Worst relegation season?

[glyn]

Thought I’d cheer us all up with a trip down memory lane and remind us we’ve had low points many times in our history.

These are relegations in my time supporting City. Sorry for those of you who will remember worse, from longer ago.

Which was the worst season/side?

I did think of including some non-relegation seasons, such as the year we went about ten games without scoring a goal in Division Two in the late 80s. Or any of the Craig Levein years, but they weren’t even memorable enough to be included in this list. And the great escape season was pretty bad for 29 matches.

Discuss.

 

[Orifice]

I remember Frank McLintock taking over a decent top-flight Leicester City and not being able to do the job - One win in 26 matches. we we relegated.

The one other bad time from the past, of course, was the Peter Taylor shambles. We we going to take a good team even higher and into europe easily. Peter Taylor will be a quality manager.....
Relegated. Disgrace.

 

[Robin127]

And the great escape season was pretty bad for 29 matches.

I always felt that we wouldn't go down that season, that team always made me that there was enough in it to avoid the drop.

Personally, I think the 1977-78 season was the worst side I saw relegated. I was at I think it was the last game of the season before when we were beaten by an already relegated Tottenham and I could see the writing on the wall then.

 

[londonfox]

77-78 under Frank McLintock seemed pretty bad. Only won 5 games.

I’m 43 and in my time as a fan, this is the worst.

 

[glyn]

If Jeff can edit the poll, then please add 77-78 in…..

 

[M17TT C]

Yeah I have to say it feels like this is the worst.

86/87 was before my time really.

94/95 we were always expected to go down - we had Lee Philpot and David Lowe as PL players for ****s sake!

01/02 Taylor was bad, especially with it being the way we ended Filbert Street but we were no way the same stature as we are now and the fall from grace wasn't so bad, despite having to watch Lee Marshall for a season.

03/04 we were very shit at times - Walker throwing the ball in to the net against Bolton and Villa absolutely tearing us apart at home was awful to watch but i think that team would absolutely batter this current one. 03/04 team may have lacked quality but they certainly had a bit of fight in them, most of the time, and were actually unlucky to go down really and we had **** all money to spend that year too.

07/08 was obviously very dark times and it's the lowest we have ever been so it is the 2nd worse imo. However the writing was on the wall for a couple of years of suffering the mighty strike force of De Vries and Hammond and it did turn out to be the best thing for the club - we were stagnating and awful to watch (400 mile round trip for the Boxing Day defeat to rock bottom Rotherham wasn't particularly fun!) but it allowed the big clearout and reset that was needed and obviously set us on the way to winning the PL.

22/23 however, it's just a spectacular fall from grace and it is turning out to be in a very embarrassing way - as poor, if not worse, football than we have ever seen before. The fall from grace obviously makes it bad but the fact we are all set-up to be comfortable mid-table at worst, if not regular a Europa Conference League team and the players and management team have been paid an absolute fortune and we are still where we are, is nothing short of abject failure from everyone involve - the players, the managers/coaches and the owners. It's always the case too, as soon as a historically bang average side begins to get too big for their boots and believe they couldn't get relegated, they always do and they ****ing deserve to. We've got a squad filled with international calibre players, 7th or 8th highest wage bill, but we are getting schooled by some absolute shite this year as the PL is far worse than the years we bottled top 4. Most of this lays with the management/coaches/scouting as we have the best facilities possible but play like a pub team. The players should do better too as if any of them had anything about them, they could easily sort this out between them as the quality is there, but they are all spineless, stupid, over-paid ****s. The owners take some shit too as this has been coming, worst ever PL start for any team should have been a sackable offence but now to leave us rudderless with these clowns in charge is self harm of bankrupt deserving consequences.

 

[Blue Maniac]

I’ve picked 07-08, but now I’m wondering who from the current team would have made that one better. Ward, Thomas, Amartey, Soumaré, the lad pretending to be Ndidi for the last 2 years, Daka. Are they really better than Henderson, Clapham, N’Gotty, Kishishev, Wesolowski, Fryatt?

 

[FOX Franks]

I’ve picked 07-08, but now I’m wondering who from the current team would have made that one better. Ward, Thomas, Amartey, Soumaré, the lad pretending to be Ndidi for the last 2 years, Daka. Are they really better than Henderson, Clapham, N’Gotty, Kishishev, Wesolowski, Fryatt?

