Are Bradford City becoming League Two's forgotten club?
They've been four years back in League Two following relegation, but Bradford City seem as far from getting back to anything like glory as they have for much of the last decade.
It didn’t say much for his opponents’ performance on Saturday lunchtime—or, as it goes, for the typical post-match headspace of the modern football manager—that the Notts County manager Luke Williams was so unhappy with his team in the post-match press conference following his team’s match against Bradford City, despite them just having just beaten them 4-2 in a televised League Two match.
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(Italics mine, obviously.)
“The first action of the second half was ridiculous from us.”
Yes, but your team had put in an excellent performance in the first half, hadn’t it?
“We gave the ball away on the halfway line, Bradford counter-attacked, and it set the tone for the whole half.”
Well, you still won 4-2, Luke.
“We were sloppy after that, we were missing intensity, the awareness wasn’t there anymore, people were having the ball pinched off them and that came from Bradford throwing everything they had at us.”
Luke, focus on the first half performance!
“At that point, they couldn’t do anything but throw caution to the wind, but they caused us far too many problems for a team that were 4-0 down.”
See? 4-0 up, Luke! You were 4-0 up by half-time! How have you forgotten this?
“We should have been able to cope with that better and we didn’t.”
Luke, you won the match! Your team is third in the League! You’re in an automatic promotion place! You’re even above Wrexham (even if it is only by one goal on goal difference)! Holy crap, you only got promoted from the National League at the end of last season!
“We’ve been here too many times, 2-0 up or 3-0 up at half-time, and we know we’ve deserved to be, because we’ve created great chances and played well.”
Oh, I give up.
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If Williams wanted to cheer himself up over his team’s performance, he might have consoled himself with the fact that at least he’s not the manager of Bradford City. The assessment of The I’s Daniel Storey at half-time in Saturday lunchtime’s match at Meadow Lane could scarcely have been more withering: “4-0 by half-time, and if there are two worse league teams in the country than Bradford this season, they should consider themselves lucky of that fact.”
Bradford’s new manager new Graham Alexander has been in charge of the club since the 6th November. He’s lost both of his first two matches in charge of his new team, which now sits in 18th place in League Two, six points and four places above the relegation positions. The team has now lost their last four successive matches. For now, the Bantams aren’t quite in immediate relegation trouble, but it might only take a couple of bad results for their position to become considerably worse than it is now.
It’s only been seven years since Bradford were knocking on the door of a return to the Championship. For two successive seasons they were beaten by Millwall in the League One play-offs, once in the semi-finals and once in the final, after finishing in 5th place in the table twice. But two years after their 1-0 defeat to Millwall at Wembley in May 2017, they were relegated to League Two after finishing bottom of the table instead, and they’ve seldom looked like returning since.
After three less than inspiring seasons in League Two during which they finished 8th, 14th and 16th in the table, last season offered an opportunity to finally get the club back on the track. At the time of his appointment in February 2022, Mark Hughes was Bradford’s ninth manager in four years. He got the team into the play-off places for the first time since their relegation last season, but defeat followed in the play-offs for a third time in a row after they lost 3-2 on aggregate to Carlisle United in the semi-finals.
Hughes was a Big Name and Bradford City are a Big Club, so expectations had been high, and the failure to get up last season only turned up the pressure on the Hughes when the new season started, so when the team started malfunctioning it was always likely that his head would be on the chopping block. By the time he was relieved of his duties on the 4th October they’d won just three of their first eleven matches of the season and were in 18th place in the table.
The statistics for their season so far are fairly damning. The two second half goals that they scored at Meadow Lane marked the first time they’d scored more than a single goal in a game since the 12th August, and only the second time all season, in all competitions. Their League Cup run saw them get through two penalty shootouts against Accrington Stanley and Wrexham before tamely losing to Middlesbrough. They were eliminated from the FA Cup at the first attempt, at home against Wycombe Wanderers.
But throughout these unhappy times, the fans have kept the faith. With season ticket prices pegged at affordable prices, they haven’t averaged crowds of under 10,000 in a decade and a half, and the two full seasons in League Two after crowds were let in following the pandemic drew average home crowds of 15,450 and 17,767. The interest is still there. Every season, the people of the city have been sending out a clear message that Bradford City—who, let us not forget, have played two seasons of Premier League football—can be restored to somewhere higher than the lower reaches of League Two.
The club has been owned by the German businessman Stefan Rupp since 2016, but while there is little question that the club has at best stagnated since then, there is equally little to indicate that he has significantly mismanaged it, either. There have been no eye-watering financial losses, and there has been no threat of the club getting kicked out of Valley Parade. Money hasn’t been taken out and there have been no signs of anything untoward having gone on behind the scenes. In other words, none of the signs that would normally raise alarms that something is going seriously wrong have been seen at Bradford City.
