When talking about the parade he’s helped plan, lifelong Cleveland Browns fan Chris McNeil wants to make one thing perfectly clear.

“Make sure you get this right,” he said loudly. “We are not having a celebration of losing, we are having a protest of losing. We want to let the Browns ownership and front office know we are holding them accountable for having such a bad team.

“And maybe we’ll have some fun while doing that.”

The Browns’ long-suffering fans will meet at their stadium on Saturday at noon and march around it in freezing temperatures. The ovular path around the stadium is not a coincidence: it’s the shape of zero, as in the team’s win total at the end of their historically abysmal 2017 season.

“Have you ever gone to a bar and saw a sign that said, ‘Free Beer, Tomorrow’?” McNeil said. “So you keep going to get your free beer, but it still says tomorrow, and you never get a free beer? That’s what it is like to be a Cleveland Browns fan. They keep telling us they’ll win tomorrow, but they never win. That’s what this a parade is about.”

The Browns’ moribund campaign marked only the third time since World War II that an NFL team has lost all their games after the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers (who did it in a 14-game season) and the 2008 Detroit Lions, and the holding of a parade to point out their “perfection” has been the source of some local consternation.

The team has not officially acknowledged that their fans will be marching in protest against them, nor have any political or business leaders come out with any response. It’s almost as if the city leadership feels if the parade is ignored, no one will show up.

Not likely.

McNeil, 38, is just a regular sports fan without any axe to grind. He works in sales for his family’s metal product company, selling stairways for commercial buildings. He’s a father to three young kids who don’t know what it’s like to support a winning football team.

Last year, there had been talk of a loser parade, but the team won its penultimate game of the season after a 0-14 start to finish 1-15. But the media last year was in more of a pugnacious mood and blasted McNeil and his cohorts for even considering it. Longtime Cleveland sports radio host, Tony Rizzo, claimed on the air that if a losers’ parade was held, he would show up there and, as he put it: “mow you down under my tires. I promise you that.”

This year’s parade is getting slightly less of a bad rap from the local punditry. Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Phillip Morris wrote of the parade that “Cleveland isn’t a pit of misery” but that the “long-suffering fan base can only take so much losing without lashing out in anger, spite, and yes, juvenile antics”.

Said antics will likely draw people, no doubt. Fans have said they will be bringing hearses, ambulances, various floats, and tombstones with the names of all of the 28 quarterbacks who have started for the team since 1999, when the Browns were resurrected after the previous iteration of the franchise was cruelly moved to Baltimore. Given that the high temperature on Saturday is expected to be about 10F (10 degrees higher than the number of games the Browns won this year) with a low temperature of 1F (the number of games the Browns have won over the last two years), no one knows if the turnout will be 50 or five thousand.

The central irony is at one time the Browns were the kingpins of the league. They entered the league in 1950 and played in the NFL championship game in seven of their first eight years, winning three of them (including their maiden season). They won again in 1964 with all-time great Jim Brown as their star running back, but haven’t been back since. They’ve never been to a Super Bowl, much less win one.

Browns wait in vain at a Christmas Eve home game against the Chargers this year. Photograph: Icon Sportswire/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images

The league gave Cleveland a new franchise in 1999 after the Baltimore move – and the rights to the old name – but the fans were only happy about that for a short time. The reason: they’ve been the worst football team in America ever since.

In the 19 seasons since, the Browns have gone 88-216. They have finished last in their division in 15 of those 19 seasons including the last seven in succession, with seven-in-a row and counting since 2011.

In 2013, after the Browns were beat by the Pittsburgh Steelers, 26-11, Cleveland comedian Mike Polk made a video in which he renamed the team’s FirstEnergy Stadium as ‘The Factory of Sadness’. During the video he yelled at the stadium: “The only two constants in Cleveland Browns football are misery and unwavering devotion from us dumb-ass loyal fans.”

That theme seems to resonate across pro sports these days, especially among fans of losing teams like the Browns. NFL owners routinely charge exorbitant amounts for tickets and parking – beers for $10, jerseys for $100 – and then treat the fans as if they are lucky to be seeing a game. TV ratings for the NFL are down this year, and Browns attendance has hit historic lows: a game against Baltimore in December had the lowest attendance at a Cleveland home game since 1995.

“There isn’t any magic formula for having a winning football team, but no team should be this bad for this long, and also charge us all this money to be this bad for this long,” Polk said. “I’m old enough to remember when they were good and how great the city felt when they were good …. it’s a shame an entire generation of Clevelanders have been deprived of that.”

McNeil is finding the whole process of running a parade to be funny in some respects. The permit requires security officers and port-o-potty toilets – “Who is going to use the bathroom when it is 10 degrees?” he laughs – and they have no plans to go more than once around the stadium. Money from the event will be raised for a local food bank.

He is also seeing worldwide attention from other countries: “Cleveland-Browns-Fans feiern historische Saison mit Parade” says a German sports site, while the French Canadians merely say, “Une Parade de la Mediocrite”.

“Above all, we have said we are sending the owners and front office of this team a message that we are mad and upset about losing, but we are doing it in a way with class and humor,” McNeill said.

Perhaps the funniest footnote: McNeill and his fellow organizers had to raise roughly $10,000 for the permit, and were coming up short. So Excedrin, the headache medicine maker, donated about $8,000 to pay for the permit.

Comedian Mike Polk explained it more simply. He wrote that the world shouts, “Hey Cleveland! The Browns suck!” and the answer from Browns fans is, “Yeah. We know. We threw a parade for that.”

Headache gone.