What's the deal with Yeovil Town?

Not presently in the short-term - more how did they to this point?

They spend over 100 years in non-league then finally get promoted but have just gone from strength to strength until they reach the Championship, this season's relegation notwithstanding. They have stayed at the ridiculously small (by Championship levels) Huish Park. The town is small, half the size of Bath who have never been in the League and, though Hereford, off the top of my head, had a similarish rise in the 70s, they couldn't sustain it. They haven't got rich owners (as far as I can tell). Is it all down to Garry Johnson?

What is the secret? Let's leave aside rivalries for a moment as you have to say, if Yeovil can do it, Bath should be able to and it is possibly a model to look at.

Although Yeovil itself is a small town they have a much bigger catchment area - no league clubs within a 40 mile radius; no other significant sports teams competing for attention; plus there is not a lot to do there at the weekend (having lived there for a number of years back in the day). They have always had high attendances for a non-league team, averaging well over 2,000 in their last years in the Conference. You could argue that they have found their level (League One/Two) based on those attendances.

Possibly but these things haven't changed in the last 10 years from the 100 years before that.

Well, one thing that has changed is automatic promotion to the league. According to wikipedia they were close to election to the league in 1976, but it was not until automatic promotion that they actually made it. Not sure how much effect their ground move had, although I presume they must have got quite a wedge of money from the supermarket company that bought the old ground, and it certainly didn't dent attendances moving from a town centre location to an edge-of-town site.

Personally I have never really got local rivalries and Yeovil are not what I would call local anyway. Did games against them generate bigger crowds? Did we have some right old ding dong matches against them?

Some interesting stats here http://http://www.nonleaguematters.co.uk/forum/gforum.cgi?do=post_attachment;postatt_id=3506;. In the days before automatic promotion from the Conference, Yeovil were up for election to the league 27 times, whereas we were up for it 13 times.

BenE wrote:Personally I have never really got local rivalries and Yeovil are not what I would call local anyway. Did games against them generate bigger crowds? Did we have some right old ding dong matches against them?

I think they generally brought quite a lot of fans to the fixtures. It was a fairly one-way rivalry, though, as they seemed to consider Weymouth their main rivals.

striped67 wrote:Not sure how much effect their ground move had, although I presume they must have got quite a wedge of money from the supermarket company that bought the old ground, and it certainly didn't dent attendances moving from a town centre location to an edge-of-town site.

I may be wrong here but I believe that they sold the land to a construction company, Bartletts of Yeovil, who then built the Tesco store on the old ground. YTFC then employed Bartletts to build a new stadium, but for one reason or another, the costs escalated and they ended up unable to finance the completed stadium. It was many years later that they were able to continue towards finishing the works.
So, I don't think they were left with a 'wedge of money' to play with. In fact, didn't they go down to the Ryman League after the moved into the new ground?
The best examples of this ground sale/move to new ground involves a 'turn-key' contract. ie sell the ground to a developer/builder/'Tesco' with a guarantee of them finding suitable land, build the stadium, and then hand over the keys together with a tidy 'wedge'.
Not easy these days of course, but it avoids (to name just one of many) a Trowbridge Town situation.

That sounds about right if Wikipedia is to be believed - Huish was sold for £2.8m and Huish Park cost £3.5m to build, so a net loss of £700k. They did get relegated to the Ryman about 5 years after the ground move.