Souness telling us how big Sunderland are

As an aside their crowd for their first European tie in their history Vasas of Budapest was over 7k lower than ours against Banik Ostrava.

Yes, I know we got some poor crowds too, but you'd have thought "massive club Sunderland" would have got more than 22k.
Interestingly they got over 10k more for our visit that season in March, than they did for their second and final ever European tie against Sporting Lisbon where they got 31k.
 
What makes a club enormous, because apart from the amount of fans they get, nothing makes them a big club. 60 years since they won anything, never played in Europe.

On sporting achievements alone they are comparable with teams like Wigan, Bolton, Norwich, and no one is claiming they are enormous and should be in the premier league
 
Bernie Slaven has rattled a few cages with his latest tweet 🤣

 
They are 10th on all time crowds. We are 16th toon 5th all three massively have underachieved but them two have bigger catchment areas too draw from than us.
 
I just think Big Club is a meaningless term.

There are successful clubs, who win lots of things, those challenging, those yoyoing and everyone else, down to community based clubs.

They all matter equally to their communities.

Arguably the most successful clubs have the highest proportion of fans who are least invested. Went Bury folded, that was VERY BIG to Bury fans. When Man City last won, whatever they won most recently, that wasn’t so big.
 
we have Teesside and very low level of populated North Yorkshire a few woolieback east coast villages and also Guisborough .
I'm come from those WB areas and to be truthful in the 82-86 period when our crowds were **** I had mates going to matches in the south where maybe there was 180 Boro at Oxford at Easter when they were flying high there be a few from.Brotton a few from Skelton Loftus as well and Saltburn, you turn the amount from those towns in to a comparable figure for Middlesbrough or Redcar or Stockton and there would be more than a F***ing 180 there and even of those 180 probably 100 had come from London, East Cleveland is a hot bed for Boro, always has been always will be , and for our pains we had take the occasional bats to head from Boro lads at AP, who when we played Yorkshire teams who thought we were from there because of our accents.
As it is all those ***** little villages probably total about 35000 not including Saltburn, Marske or Guisborough. When I was at Plymouth recently it was unreal how many people I met from Brotton , not in one group but several individual groups.
 
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