Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.

As the match kicks off, there’s only one thing I can think about: I can see the word “Cardiff” written across from me in the blue seats of the Ninian Stand.

I have been here for magnificent occasions for the Wales national team, when Dafydd Iwan sang Yma o Hyd and I felt myself taking on Welsh heritage via emotional osmosis. I have been here for important Cardiff City games, when more than 25,000 brought the noise. I have been in here when the red seats in the top tier of the Ninian are empty, covered by giant flags. But I’ve never seen it like this.

There are a litany of explanations: Christmas is coming to suck up disposable income; it’s freezing cold; it’s midweek; it’s a non-glamourous opponent (sorry, Preston North End fans); it’s live on television.

The attendance is announced as a touch over 15,000 but that must include season-ticket holders because the Cardiff City Stadium feels more empty, more cavernous, than that.

But it’s more than all of those things: Cardiff are at aching point and you can see the breaking point coming soon if things don’t change for the better.

I want to enjoy every match of the 92 this season, but this one is awkward to the point of unpleasantness, like watching a theatre production when one of the protagonists forgets their lines. Preston have not won in 10 matches and have not won away in the league since March, they play poorly almost all game and yet are comfortable winners. The first Preston goal is scored for them by Cardiff, the second given to them by a calamitous backpass.

By full-time, Cardiff are back in the Championship’s bottom three.

To describe the mood as mutinous would be inaccurate, but only because the most angry have reasoned that it’s too cold for this and left a long time ago. There are occasional shouts towards the manager of “Riza, sort it out” and loud boos at the end, but they are far outnumbered by the low-level groans at everything bad that happens. Which is almost everything.

The main soundtrack of the evening, however, is grumbling whenever the ball is passed backwards. At clubs in rude health, this never happens – that passing is not viewed as risk-averse tactical cowardice but as part of the process. Booing the team playing backwards is an allegory of a club moving backwards.

To understand Cardiff and this current pain, we must understand how longer-term mistrust and short-term concerns interact with one another. The angst is about simultaneously about what is happening now and what happened 12 years ago.

In May 2012, two years after Vincent Tan had bought Cardiff City, he effectively made a public promise that he would increase his investment in the club if he was permitted to change the colour of the kit to red and the club badge from the traditional bluebird to a dragon. Understandably, it caused vast outrage from Cardiff supporters who could see tradition and heritage being trampled upon. So Tan dropped the idea and then, a few weeks later, made the changes anyway.

By February 2014, Tan was accusing the UK media of racism for their criticism of his ownership of the club and also gave supporters unhappy with the Cardiff City rebrand a pleasant message:

“No way I will change it back to blue under my ownership. Perhaps they can find an owner who likes blue, pay up and buy me out. Sure they can go and change it to blue after that. I will go somewhere and build another red club.”

In January 2015, Tan changed it back to blue and the dragon to a bluebird.

Over time, an uneasy truce formed that even threatened to equate to forgiveness in some quarters. Cardiff’s 2017-18 promotion to the Premier League sparked predictable joy and it would be foolish to overlook the role of Tan’s investment in that story. He seemed to have learned hard lessons for the red-blue farce.

But the episodes between 2012 and 2015 leave scars for some that tend to itch when things go awry. If we judge the patience and faith of football supporters as one fund, Tan reduced its maximum possible size. When Cardiff’s luck turns, he therefore has less far to fall before that faith enters the red (if you’ll pardon the pun).

Tan crossed a line and that will never be forgotten. When things go well, there are sufficient distractions for it not to register. When they don’t, there aren’t.

“It’s a funny one,” says Ben James of the excellent View From The Ninian.

“If you look back to the red kit period, I think some fans were okay with it and saw the red kit as a necessary evil in return for promotion.

“Attendances didn’t really suffer – the Premier League year saw big crowds and it was only when we got relegated and performances suffered under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer did the discontent start again.”

“But I think, existentially, Tan did ruin his relationship with the fans at that time. It broke the trust. I know fans who have never come back, I know fans who’ve started slowly returning and I know people who will never come back while he’s at the club.

“It will always be a shadow and a caveat to his ownership, and whenever there is an issue, it comes up, and it shows the distrust the fans have for him.”

Cardiff City 0-2 Preston North End ( December)

• Game no.: 47/92
• Miles: 324
• Cumulative miles: 7,639
• Total goals seen: 132
• The one thing I’ll remember in May: The word “Cardiff” across the seats in the Ninian Stand. I’ve never seen it before during a match.

And now, it’s fair to say, an issue has come up. The last few seasons at Cardiff have been generally miserable: they finished 18th in 2021-22 and would have been relegated a year later had Reading not been deducted six points for breaching an EFL funding plan. Last season, Cardiff appointed Erol Bulut and started the season well, but by December became distinctly mid-table and lost six of their last nine league games.

