From when we moved to East Manchester up until the season prior to the arrival of Abu Dhabi...
2003/04 to 2007/08 five season average att~
Manchester City FC 43,401
littlewoods FC 43,324
...the best finish we had during that period was 8th, whilst we spent at least some of each, bar the last one, of those seasons looking in danger of relegation. The club hadn't got a pot to piss in after mortgaging the future to pay for the parts of the move where the onus fell on us, and then funding the retirement plans of ex dippers like fatso fowler and mcminimum...we were then reduced to signing players like Corradi, Trabelsi and Dabo. There's also a full season under the 'stewardship' of all round gormless plank Stuart fucking Pearce in there as well.
Compare that to a worst finish of 5th place... in short a team in contention for at least a top 4 finish in each of those seasons... and the result you come up with that we are an apparently poorly supported small club.
It should also be noted that the people who make the latter statement about us probably also believe that we were in the third division when we were taken over, having heard something about us being in the third tier in our history