Alan G Bryant wrote:Sunderland have financial security, really? They are £170m in debt and their owner will give away the club to anyone willing to take on the debt. A lot of the debt is still paying wages from the premier league. Another well run club we should aspire to emulate, heading for league 1 it seems.

Yeah, they just had 10 years in the Premier League funded by the chairman, but they only finished above 13th once in that time and have been a basket case for the past 4 years. "Teams with money but terribly run" is not really relevant to us in any way. In fact most of them aren't exactly comparable.

There are very few teams in the EFL with as little success as County have had, or with historically as small crowds as we've had - we should be looking at the ones 10-15 years ago with under 4000 people turning up in the bottom division who didn't own their own ground or facilities and see what they did, not complain that we're "not as well run" as teams who've won the FA Cup in the past 6 years.

Maybe have a look at Burton and see how they got up there, or Doncaster's recent development. As mentioned, Shrewsbury is a reasonably decent comparator, they went from 2500 when midtable in 1999 to 5500 on a regular basis across both bottom divisions no matter where they finish. It's not just about population, it's about history, success and access to money.