Vive_La_Villa Posted September 14 Share Posted September 14 34 minutes ago, limpid said: These are likely returned season tickets. There will always be some of those. They are. I put mine up for sale yesterday and it went quite quickly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarryOnVilla Posted September 14 Share Posted September 14 (edited) There isn’t any loyalty like football loyalty. We chose our club as a child and stuck with that choice until now, and most likely keep that loyalty until to we are dead. Other than family we haven’t loved anything longer than our club. Even our partners and children can never over take our love for our club. We may love them more, but we’ve loved our club longer. It’s constant, it’s unwavering and it’s always there for us at the weekend. We love, cry, cheer, celebrate and made friends because we enjoy football through our love of Aston Villa. Edited September 14 by CarryOnVilla 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MikeMcKenna Posted September 14 VT Supporter Share Posted September 14 (edited) Over my many decades supporting Villa due to family, work, unemployment etc etc, I have had a couple of breaks, but like a bad penny always came rolling back. As others have said, ‘loyalty’ is very hard to quantity. Through ‘thick and thin’ is imo a good way to describe loyalty with the thin times being the most relevant - It is easy to be loyal when we are doing well. I am sure most supporters have examples of the best and worst of times. As a kid probably the worst was walking to VP in the snow from my home in Saltley because the special buses were all stuck - looking back it was incredible to think some of the matches continued despite atrocious weather conditions. However, missing a match at VP was not an option. More fearfully, being at Millwall on the freezing evening of Wednesday 1st December 1976, standing with their crowd because we couldn’t get in with the Villa fans maybe a sign of loyalty or stupidity (we won 2-0 but never moved a muscle for either goal). Queuing for cup tickets overnight lying on the pavement wrapped in blankets on the Trinity Road were some of the longest nights of our lives! In more recent times the worst that tests loyalty is the sinking feeling that the club has moved away from us and that we are no longer valued. Edited September 14 by MikeMcKenna 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaveAV1 Posted September 14 Share Posted September 14 (edited) 13 hours ago, MikeMcKenna said: Over my many decades supporting Villa due to family, work, unemployment etc etc, I have had a couple of breaks, but like a bad penny always came rolling back. As others have said, ‘loyalty’ is very hard to quantity. Through ‘thick and thin’ is imo a good way to describe loyalty with the thin times being the most relevant - It is easy to be loyal when we are doing well. I am sure most supporters have examples of the best and worst of times. As a kid probably the worst was walking to VP in the snow from my home in Saltley because the special buses were all stuck - looking back it was incredible to think some of the matches continued despite atrocious weather conditions. However, missing a match at VP was not an option. More fearfully, being at Millwall on the freezing evening of Wednesday 1st December 1976, standing with their crowd because we couldn’t get in with the Villa fans maybe a sign of loyalty or stupidity (we won 2-0 but never moved a muscle for either goal). Queuing for cup tickets overnight lying on the pavement wrapped in blankets on the Trinity Road were some of the longest nights of our lives! In more recent times the worst that tests loyalty is the sinking feeling that the club has moved away from us and that we are no longer valued. My love for Villa goes way back to the 70s and so it’s fair to say I’ve experienced most emotions along the way. I met my now wife in 2008 and we were married in 2012. Soon after we met she described me as a, “football obsessed, beer swigging, workaholic, Brummy chancer. I can only argue that I am Villa obsessed rather than football, everything else is pretty accurate although you could probably add fly fishing to my obsessions now. Our 10year old daughter is of the opinion that her dad uses the “F word too much”. F in her opinion being Football and Fishing which I admit to talking about quite a lot but perhaps our definition of what is, too much, we may disagree on but would be supported by my wife! However in 2017 we decided to move up to The Highlands which is 460 miles from The Holte and so my attendance of games at Villa Park is no longer as frequent as it was. The decision was that the move would be to move us closer to my wife’s home and her parents who were also our daughter’s surviving grand parents, my Dad passed sway in 1998 and Mom in 2016 and so perhaps I could quantify the love of my wife and daughter to be greater than my love of Villa but not longer. I am now an armchair supporter I guess but no less pationate all the same but life and priorities alter over the years. For real none television entertainment I’ve discovered fishing, which I wish I’d found years ago. I’m sure Mr Ellis would approve. Although I think Doug was a salmon fisherman whereas I target trout but with the same basic method. Ie. Using a fly. Living in the Highlands it would be almost a crime not to fish or play golf, there are plenty of opportunities to do both around here. Tight lines and UTV!!! Edited September 15 by DaveAV1 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TRO Posted September 14 Author Share Posted September 14 (edited) 16 hours ago, OutByEaster? said: Fan loyalty is a strange thing. I grew up poor and without a father at home, I went to Villa Park about a half dozen times before I was twenty, got my first season ticket at thirty. I don't think you could look at me today with twenty years of that behind me, and the choices I make now in how I spend my time and say I'm not a loyal fan - but when I think about it, I don't think I'm any more loyal than the eleven year old me drawing pictures of Tony Morley at the kitchen table, or the fifteen year old me walking three miles home from Villa Park in the dark on my own after a reserve game, I don't think my season ticket makes me more loyal than the young man that ran a mile from the train station to make it home from work just in time for the kick off of the 1996 League Cup final. I'm not sure that having a season ticket has made me more of less loyal, I don't think it's changed me much at all, but I think it's probably fair to say that as an expression of that loyalty, a season ticket is a pretty good guide. I don't think you need a season ticket to be considered loyal, but I also think that if you have one, it's a fair indication that you are - very few people have a season ticket by accident. Loyalty in itself is of course a quality that's impossible to measure - it's not about pounds and pence, that much is for sure. Sat at the club meeting this week, I couldn't help but feel that one end of the table was there because they were in business and the other because they were in love - it's no wonder we sometimes struggle to communicate or that sometimes people forget there are other things that people invest in this club than money. I really enjoyed that, and endorse it. and as you rightly say, that's where the communication, may falter at times. We have so many folk working at the club, who have never been involved in the feeling we have for the club, some do get to grow with it, some never do....but they do have an impact on the results we crave, and help with our feel good factor...albeit its their job in the main, sure there are home grown boys ingrained in what we feel.....but the world of business, soon negates that, when they are out of favour or transfered, that's when they morph in to a commodity. Look how Albrighton had his heart broken as an example. but, We need to remember, no one has put our arm up our back and forced us to attend, or no has forced us to support the club from a far.....it's a choice we have made, no matter how hard that choice has sometimes challenged us, to do so. I too grew up badly off and money was scarce, so going to the match was very much a treat then, .....but maybe, just maybe, we are missing the point of mixing love of the club with business.....two separate factors and at times we mix them up and expect folk who are not emotionally involved, (just commercially), to have the feelings we have. Edited September 14 by TRO 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DaveAV1 Posted September 14 Share Posted September 14 On 10/09/2024 at 15:39, TRO said: I would fail that loyalty test. Me too! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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