Consolidation in League One Is Not Midtable Mediocrity
Easter has gone, thoughts are already turning to warm summer evenings and holidays. It must mean the season is drawing to a close. Bookmakers such as Skybet have the Valiants all but home and hosed for this season which is an unusual predicament for Vale fans. It is rare that the season’s final few games aren’t played out among the drama of a relegation fight, a push for the automatics or the fading, but impossible to extinguish, dream of a play-off place.
It is twenty-three years since Port Vale last graced the second tier of English football. A lot has happened to football in those proceeding years, both with the domestic game as a whole, and closer to home with the club itself.
You don’t support a club like The Vale thinking you are going to embark on European adventures (though of course the Anglo-Italian exploits will live long in the memory of everyone around at the time), or to trouble the pundits of Match of the Day.
What you do want when you support a club like The Vale is a sense of community, the feeling that everyone at the club is pulling in the right direction. That the players on the pitch are giving their all—right up to the end of the season—and that there is progression. Whether that progression takes the form of players coming through the ranks, establishing themselves in the first team, a style of play, or a philosophy that everyone buys into.
All at Sea
That all sounds very good, but if all of those are in place and the club finds itself in and around 10th position year in year out, neither troubling the top six, nor feeling the danger of the trapdoor, will people be happy? Even if they are achieving that at a league higher than they were just a handful of seasons before?
Because being a fan of whatever club also comes with another requirement. There has to be drama, excitement. Yes, a cup run can provide that, but the meat and drink of every club’s season is the league, and that horrible term mid-table mediocrity tends to rear its head whenever a club establishes itself in a league but does not (yet) possess the means to look up.
Switch that term with another—stability which to all intents and purposes means exactly the same thing—and it puts a different spin on things. But people don’t follow a club or take up a hobby for stability. They want the aforementioned drama and passion, even if it ultimately ends in heartbreak and tears.
Establishment in League One
The Vale’s ambition this season was to stay up. That would have been their number one, number two and number three priority. Not wishing to jinx anything, but they have achieved that. And League One is not just a completely different animal than League Two, but it is barely recognisable from the league that The Vale spent four seasons in less than a decade ago.
There are teams that have been in the Premier League in recent memory. Teams that have won in Europe in our lifetime. Teams with international players. Most crucially, teams with multimillion pound budgets.
Ipswich Town, Sheffield Wednesday, Derby, Portsmouth to name four, are all sides that would not look out of place in the higher echelons of the Championship, or even the Premier League, in terms of grounds and fanbase. At least two of those will again be in the same league as Port Vale when we go again next August.
Of the two sides that came up with The Vale last season, Exeter have equipped themselves well, especially in the second half of the season despite losing their manager in October. Forest Green on the other hand have found the move up a league a step too far.
At the present moment, League One is the level Port Vale should be playing at. Consolidation is the number one priority, and they need to stay here longer than the brief flirtation they enjoyed last time. Once that has been achieved then they can look to emulate some of the equal sized teams who have managed to break the glass ceiling into the Championship. The likes of Rotherham and Wycombe. The process of making that a reality may not be the most exhilarating, but it is essential.