I attended the excellent and informative open day at Easter Road Stadium this afternoon, put on by the Hibs Historical Association as part of the Leith Festival. The day was a great insight into the history and traditions of Hibernian, and showcased the heights at which Hibs once performed.
Hibs record attendance is 65,860, set on the 2nd of January, 1950 against Hearts at a time when Hibs were a formidable force in Scottish football, with the Famous Five entertaining large crowds on a regular basis, and with Easter Road proving a challenging venue for even the greatest of European visitors.
These days, Easter Road has a much reduced capacity. The modernisation of the stadium into an all-seater venue means that, when full, Easter Road now holds 20,421 - and it's rare that the stadium sells out.
Seeing a model of the stadium in its old form and thinking about what it must have been like to have stood on the steep embankments of the old East terracing brought about thoughts about how much potential there actually is at Hibernian, and whether or not that potential is matched by the ambition at the club. The question could also be asked the other way around - does the ambition overstretch the potential?
In modern Scottish football, crowds of 60,000 plus are very rare. Even Celtic struggle to fill their ground for all but the biggest of matches, and it's a similar story at Rangers, where the stark reality of a lack of success aligned with a lack of a trustworthy board in recent seasons has eroded the attendances at Ibrox significantly. Even the showpiece game of the Scottish football calendar - the Scottish Cup Final - attracted a little over 37,000 supporters, leaving almost 15,000 empty seats. It should be noted that the game was played out between Falkirk and Inverness Caledonian Thistle, and so the 37,000 represents a fantastic turnout in relation to their respective average gates.
Hibs have a long way to go to even come close to filling Easter Road on a regular basis. It has been sixty-three years since Hibs won the top flight league title. Hibs fans have given up counting the number of years it's been since they last won the Scottish Cup. The last success Hibs had in any cup competition was in 2007, where they lifted the CIS Cup having defeated Kilmarnock 5-1 in front of 52,000 spectators.
Starved of success, and frustrated with how the club has been run for a number of years, an apathetic Hibs support has found better things to do on a match day. Recent cup finals have shown that there is still a significant Hibs support that could potentially be wooed back to Easter Road, but coming out for a cup final is one thing, getting back into the habit of attending home matches is something else altogether.
Even if Hibs were to fill Easter Road week in, week out, what is the best that they could hope to achieve? At a little over twenty thousand seats, their gate income would still be dwarfed by that of Celtic and Rangers. and with TV income at a fraction of that enjoyed by similarly sized English clubs, Hibs would still struggle to attract talent that would make them competitive outside of the top two or three positions in Scotland.
Celtic, with the huge relative income that they enjoy compared to Hibs, are the poor relations amongst Europe's elite. For Celtic, a club that once won the European Cup, simply qualifying for the Champions League is now considered a success, getting out of the group stages in that competition is a notable achievement.
Manchester City have spent however many hundreds of millions of pounds on their squad and have yet to trouble Europe's best. So what hope do Hibs have of getting a seat at that table ever again?
Where does that stark reality leave the ambitions of the Hibs support and board? Is the extent of the potential at Hibernian a full stadium and the odd second place finish in the top flight (even then, just competing in the top flight might still be some way off depending on whether or not Rangers spend big this summer to get out of the Championship, where their bigger spending potential should - if Dave King's claims are to be believed - put Hibs at a disadvantage for automatic promotion right from the word 'go'.)?
It would be an incredible achievement for Hibs to find themselves in a position just to compete to qualify in the Champions League. Hearts managed to find themselves in a Champions League Qualifier after Romanov spent millions, at a time when second place in the then SPL was enough to secure a qualifying spot. Now, you need to win the league.
So how can Hibs - or any Scottish side - ever hope to get back to where they once were? How can Hibs take a full house and use it to put together a side that competes way higher than the resources should allow?
How do Hibs even get to the point where they have that problem to address? Hibs have started to look seriously at how to reconnect with those lost supporters. A greater presence in the community through partnerships such as the recently announced link-up with Edina Hibs, and with Spartans, along with events such as the excellent open day, will go some way to drawing back supporters whose interest may be re-ignited by reliving past glories, or attracting new supporters who see the club as synonymous with football in Edinburgh.
Of course, the best way to attract fans is to be successful. An exciting, winning team does wonders for getting bums on seats. Building and then sustaining a winning side on limited resources, where your neighbours in England and Glasgow just need to flutter their eyelashes at your players to lure them from you, is a monumental challenge.
Hibs, again, appear to have put a plan in place to get a sustainable way of building a team with George Craig overseeing a complete overhaul of the football operation at Hibernian, from youths through to the first team. This should lead to Hibs being able to produce, sell, and replace talent without impact to the overall quality or style of the first team - similar to the approach taken by Swansea and Southampton in the English Premiership.
The biggest challenge that Hibs have is finding a way to break the shackles of the reality of the situation that they find themselves in, along with the rest of Scottish football, which is that no matter how good they get, how well they do, or how full the stadium is, the odds of achieving anything are stacked against them.
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