How to collect football grounds

Men love collecting things. We’ll collect anything. We even collect football matches. We collect whole stadia. For some of us, it’s the reason we go.

It’s definitely a man thing. I was once trying to explain how a woman will never feel the same way about football that men do. And let me be clear on this right from the start; I know several females who know as much about the game as I do, who are good company while watching a match, and there are plenty of them who play the game better than I ever could. But none of them collect things, which sets us apart. You only have to visit a programme collector’s fayre to see that it is a men-only zone. Collecting is the difference between obsession and enthusiasm.

I collect football grounds, and I have done for many years. I don’t collect them as obsessively as some lunatics out there, but nothing satisfies me more than chalking off my first visit to a stadium. These days, it has become almost as important as the match itself. If you offered me a visit to a new ground to lose 0-1, or a win at somewhere  I’ve been before, I would probably take the defeat. I can’t explain it.

I suppose now that we can order our shopping online, there is very little left to satisfy the homosapien instinct for hunting and gathering, unless of course you live near Exmoor and own a shotgun. We can also go picking wilderberries, but somehow that doesn’t satisfy us. We need to collect. We’ll collect dinky cars, railway posters, beer mats, and adidas trainers. We’ll collect anything that reminds us of good times.

The big thing in football memorabilia used to be the match programme. This served two purposes. It helped you collect the match, the ground, and even in some cases, the team you played against. It was a visual reminder of your attendance. Even if you weren’t there, it was cheap, relatively small, and desirable. You could buy a whole season of 1960s Cardiff City home games for about £30. Like stamp collectors, people assumed it would be an investment. Well if you think it’s worth keeping a fragile document in a plastic folder for 50 years in return for a 40p profit, then I suppose it is.

But clubs got too greedy and ruined the football programme as a collectable item. Take the European Cup Final. The 1950s issues are some of the most beautiful memorabilia available. Iconic imagery, epoque-defining graphics, and small enough to collect. But in the 21st century, the Cup Final programme is a huge bloated £10 mini-book, which nobody will read, but which will make a handsome profit for UEFA. It’s size makes it uncollectable.

No, it’s much easier to collect the match itself, and many people now do this by keeping the match ticket. I prefer to keep a record of my attendance using three seperate websites. (I know, I’m not covering myself in glory here am I?)

Firstly, I’ll visit Facebook, and the “football grounds” app. This allows me to check in at the new ground on my list, but most importantly it allows me to compare my total with other facebook losers friends. My visit to Elland Road was my 130th ground recorded. Another good thing about the facebook app is that it covers grounds all over Europe, including Welsh grounds down to the Welsh Alliance, which is the 3rd tier of Welsh football. After checking in your new stadium, it plots the ground on your personal map of visited places.

Isn’t that lovely? The app is also available as a standalone website at www.footballgroundmap.com

So now that I’ve done that, why would I need to log my attendance anywhere else? Well, the fb app doesn’t go far anough. It records my visit to the stadium, but it doesn’t record my visit to the team. Does that make sense?

The holy grail of UK ground collectors (or more geekily, groundhoppers) is to become a member of the “92 Club”, that is to be able to say that you’ve visited all 92 stadia in the English Football League. This used to be a straightforward task, often completed in a few seasons, usually riding a pushbike and wearing a gorilla suit. At one stage in the late 1980s it seemed that every home game would see a mention in the programme of some twat who was completing his “92” membership by visiting Ninian Park. They always left it till last because they really didn’t want to go there.

But since the criminal and negligent stadium rebuilding frenzy of the past decade, your ’92 status is never safe. Once a club has a new stadium, your old visit is wiped off the records. And if a club gets relegated out of the League, that visit too is struck off your list. Of the 73 stadia that I have visited in the Football League, 25 have now been demolished or their team has been relegated. My ’92 club count is reduced to a pitiful 48.

It is a mammoth effort to keep track of all these stats, but thankfully there is a website. Doingthe92.com does all the maths for you. It really is a spectacular feat of insignificent-in-the-grand-scheme-of-things-but-somehow-vital attention to detail. If you select the date and the home team, it automatically fills in the atendance, score and team lineups. It counts and lists the number of teams that you’ve seen play. You can scan your own image of the match programme. (I don’t do this, really I don’t). It then calculates your sum total for “92 club status”.  Indespensible.

And finally, there is a new kid on the block which shows tremendous potential. footballfans.eu combines both the details of doingthe92, and the more attractive web2 interface of footballgroundsmap. It has some great features such as identifying your nearest match by detecting your location. It has worldwide coverage, and is almost recommendable. At the moment it does not allow you to enter details of English Cup, or friendly matches, but I’m sure that will come in time.

Sometimes, when I finish writing a blog piece, I feel really grateful that I am already married. There are many lonely middle aged men out there, wandering from ground to ground without the companionship of a good woman. I am thinking of the man I met at Felinheli, who had travelled for 4 hours from Liverpool by bus and train to visit Cae Seilo. (Groundhopping must be undertaken by public transport for some of them). And what about the group of German groundhoppers that visit Wales once a season to add a few more Welsh grounds to their list? The Newport County fan who aims to visit every ground in the Icelandic 1st Division? Modern day hunter-gatherers, to a man.