Bristol City have all the ingredients for Premier League football except one

Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.

Shortly after Brighton & Hove Albion and Huddersfield Town became the 48th and 49th clubs to play in the Premier League, a few bookmakers offered odds on which club would be the landmark 50th. It ran for a while before the market petered out, presumably through lack of interest, but not before Bristol City had become favourites. 

At first they competed at the top of the market with Preston North End and then Millwall, who came up from League One and finished eighth in 2017-18. In fact, it took until 2020 for a Premier League newcomer to arrive in the form of forward-thinking, Scandi-strategised Brentford. Three years later, punch-above-their-weighters Luton Town became the 51st club.

And so Bristol waits as the bridesmaid of England’s football cities, destined to forever stand dressed in white and disappointment. This year will mark the 45th anniversary of the last top-flight representative from the eighth biggest city in England by population. Go down that list and you reach Plymouth to find the next biggest without a single Premier League season.

Bristol City have become a little stuck in their own suspension. Along with Queens Park Rangers and Preston, they are the joint longest-serving team in the Championship, but you could argue that even drifting Preston have had excitement more recently. Bristol City have finished between eighth and 18th in each of their nine straight seasons at this level. No play-offs; no panicky Aprils at the bottom.

Extend the search and you have to go back to 2007-08 – 14 Championship campaigns ago – to Bristol City’s last play-off campaign. Then, when the Robins finished fourth after promotion the previous season, it felt like anything was possible. Now it feels like they can take a look at their inescapable future simply by staring in the mirror and seeing a reflection of the present.

Nobody sensible truly believes it, but there are weeks when you persuade yourself, as a method of emotional self-preservation, that it would be easier if your football team had always been bad; at least then you know what to expect.

Perhaps that is part of the problem here. Bristol City have had hope: Carabao Cup semi-final in 2017-18, a 13-game unbeaten run to go fifth in 2018-19, fourth in December 2019, third in November 2020, a current run of four straight seasons with a higher league finish than the previous year. And from all of that, what residual feeling other than disappointment? A little pride. A lot more regret.

The great frustration here, the one that really keeps people up at night, is that everything is in place for this club to fly. Bristol City have the owner, not only a billionaire but one born in Bristol and who has subsidised financial losses for more than 20 years. Steve Lansdown sold a stake in his own business to help fund the construction of the new stadium.

For any simmering discontent in some quarters – and Lansdown will never be an unqualified success until he leads his club to promotion – you cannot doubt the benevolence nor the connection. Any discontent certainly hasn’t reared its head on a matchday.

Bristol City 1-2 Wolves (Saturday 11 January)

• Game no.: 55/92
• Miles: 272
• Cumulative miles: 9,267
• Total goals seen: 155
• The one thing I’ll remember in May: Bristol is the most underrated city in the UK, so I’m mainly just going to repeat that until people believe it.

Bristol City have the stadium. The new Ashton Gate is magnificent, catching you off guard as you walk inside for the first time. Everything is smart and works. Everything is signposted. Nowhere feels overcrowded, no corner is dingy and yet neither does any of the newness erode the atmosphere. It feels a lot bigger than its 27,000 capacity and that’s intended as a huge compliment.

Bristol City have the fanbase. This season, average home attendances are going to be above 22,000 and they were over 22,000 in 2023-24 too. It will be the first time since 1978 that Bristol City will have managed that two years in a row. For all the talk of frustration and aimlessness, the congregation haven’t gone away.

As such, Bristol City have the revenue. According to the latest fully published accounts (which cover the 2022-23 season) the five clubs receiving parachute payments unsurprisingly posted the five highest revenues. In sixth place were Bristol City, ahead of Sunderland, Stoke City, Middlesbrough and Cardiff City respectively.

Bristol City have the infrastructure. As well as the stadium, Lansdown built a new state-of-the-art training facility that opened in 2021 that has facilities for first-team and academy. That academy has a reputation for developing high-end talent and is the best in the south west of England.

