Measure of success?

[clactonram]

There are many differing ways to measure the success of football clubs, trophies being the most common. However, you can get an indication of the general trends of a club's success, throughout its history by comparing their seasons in the top flight with other clubs.
I found this interesting website (see link) which shows records of seasons spent in the top flight.
Is nice to see that Derby are in the top 15, six places ahead of Forest. We're also ahead of them in most consecutive top flight seasons.

Other interesting points:

Man Utd only 5th despite recent dominance.

That small club Blackpool ahead of us for consecutive seasons (I believe the legendary Stanley Matthews had a stint with them in their previous glory days).

Arsenal holding the record for most consecutive seasons - some folks might dispute the validity of this record as it began with them being elected to the league rather than winning a place. - [url=http://www.myfootballfacts.com/SEASONS-IN-TOP-FLIGHT----1888-89-to-

[Ramondo]

I think it depends also on how you determine success as either current or historically, and also how relevant historical success is to the status nowadays of each club.

Let's take the Blackpool example again - since football records began they have a long and colourful history with some good successes in there, they were once considered a big club. However, I have been following football for 35 years and in all that time they have been a lower league club that you pay little attention to unless a juicy 3rd cup tie comes up, apart from the one season they shocked everybody (including themselves) and got up into the Premier League for a year.

Now compare them with someone like Man City for example, who are below Blackpool on that chart. In the modern game, is that a relevant stat when you compare the size of the two clubs, their resources, their profile and their expectations?

[Bear DCFC]

Depends who you ask, but I'd like to measure success by comparing us to the teams around us, their budgets and expenditure etc. The club sets targets at the start of each season so I guess how we do against those targets would be a good measure.