This summer, Tan certainly backed Bulut in the transfer window. The sale of Mark McGuinness to Luton Town facilitated four new players arriving for transfer fees and the free transfer signings – on significant wages – of Chris Willock, Calum Chambers and Anwar El Ghazi. Then Cardiff took one point from their first six league games and Bulut got the… OK, Bulut was sacked.

That’s where Cardiff’s season gets strange and the disharmony really starts to bubble up. Omer Riza, Bulut’s first-team coach, stepped up as caretaker manager from 22 September and communication from the club seemed to stop when supporters needed it most. By 7 November, it was left to Riza himself to publicly concede that he didn’t know what was going on with his job or potential replacements, although he wanted some certainty.

“In general I’ve enjoyed the whole thing, I just want to carry on,” Riza said.

“But it’s hard to carry on when you don’t know what’s coming next. I have to continue doing what I’m doing, working hard.

“It would be nice that there was some sort of thing to show that what we’ve done so far over the past six or eight weeks has been good and positive.”

On 1 December, with Riza still in limbo and Cardiff’s form taking another downturn, the club’s fan advisory board (FAB), representing all of the club’s supporter organisations, penned an open letter to the club in which they expressed their deep concerns about the current situation.

Within the letter, the FAB pointed to “no full-time manager, no clarity on the hiring process and no clear plan on the table”. It expressed frustration at “the lack of communication from the owner either directly or via his directors”. It warned that the club was facing “a significant shift in supporter opinion that could result in irreversible toxicity and apathy” because “the lessons of the past have not been learnt”. It was, to say the least, sweeping and damning.

“Ken Choo [chief executive officer] and Mehmet Dalman [chairman] are the figureheads for the club,” James says.

“Choo is also the CEO of HR Owen, a car dealership. Mehmet Dalman is also involved there, while also involved in other businesses and even tried to buy a football club while running us. The big question for them would be how they think they can run a football club, essentially, part-time?

“It’s unsustainable that a Championship club is run in a leadership vacuum. We need people to be pushing Tan for more control of the on the ground stuff and more say in how the club is run while he is more removed from it. Until that happens, we will continue on this death spiral of ‘Dalman shows up, makes a decision, it goes wrong, he disappears, the club suffers.’”

Those who partake in FABs do so because they love their clubs. They do not get paid and often don’t get many thanks, but at their best they act as a messenger between those in power and supporters and as an early warning system when something goes wrong.

So for the club to respond to that letter by failing to address anything raised within but instead criticising the FAB for writing the letter – “concerning that an incendiary open letter was published” – and accusing them of behaving in contrary to agreed procedures and process was a dismal misstep.

Too many people forget this: to own or run a football club is to accept scrutiny as part of your privilege. You need these supporters because they are your oxygen and your blood. If you want to react to their concerns in a derisory manner, that is your choice. But don’t expect them to react favourably. Cut to thousands of empty seats on a Wednesday evening.

Coincidentally, four days after the letter was published, Cardiff announced that Riza had signed a deal until the end of the current season. Which both answered the question and raised another, given the length of the deal. If Riza’s understandable problem was about certainty and continuity, what happens if Cardiff are in trouble in March and April and the manager doesn’t know if his contract will be extended?

On the evidence of my trip, Cardiff will indeed be in trouble. They have taken three points from their last seven games and are a point outside the bottom three at a time when others have either changed managers or picked up their own form. The decision to stick with Riza, whose only other league managerial role was for seven games at Leyton Orient, is a risk. This is not on him, but it is an unenviable position for anyone.

It is more than 20 years since Cardiff were in the third tier; they have twice enjoyed Premier League seasons in the interim. But no club has a right to Championship football if they make a series of mistakes and follow them up with more. League tables are a meritocracy and, right now, Cardiff are one of the three worst in the division. Watching them on that Wednesday, it’s hard to believe that they aren’t in the bottom one.

That’s why there is anger here, because those who love this club the most can see what is happening and are worried those in charge aren’t taking the same position with the same view. And that’s why, in ever larger quantities, there is apathy too. Because you can’t keep doing something that makes you feel like this for too long before you love itself gets eroded. And that is the final straw.

“Being a football fan is supposed to be a bit of fun, it’s supposed to be a 90-minute escape from the drudgery of day to day, where you let your anger go and get rewarded with joy or at the very least, effort,” James says.

“My current feeling, and the same with others, is that this is bordering on a chore. It’s our 125th year of being a football club and the celebrations around that just feel secondary to the club being a circus. Every decision or bit of news that comes is just death by a thousand cuts.”

Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here