JULIAN Rhodes today reassured fans: City have rebuilt before and we can do it again.

The Bantams are on the brink of dropping back to the basement division after a miserable campaign - and now sit eight points from possible safety.

With debts of around £2 million for the season, they are also facing a challenging summer.

READ MORE: Fans hailed by Bantams boss

Rhodes, though, believes that recent history has shown the club will be capable of picking themselves back up once more if the worst happens.

City’s season-ticket advertising campaign on social media has featured clips from memorable games in the run-up to Sunday’s deadline for the £150 early-bird prices.

But the interim chief executive cited the example of a meaningless final day of the season three years ago against Chesterfield as proof of what he feels can be achieved.

Rhodes said: “It was a nothing game in a sense. We’d qualified for the play-offs the week before with a win at Southend and Chesterfield had already secured their League One safety.

“Yet nearly 21,000 people turned out to watch us – the highest league attendance at Valley Parade since 2002.

“I can remember during that Chesterfield game reflecting on how significant that was. We were still a League One club with so many fans in the stadium for a game that meant nothing.

“It almost felt to me like a celebration of how far we’d come after the really dark times post-Premier League and during the administrations.

“I always thought that the final deal that marked the end of all that was the sale of the shop and office building in 2012.

“In the space of four years, we’d gone from fighting for our lives against Crawley – quite literally – to becoming a really well-respected League One club.”

Some supporters are in two minds about renewing their season tickets after such a bad year. Sales are understood to have been sluggish, although City are expecting a late push before the cut-off point when the discounted prices will rise.

But recalling the packed audience for that 2-0 win in May 2016, Rhodes is urging fans to keep faith that the better times can return.

“The significance of the game that day for me was that we’d done it the proper way,” he added.

“We didn’t have a sugar daddy bankrolling it. Everybody had played their part – the supporters, Phil Parkinson and his management team, the players and everyone behind the scenes.

“A lot of other clubs were envious of what we’d done because we’d self-generated the money to allow us to get to that position.

“OK we didn’t push on and go up or go up the next season. But for me, that was one of the best games I’ve been at – even if most people probably won’t remember it that well.

“It shows it can be done. We're looking forward to doing it all again – and I think a lot of people are.

“Yes, this season has been a major setback but it doesn’t mean to say we can’t do it all again.

“If you get everybody contributing – and that’s what it was – there’s no reason that Gary (Bowyer) and his management team can’t emulate what we achieved then.”