For me the fan's sense of entitlement boils down to what is shoved in our faces every week with the Premier League.
You only have to listen to a TalkSport phone-in or BBC's 606, and any team who openly chuck money at a problem automatically have fans banging on about expecting more for the investment.
However in the Premier League, the competition is rife, the money is so massive that any club can afford good players, and the idiots that follow clubs at that level can never grasp that their chosen club that they cheer on from their armchair cannot win the league every season despite what they spend.
That culture of "Chucking money at it and expecting success" though has filtered down massively into the lower echelons of the football pyramid.... and if we're being honest, because the level of big spending competition down here is far, far smaller, it mostly has worked.
Fleetwood, Crawley, Salford, Forest Green to name a few recent ones.... Those of you who have supported us for as long as I have will remember us regularly playing the likes of Fulham, Swansea, Cardiff, Bournemouth etc prior to them having good amounts of cash thrown at them too.
So simply for me, it all boils down to like lifestags has said, when the comments of "Smash the league" and "Top 3 budget" were thrown about, the massive sense of entitlement that goes with it, came along too...and it would not be unique to our set of fans, it's endemic in all of football these days. You can guarantee if any multi-millionaire came into any club, no matter how big or small, and said they were chucking money at a promotion push, exactly the same would happen there than what is happening here.
The peak of this entitlement came for me though with the appointment of Evans. There was no denying/playing down the level of spending for a promotion push once that appointment was made.
Every thread about possible new managers in the entire history of Stagsnet's existence has always had a post from seemingly some sort of nutcase who suggests a manager who has just lost his job in the Championship, and those of us with half a braincell laugh it off. Yet Evans coming was that manager who 99% of the time in the past we would never have seen coming here, and his appointment signalled a massive sea change.
It meant the wages we could pay a manager, and the signings to come with it, were massively above our station in League 2.
So...when we sacked Flitcroft (who we paid Swindon to get too) we were expecting (through the increased entitlement) to get another big name manager, because obviously we have afforded it in the past.
To get Dempster instead turned the entitlement into vitriol, and it has only got worse because he still had the expensively assembled squad, and the budget was clearly still there as he added arguably (on paper) better players to it in Cook and Maynard.
The expectation is still there as long as the budget and the in your face flaunting of it (look at me, look at me
) is still there.
That's my thoughts on it all anyway.