It's like so many towns around the south west and beyond.
Each Club in these towns has its hard core of genuine football supporters who follow their team through thick and mainly thin.
Then there is (sadly) a large and typically mouthy gobshite majority who through their own lack of self-esteem, also lack the fortitude to support their local team and instead brand-attach themselves to "successful" clubs like the rags and liverpool and convince themselves they are top fans of these clubs because they watch sky and listen to talksport, ie the source of all their football "knowledge" and "facts".
For the fans that genuinely support their local Club regardless, they deserve nothing but respect. If anyone can relate to that, it's City fans.
That statement may have its basis in truth, but it’s also extremely lazy. Whilst there is undoubtedly a ‘type’ of supporter who will latch themselves onto the rags or Liverpool, the casual dismissal of everyone in England’s footballing outposts who follow Premier League teams first and their local club second, as ‘glory hunters’, overlooks the reality of following football in the modern era.
Even when I was a kid in the 60’s and 70’s, the Premier League was mammon. I grew up in East Devon and although there wasn’t the blanket TV coverage that there is now, it was still all we ever talked about and I’d say 80% of my class at school supported a top flight team first and foremost, even though, primarily for geographical reasons, it was Exeter City they went to watch on a Saturday afternoon (if they went at all).
The only difference between then and now is that then classrooms contained those who followed Liverpool, Spurs, Stoke, Leeds, West Ham, Pompey, Chelsea and, in my case, City, whereas now the non-stop deluge of red-shirted propaganda coming out of Sky TV, results in a far more concentrated demographic.
City fans always get excited about this issue, I suspect because it’s a handy stick with which to beat the rags, but how many modern day junior blues live closer to Rochdale, Altrincham, Stockport, Macclesfield, Bolton, Oldham and even now Huddersfield, Wigan or Accrington, than they do City? A fair percentage I’d be willing to bet.
I still go and watch Exeter 4 or 5 times a season (usually away games, because I no longer live in the South West), but my ‘team’ is, and always has been, Manchester City, where I’ve been a season ticket holder for 3 decades, and I can assure you that for most of the near 60 year period I’ve been following them, any ‘glory hunting’ element has largely been conspicuous by its absence!
The same premise, sadly, will apply to (at least some) long distance rags and dippers. In fact I have some of the former in my family, who still live in the West Country and who are (nearly but not quite) as resolute in their support of United as I am City……