Related to that: Bristol City have proven themselves capable of either developing their own players, or buying low and developing them before selling at a profit. It started with the sale of Jonathan Kodjia to Aston Villa for an initial £11m and continued from there. Between 2018 and summer 2023, Bristol City sold eight players for a combined £95m.

That’s the complicated thing about Bristol City to an outsider. Had they managed to reach the play-offs and somehow negotiate a path through them, we would be warmly praising them for staying true to the ideals of a perfectly run football club. And yet, without the goal ever being reached and with the club perennially mooching about in Championship midtable, it becomes warped into an insult about missed opportunity.

Instead, there are two damaging strands that have undermined much else. Firstly, Bristol City have tried just about everything at one time or another: a period of high spending and a period of comparative parsimony; giving academy players a chance and selling them on as soon as they gain value; keeping faith in some managers and moving quickly on from others.

Changing plans is expensive in football, because they usually require investment and because they always require patience and time costs money. Lansdown has been forced to cover for heavy financial losses: £38.4m for 2020-21, £28.5m for 2021-22, £22.2m for 2022-23, £3.3m for 2023-24. That last figure is a dramatic reduction and may be viewed as a relative cause for celebration. And that’s a year during which Bristol City lost £63,000 a week.

Those losses provoked Bristol City to sell their valuable assets (and it’s just as well that they developed them), but they probably also meant that those sales came ahead of the ideal schedule. Selling Antoine Semenyo, Adam Webster and Sammie Szmodics for a combined £27m may have made sense at the time, for example. Semenyo is probably worth at least twice that on his own now.

Bristol City have also struggled to find the right manager to make the most of their circumstances. Steve Cotterill left during the season after promotion back to the Championship. Nigel Pearson, a similar personality type to Cotterill, was sacked in October 2023 with the club five points off the play-offs having suffered several injuries and lost Semenyo and Alex Scott in consecutive windows.

In a lurch the other way, Lee Johnson was given four-and-a-half years, extensive recruitment and had a group of fine academy graduates. Johnson earned great credit for the Carabao Cup run, but failure to deliver a top-six place arguably set back Bristol City another couple of years. His replacement Dean Holden got seven months.

None of this is unforgivable, of course. Clubs make mistakes all the time because this is not a perfect science. But it exacerbates the suspicion that is most galling to supporters: Bristol City have become the experts of wrong man, right time and right man, wrong time. “When it clicks…” is the perfect tagline, with the emphasis on the ellipsis.

The other accusation, and it is laced with a compliment, is that Bristol City intrinsically lack a ruthlessness that would aid the pursuit of promotion. They are a lovely football club in a wonderful city, but is there quite the relentlessness and hard knocks required?

If not, that only gets harder the longer you go without the success you crave. Your own repeated behaviour becomes hardwired and thus self-fulfilling. Like Stoke City below them, the fabric of the club involves not making good on the clear potential and investment.

Liam Manning is the latest manager to carry this dream upon his shoulders, via City Football Group education, MK Dons and Oxford United.

On the day I watch Bristol City, a 2-1 FA Cup home defeat to Wolves, Manning takes his record to 21 wins, 21 draws and 21 defeats. It would be a little simplistic to say that reflects his reputation among supporters, but you get the point. Some of the football is a little too pedestrian, some of the results a little disappointing and then along comes a home win and everybody hopes again.

The end of January 2025 roughly finds Bristol City in their natural position. At the time of writing they are eighth in the Championship, either three points from the top six and looking up or three points above the bottom half thanks to a slow start to the season.

Each of the five clubs directly below them and each of the seven above are former Premier League clubs. Three of those above them are enjoying the benefits of parachute payments and they are the top three. As such, this will not be easy and will never be easy. The more you go without, the more likely you are to go without again.

But there is a desperation amongst this fanbase for Bristol City, and Bristol, to be awakened as a major footballing conurbation and that requires promotion. If not now, then when? If not this manager, then who? If not their club, with all its strengths, why so many others?

Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here