This isn’t just a matter of not nothing egregiously terrible having happened. Transfer and wage budgets have consistently ranked among the top four or five in League Two. Different approaches have been tried, from rookie joint-managers to League Two specialists to a faded but still big name, and none of them worked.
Attendances haven’t precipitously fallen and there has been little sign of people simply walking away from the club. When Bradford played Wrexham at Valley Parade (current sponsors, The University of Bradford) on the 21st October, they reported an attendance of 21,552. There will be plenty lower attendances that that in the Premier League, this season.
And Rupp has had potential escape routes which he has pointedly not accepted. When the crypto bros WAGMI United, who have since taken control of Crawley Town with predictable results, came a-calling at the end of 2021 he turned down their offer:
“On Thursday I received an offer from the WAGMI United group to purchase the football club. This has been rejected. A great deal has been aired publicly since the offer was made. This, as well as a number of factors which will remain private, has led me to this decision. As a proud custodian of this wonderful football club, my first and most important responsibility is to protect it and safeguard its long-term future, while upholding our values.”
For the avoidance of doubt, if people like this come a-calling at your football club, this is what you want the owner of the club to be saying, and for them then to be coming good on the promise. This is what has happened in this case, even though it gave Rupp an out which would have seen him claw back the £5.5m that he paid for it in 2016 and what he’s put into the club over the last seven years since then. A willingness to sell to just about anybody is another hallmark of a bad owner. It is to Rupp’s credit that he didn’t cut his losses and run.
And yet, and yet.
This… isn’t really working either, is it? Stefan Rupp hasn’t been as bad for Bradford City as, say, Peter Swann was for Scunthorpe United or Ron Martin was for Southend United, but that’s a bar so low that you have to practically limbo to get under it, and it can hardly be argued that Rupp has taken the club forward when they’d just finished 5th in League One when he arrived there and are 18th in League Two now, either. The club’s financial position is decent enough, but that counts for little when you’re grumpily filing out of the ground at five to five on a Saturday afternoon after having seen yet another witless ninety minutes of football.
A good example of how this doesn’t work might be the story of Jake Young, who’s pspent the last two seasons on loan and was told during the summer that he was free to find himself another club. Young turned down loan offers from other clubs before finally going on a year-long loan to Swindon Town. At the time of writing, he’s scored 13 goals in 17 league games for Swindon, the second highest goalscorer in the division after Matt Smith of Salford City while Mark Hughes, the manager with whom he fell out, departed more than a month ago.
So, what to do? Do you protest against the owner, and run the risk of him losing patience and selling to just anyone? Do you just put up and shut up, and keep your fingers crossed that they’ll find a combination that works? And if you go on for the latter of these two options, for how long are you expected to put up with tepid dish after tepid dish? This is Bradford’s fifth successive season in League Two, and they’ve already had one six-season spell at this level this century, which was ended by winning the play-offs in 2013. And that ‘trying different things’ policy is only really worth anything if one of those new methods actually works. If none of them do, it does start to rather look as though you’re just reaching around in the dark, hoping that you’ll chance upon something, anything, that works.
It’s now been a 43 and a half years since the number of Football League clubs in the city was halved, and it does seem absurd that there could even be a possibility that a city of more than half a million people could have no representation among the top 92. But while there is no need to pull the emergency alarm just yet, it can feel at times as though Bradford City are half-forgotten outside of their home city. The size of crowds demonstrate the potential of this club, but by the end of this season it’ll have been two decades since they last played in the top two divisions and a quarter of a century since they won promotion into the Premier League.
Perhaps Stefan Rupp should be looking closely at those below him, at whether Bradford need change nearer the top rather than spinning the managerial roulette wheel once or twice a season and wondering why nothing appreciable seems to be changing for the better. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he has to go. As I say above, questions of whether someone is a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ are suggest, but by the standards of how we’d define a ‘badly-run’ club, Rupp hasn’t come close to seriously endangering Bradford City yet.
But the pride of the city would be damaged by losing EFL status at the end of the season. The stakes are high, and neither club nor city can afford for things to deteriorate further, and two consolation goals at Notts County don’t alter that stark fact, even if they were the most goals Bradford supporters had seen their team score in one match in the last two months. Graham Alexander was barely out of work for three weeks following his sacking by Milton Keynes. He needs to start racking up some scores on the doors, if an underwhelming season isn’t to curdle into something even more unpleasant. With more than a third of the season now played and no cup distractions, those results need to start flowing again.