith is Norwich City's joint majority shareholder, alongside her husband, Michael Wynn Jones:
Norwich have never had a consecutive season in the PL though since Pozzo bought us, we’ve had 5. What’s the similarity?
It’s no surprise the point has sailed way over your head as per usual. Norwich have been the dictionary definition of a yo-yo club, so surely it’s no surprise that some (yes some, I don’t imagine an article about Watford is exactly the finger on the pulse, hot of the press, go to place for the hive mind opinion of all Norwich fans) of them are a bit unhappy about that? We've yo-yod, err, once, so our situation is entirely different to theirs, and hence why your comparison between our fans opinion and their fans opinion on the bottom of an article about Watford is entirely meaningless.
Norwich could still get in the play-offs so maybe they are waiting to see that dream end before really kicking off... Again they don't strike me as the sort of fans to really protest strongly at games but for what it's worth their forum is certainly unhappy about the current situation mainly blaming the CEO guy (Webber?) Lots of people complaining about the recruiting and lack of communication from the club - sounds familiar! I don't know what their financial situation is but get the feeling it's not as serious as ours potentially.
I’m saying we have entirely different things to be unhappy about, but that’s clearly a far too complex point for you to grasp.
Why are you arguing with me about that? My point was that some Norwich fans read the above Guardian article, and thought it sounded similar to their own experience and that they actually have pretty similar things to be unhappy about; these are some comments from below the article: "For Watford, see also Norwich City." "Just substitute 'Norwich' for 'Watford' & that sums up my season" "My son-in-law is a Watford fan, I’m a Norwich fan. At least we each have someone to commiserate with."
Things are so bad I might have to get a season ticket next year just so I can give it up the year after.
