Spa towns compared

I wrote this for another of my pages

Cheltenham Town are currently in the play off positions in League Two and they had profits of £69,000 in 2018/19. This may be due to the sale of Mo Eisa to Bristol City for about £1.5m, notes Kieran Maguire of the PriceofFootball. The club has plenty of cash in the bank. Cheltenham did not sign any players for fees in 2018/19. Cheltenham loans down about £120,000.

Local businessman and lifelong fan Andy Wilcox became chairman in 2018: New chairman

Arguably Cheltenham as a club are punching above their weight. The population of the town is 115,000 and there are not many large places in the immediate hinterland. In comparison the Leamington urban area (Leamington and Warwick) has a population of 95,000 before counting some heavily populated villages nearby. Leamington, admittedly a phoenix club, are in the National League North.

One would not think of Cheltenham as a natural football town. The biggest employer must surely be the highly secretive GCHQ which is internationally respected and plays a vital role in protecting all of us from terrorism and other threats. How many of them go to football I have no idea. Do they all call themselves 'Brian' which seems to be the done thing at London clubs?

In the case of Leamington, the so-called 'Silicon Spa' there is heavy reliance on support from the less affluent southern area of the town, the CV31 postcode. There is a large Portuguese speaking population, many of them Brazilians with Portuguese papers, but they are conspicuous by their absence at Brakes games. However, they may not be fans of hoofing the ball.

Historically Leamington was a centre of the automotive parts industry, with AP Leamington, the name of the previous club, the biggest employer. As you drove into Leamington in the 1970s there was a big poster that said 'There's a part of Leamington in every car', reflecting the claim to be the brake and clutch capital of the UK. The old AP has gone, as has the Ford Foundry. It is now a service based economy in large part, although some manufacturers survive. The club's leadership place their faith in the transformative potential of a new stadium to be built by the Council nearer the town, but have they grasped the changing demographic of the town?.