How do you actually feel about United now, and what do you want them to be in the future?

[BiggerBladeThanThou]

Isn’t that what we are now?

Yeh but that’s not my dream scenario for us.

 

[dexter101]

I am not a born and bred Blade, but for me, I love the connection between the club and the city as a whole.

I know I am biased but Sheffield United represent (for better and worse) what Sheffield is. There is a real distinct link between them and as I love Sheffield for what it is, I love the Blades for what it is too. Yes, in theory, it should be more successful and more attractive to a wider audience than it is, but it doesn't really fully appreciate how special it is and if someone starts to recognise that, it just shrugs it off.

What ever changes in the future, and I do hope we continue to develop (for example, a Cat 1 academy) but I hope we never lose that connection.

 

[JimW1889]

Winning games and playing exciting football is fun, losing games and playing boring football isn't fun. Nowadays as long as we continue existing up to a point I'm not overly bothered what league we're in. Obviously if you go up rather than down it means you've had a more entertaining season, but I don't overly care beyond individual matchdays anymore.

Fucking up someone's day is beautiful. Not sending them down or anything like that, necessarily, but halting a play-off charge, equalising with 9 men, winning with your only shot on target after being outplayed for 90 minutes, it's what I live for.

I often think, not out of bitterness, when I see away fans leaving happy and us annoyed that next week it'll be the case that they're in our position. Which is what it's mostly about, having some good days out and leaving happy on a Saturday afternoon.

 

[GeorgeDonis1889]

To me, what you describe as the things that distinguish us from 'identikit' teams are what I would call our club culture - a term that has been hijacked on this forum to infer something different and poorer

Exactly this. The stuff people say they love about us and make us unique are the very things they mock and sneer at on here.

We had the dream scenario in 2019 and now a large group on here seem to obsessively hate the manager.

I think a lot of people are very confused about what they want United to be. Far from loving what makes us unique, most of the most vocal posters just want us to be exactly like Brentford and Bournemouth when you look at what they say. I am happy that if things are going ok with the running of the club we can aspire to be top end championship/bottom end Premier league. Maybe one day we'll sustain being in top flight for a decent period but I accept maybe not.

We are very entitled on here. Much less so match going fans thankfully.

 

[Gin&Juice]

Things that I’ve really enjoyed over the last few years, that I would love to see more consistently in the future. But I suppose i’m being unrealistic and probably greedy. United are a basket case, mad club. Always have been always will be, but that’s part of the charm. Anyway…

The way we played 16/17 season. Just total domination and sexy football. It was such an enjoyable time. I think it got a lot of fans back on side, I know quite a few fucked it off. 3 seasons before we got about 15k vs Yeovil in the PL semis. I’d love to have another season like that.

Watching Iliman play. I’d love to see us field players of his talent, you know they’ll go to bigger and better things, but watching him under Hecky was immense.

Team cohesion and never say die under Wilder in 2019. I really expected us to capitulate, but when won when we needed to. I never thought that would happen with United. We’re such a pessimistic bunch.

I don’t want us to lose our soul, I think we’re too small a club for that to happen. I’d love to see an exciting, fast, youngish team. Similar to that Leeds team 25 years ago. Obviously without the bankrupting part.