Stadium of Blight

It's a bank holiday here in the US, and with the wind chill taking the air well below freezing outside, there's not much to do today other than write my blog.

An observation from yesterday's Sunderland-Chelsea game.....the attendance was just 32,420, in a stadium that holds 49,000. Now I know the game was on Sky and that Sunderland are perhaps the worst team to play in the Premiership, but surely Chelsea are the biggest draw in the land right now? And whilst Sunderland is in a relatively poor part of the country, their ticket prices reflect this.

The reason I bring it up of course is to remind the Charlton board that Sunderland used to get full houses for most home games, yet are now seeing a precipitous decline in gates. In short, in the absence of either radical increases in the competitiveness of the league, or a radical decrease in ticket prices, the assumption that a newly-expanded Valley would be sold-out for the 'glamour games' is utterly flawed, particularly as many would be shown on TV.