I think there’s a lot of better players than Radostin Kishishev.

 

[Blue Maniac]

I think there’s a lot of better players than Radostin Kishishev.

Have we ever seen a shred of evidence that Soumaré is one of them?

 

[popillius]

Have we ever seen a shred of evidence that Soumaré is one of them?

No. That's why he started today's game.

****ing bizarre madness of the Sue Pollard on cocaine type.

 

[RugbyFootball]

This time is worse. It's the hope that kills you. I had hoped we had matured as a club, created a superb platform for decades of premiership status, finally shed the yo yo tag and emerged from being seen as a small club with a small mentality. I've seen us relegated before and we will be back again (one day) but ffs what an opportunity we have blown to structually move this club on and f#%k did we spectacularly blow it! That's what hurts so bad this time! We are back where we belong after all amongst the Middlesbroughs west broms coventrys and Lutons. Even Brentford Burnley Brighton Bournemouth (thats just the "b"s) are ahead of us tonight in stature and status.

 

[Brown Nose]

This one isn't really that bad at all. We've had a fabulous run. Nine seasons at the top table winning big matches and trophies.

But we can't sustain it forever. We're a yo-yo club. Always have been, always will be. When the cash and the luck ran out, it was always going to end this way.

The worst was easily the drop to League One. Unprecedented and felt utterly disasterous.

Big picture is that there are still 80+ league clubs that would swap places with us in an instant for the ride we've been on. It may be a bumpy landing but we've defied gravity for a long time.

 

[SilverFox]

This is the worst because it never had to be. The others had obstacles like finance. This was never about that. This is about sleepwalking into oblivion.

 

[give_us_a_wave]

I'll go along with the old git brigade. 77/78, even though it was so long ago still stings in my memory. Ruined my ****ing childhood. We were basically down by xmas & there wasn't even the slightest glimmer of hope that we might turn it around at any stage of the season. 2 years earlier we'd been challenging for a european place. It was a nightmare.

& of course the icing on the cake was that ****ing Forest won the league. At that age I actually hadn't even known they existed until they won promotion the season before. County were the Notts team as far as I was concerned. It just seemed ridiculous on every level to me.

I remember being angry & dejected through the whole summer holiday & I've never forgotten it. Obviously as an adult it doesn't hurt as much due to having so much else in life to concentrate on so that level of pain is never likely to be repeated.

Relegation to L1 comes in next obviously as , much like 77/78 I hadn't even considered it as a possibility.

But yes...this one is special because it was so easily avoidable.

 

[glyn]

Having set the vote I actually found it difficult to decide, as they all feel pretty awful at the time.

86/87 was my first so that felt like a disaster to my 10 year old self.

94/95 was hard as we’d fought so hard to get up there via three play-offs, but it was at least obvious all season we weren’t up for the big league.

I’ve voted for the relegation to the third tier, as we had such a proud record of never being down there and who knew where the abyss would end.

This one is very close though, and could end up feeling worse, for the points made above about the opportunity wasted and the sudden fall from grace.

The Taylor one for similar reasons, albeit from a lower peak, as it felt as if he’d thrown away everything we had achieved since 1996. And the football that season was equally dire.

 

[fox58]

Definitely the McLintock season, it was obvious very early on we would be going down,

 

[popillius]

I think what makes this one of the worst is that we've seen what can happen when we have players that are set up correctly and care. The matches against Spurs and Villa, that run before the WC; we showed that we have more than enough quality to compete but the players just can't be bothered anymore. They've been ground down by a manager who wanted his pay day and instead of now showing the balls to compete, they've just decided that it's game over anyway so they may as well tread water until they can sit on a beach taking selfies for their Imstagram accounts.

I hate so many of them.

 

[Joe_Fox]

I think it's only fair that the club put on an open top bus to parade the bunch of feckless tarts around the city. Anyone is free to pelt them with rotten vegetables or, if they choose, excrement, whilst shouting "shame".

Of course, Rodgers won't be on the bus because if he was not only would it cause severe shortages of rotten vegetables and excrement, but the bus would...

a) never get out of first gear;
b) go sideways;
c) break down after making steady gains;
d) consume itself up it's own exhaust pipe.

 

[Willlow]

Youri being injured/not being arsed has really impacted us. He made us tick and crated most things…

 

[taupe]

crated most things…

Be fair, he is moving after all.