So it's been a month since the National Football Museum closed its doors at Deepdale. It will reopen in Autumn 2011 in the Urbis @ Manchester.
Now for me, someone who only discovered football in early 1993, Deepdale has a lot of history, heritage & culture within the game. Yes, PNE are not the power they used to be but there was something metaphysical about seeing all this history at the place where football 'began'. The Football League as we know it, the Premier League, the FA Cup...it all leads to Deepdale.
So why, is it being moved to some place opened as a conference centre in 2001? No history, no roots. You could argue that Wembley could host it, but for a stadium that only hosted what used to be the showpiece event of English football for the first time in 1923, I would say that it's not good enough.
All about the £.
Ridiculous.
National Football Museum
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Dirk Gently
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It is all about the £, in the point that visitor numbers weren't enough at Preston to justify it being there.
Certainly in an ideal world it'd be at Preston, and the heart says it should, but really the numbers are so disappointing that it's just not viable there - all the stakeholders are paying lots of money to put the exhibits on display and not enough people are going to see them. Also the existing premises are too small to put the whole collection on display - and it hardly rotates. Once you've been there once you've seen it all.
So reluctantly I agree it has to move - the heart say not but the mind says it must.
Perhaps the question you should be asking is "Should we really have the artefacts of the world's greatest game, that we gave to the world, tucked away in a fairly inaccessible Northern town? Shouldn't they be in a major tourist centre where the world can more easily see them."
For me the real worry is how the display is done - as a proper history of football and not an advert for the PL or for Old Trafford plc.
Certainly in an ideal world it'd be at Preston, and the heart says it should, but really the numbers are so disappointing that it's just not viable there - all the stakeholders are paying lots of money to put the exhibits on display and not enough people are going to see them. Also the existing premises are too small to put the whole collection on display - and it hardly rotates. Once you've been there once you've seen it all.
So reluctantly I agree it has to move - the heart say not but the mind says it must.
Perhaps the question you should be asking is "Should we really have the artefacts of the world's greatest game, that we gave to the world, tucked away in a fairly inaccessible Northern town? Shouldn't they be in a major tourist centre where the world can more easily see them."
For me the real worry is how the display is done - as a proper history of football and not an advert for the PL or for Old Trafford plc.
As long as it's inside the M25 somewhere that'll do. Otherwise too hard to get to and visitor numbers will suffer.
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