Yes but it is used as a stick to beat the Club with and I'm pretty certain nobody in official circles has said that there's any 5 year plan, although the 'one ambition' to be in the top league is admittedly the same thing without a time frame.
Eloquently put and what I've been stumbling to say on about twenty different threads over the last week or so. One sentence sums it up: 'high prices, high expectations'. There's more to being 'Premier League ready' than charging booking fees on top of already-high ticket prices and making sure that the Harveys is the most expensive in Europe. Rightly or wrongly people's expectations have been raised, and saying "but we used to be a third division team! is no more relevant than me saying "but I used to be a three year old!" (Although some people would say I post like one!) Times have changed, the world's moved on - and so have the club.Licker
I don't go very often these days because of the distance involved but when I did live down there I went week in, week out, home and away, even when we were at Gillingham I missed 4 games in 2 years.
However, Much as we all dreamt of returning to Brighton and still having a team to support, I don't think too many of us imagined having the highest ticket prices for a match day ticket outside the premier league and higher than some of the clubs in the premier league.
Mr Bloom has done a fantastic job of delivering a world class stadium and a grade 1 acadamy but anyone who has followed Brighton for the longer period will remember the stench at the back of the north stand where you sometimes had to jump over puddles of piss to get served a cardboard burger. They will remember the 75 mile trip to priestfield to hopefully get enough points to keep us in the league. They will remember sitting in the rain, even in hailstones to watch a 3rd rate team in a 3rd rate athletics stadium, where if the game was that crap you could always watch the ladies doing their exercises at the gym, or was that just me
So yes we now have our shiny emporium, the future looks safe and the dream of being able to call ourselves a championship team has been realised, but with the high prices comes high expectations, and rightly so, Bloom, Barber and all sold a lot of season tickets on the promise of a 5 year plan to get to the premier league.
If they want to keep people returning then they have to deliver on the pitch. They chose to play the corporate game, it wasn't the fans. If you raise peoples expectations them you have to expect some flack when things are not looking so rosy.
The team in my opinion is woefully short of the one that finished last season, and that wasn't as good as the team from the year before. How many backward steps should we take before people are allowed to say, you want me to pay £30 for that!
People have paid a lot of money up front with season tickets, in good faith. They have the right to complain if they don't think the product is up to standard. Again in my opinion, it is nowhere near up to standard.
They created a monster. Now they have to feed it.
