Royal MonkeyClyde1998Snowflake Royal Even before that we rarely featured in tier 4.
I think I'm right in saying we've spent considerably more seasons in tier 2 than 4. I think it's something like
Tier 1 - 3
Tier 2 - twenty or thirty
Tier 3 - many lots
Tier 4 - about 7/8.
So by any measure we're an upper L1 club at least and definitely a big fish in L2. Albeit that doesn’t mean we can't be shit and find ourselves outside the league.
It's 3; 29; 57 and 8 respectively (twenty-five seasons were in the Third Division South). Our average finishing position since being a league club has been 50th (equivalent to 6th in League One); since 2000, it's been 31st (11th in the Championship).
For anyone over 30, you'd've grown up with us typically being a third tier club with the occasional season in the division higher or lower.
Yeah it’s definitely a generational thing with viewing how big the club is. For me being 51 and being taken to my first game in the late 70’s we’re not a big club, I’ve always viewed as as a Division 3 size club even with the move to the Mad Stad and always felt we were punching above our weight in the Championship let alone Prem.
But for my kids who are 26 and 24 it’s completely different. We were in Champ when I started taking them so this is their first experience of us below the top 2 divisions.
This is my first experience of the third tier as well, but I feel we're a lower Championship club on average - which means we'll have periods challenging towards the top end of the Championship (with the potential of the odd season in the Prem) and periods when we drop into League One.
Many clubs have caught us up (at least in stadium terms) since we were last in the third tier (Cardiff, Swansea, Hull, Brighton, Brentford, Blackpool, etc.). Bigger sides we were ahead of in the 2000s - Nottm Forest, Leeds, Southampton, Coventry, Wolves etc. - have returned to a more natural position in the pyramid (generally as financial issues have been resolved). I think those factors, especially the latter one, will make it harder for us to be regularly in and around the play-offs like we were in the mid-to-late 2000s and early 2010s.