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Are Bromley where English football is heading?

Rod Liddle is one of those newspaper columnists whose job is to be controversial, but the reinvented northerner is a bit disobliging about promoted Bromley in the Sunday Times today.

Leafy but otherwise unlovely and once described by a former resident, Frankie Boyle, as being a “lobotomy made of bricks”, Bromley can now boast an English Football League club for the first time in the town’s thousand-or-so-year history.

It was once a Kentish market town, but swelled rapidly with the coming of the railways and even more so the “white flight” to the outer suburbs of London from the 1950s onwards. Ten miles southeast of central London and a non-stop 18 minutes on the train to Victoria, Bromley is exactly the sort of place where you might expect to see a flourishing of our absurdly popular national sport.

'Extremely affluent — residents enjoy one of the highest levels of gross disposable income in the country — Bromley is kind of where English football is heading. It is why we have Brighton & Hove Albion, Bournemouth and Brentford in the Premier League, for example, and also why, when you scroll through the EFL’s four divisions, you won’t find any mention of Bury, Hartlepool, Halifax, Rochdale and so on. Demographic shift and football, as ever, following the money.

Bromley did it the hard way last season, finishing 17 points behind the wonderfully rejuvenated champions Chesterfield and scraping through the play-off finals via a penalty shoot-out against Solihull Moors, with the 37-year-old club captain and former Millwall defender, Byron Webster, keeping his head at Wembley to score from the decisive spot kick.

 As you might imagine, Webster is not alone in coming to Bromley from one of South London’s EFL clubs — the assistant manager, Alan Dunne, was a Millwall stalwart and there are a scattering of former Charlton Athletic and Crystal Palace players in the Bromley ranks.

They draw a decent crowd  — an average of 3,561 last season, sixth best in the National League and the ‘sarf’ London businessman who owns them, Robin Stanton-Gleaves, is expecting a mid-table finish this season. That may be a little optimistic, given that the bookies have them as the second favourites to go straight back down.

There is not much money to splash around, seeing as the club have been forced to tear up their hideous, if lucrative, synthetic pitch and replace it with grass to comply with EFL strictures.'

Liddle doesn't mention this, but one of the challenges for London clubs is the sheer number of them, albeit with attendances boosted by soccer tourists.   Bromley are a bit of a second club for Charlton and Crystal Palace fans and attendances may depend on how well the Ravens do on the pitch.


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