A City supporter writes …

Of course, all City fans are behind Steve Lansdown’s new stadium, the World Cup bid and the plan to put a Tesco Extra on Ashton Gate aren’t they?

It’s only Gas Heads, political agitators and people who hate football who are against it right?

Lansdown and Sexstone are seriously damaging my lifelong affection for my local club. They are part of that self-serving self-important clique that have told my family over several generations that they should be grateful for the small crumbs that “trickle down” to them from above. It isn’t just football, it is the whole rotten system.

I wonder how many City fans have even asked Lansdown whether he intends to retain the freehold for the land that he and his son own, the land on which the new stadium will be built. Frankly, I wonder if any of them really care?

When Bristol City nearly went out of existence in 1981/82, the cause was that those running the club when it was in the top division, over-optimistically assumed that the club would stay there for 10 years and more.

As a result, to encourage top players to stay with BCFC they signed them up on long-term contracts (up to 10 years) at top division wages. But the players didn’t perform and City were relegated twice in consecutive seasons (and were about to be relegated for the third consecutive season to set a Football League record) and so ended up playing in front of third-division crowds with third-division receipts while players were being paid first division wages – a bit like bankers being paid bonuses for destroying the economy.

In the end, with about an hour left before the deadline for declaring the club bankrupt, eight of the players tore up their contracts and the club was saved from its own over-ambition.

Nearly 30 years later … The club is losing in the region of £2m every year but wants to invest £90 million it hasn’t got, into a stadium that it won’t be able to fill, built on land that it doesn’t own, partly financed by selling what Colin Sexstone describes as the club’s only asset. Bonkers!