Travelling to support a football club is a habit and it's been broken
Posted: Sat Jan 23, 2021 2:05 pm
Article from the Athletic
Bramall Lane should be going green on Saturday afternoon. In different times, in better times, Plymouth Argyle would have 5,000 fans travelling north to south Yorkshire for a fourth-round FA Cup tie. From noon they would be arriving in Sheffield, heading for a pint in the Howard opposite the station or circling Sheffield United’s ground, pocketing a programme, queuing outside the chippy on Shoreham Street.
But there will be none of this, there will be no Pilgrims progressing across England, just as there were no Wolves fans travelling to Chorley in hope of revenge on Friday evening. There won’t be thousands of Wednesday fans exiting Sheffield for Goodison Park, or Blackpool supporters travelling in number for their match at Brighton’s Amex Stadium; Luton, who have not played at Chelsea for 27 years, would have filled an end of Stamford Bridge; and of course Liverpool would have taken so many to Old Trafford all police leave would have been cancelled. For those fans, this weekend would have been one of the biggest of the season.
Every weekend England bears witness to these tribes shuttling across the country, meeting at arranged locations or bumping into each other at service stations or on train platforms. This FA Cup fourth round would have been a bumper version.
But coronavirus has placed all travel on hold, and as Kevin Miles of the Football Supporters’ Association says: “Travelling to support football is a habit and it’s a habit that’s been broken. It remains to be seen how many will get back into the habit. We’d argue that away fans are a bit of an endangered species, something that needs to be preserved and encouraged.”
The away fan is a particular staple of English football and has been virtually since the game turned professional 130 years ago. As Greg Foxsmith of the London branch of Plymouth Argyle supporters puts it of Bramall Lane: “We’d have sold out, just as we’d have sold out Huddersfield in the last round. We hold the away record turnout at the Emirates.”
Plymouth took 9,000 fans to Arsenal in the Cup in 2009, and more recently took over 8,500 to Anfield in 2017. Argyle, like Grimsby Town or Carlisle, are one of those geographically-challenged lower division clubs for whom away wins are nearly as rare as trophies, yet who can be counted on to take large numbers on the road every other Saturday. Or midweek.
Some of the 8,500 Plymouth fans who travelled to Liverpool in 2017 (Photo: Getty)
Relegated to League Two in 2019, Plymouth began the 2019-20 season under new manager Ryan Lowe, whose first game was at Crewe Alexandra. Argyle took 1,700 fans on the 500-mile round trip for a fourth-division match and their new Liverpudlian manager was astonished and beguiled.
“It was one of the reasons I joined the club, because I knew the fanbase was massive,” Lowe says. “When we pulled up at Crewe for the first game, on the right-hand side of us they were banging on the windows, the flags were out. It was like when I used to go to Wembley and watch Liverpool coming in on the coach. That’s what it reminded me of. I thought ‘Wow’. Then when I got out and saw the whole end was full, I was thinking: ‘Yes, this is rocking.’”
Plymouth won 3-0 and Lowe’s opinion is that “100 per cent” it was down to the presence of away fans he describes as “noisy and effective”.
It is therefore no surprise that Lowe is “disappointed” there will be no green support at Bramall Lane, though he understands the pandemic reasoning.
As to when away fans might be seen in their usual place inside grounds, Miles of the FSA says: “Those of us who spent months at the end of 2020 working to establish protocols to enable fans to get back into grounds had to accept away fans were probably the last group to return. With the return even of home fans paused, sadly it seems to be the case that we’ll not get away fans back in grounds this season.”
Sheffield United know all about the FA Cup and away fans. There were more than 110,000 people at the 1901 FA Cup final and while there is no definitive figure as to how many of them wore Sheffield red, contemporary reports suggest the tally was at least 30,000.
The 1890s in England and Scotland was professional football’s first boom time. Rising attendances at the Cup final charted the surge in football’s popularity — from 42,000 in 1895 to 74,000 in 1899 and then, for Tottenham Hotspur versus Sheffield United in 1901, the first crowd of over 100,000. These finals were held at the old Crystal Palace stadium in south London with Blades-Spurs having the extra appeal of a first north-south clash of the professional era.
Under a headline of “The Exodus from Sheffield”, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph reported two days before the game: “On all three railway systems big business is being done.” It said between 150 and 200 saloon carriages had already been booked and they expected many more. It concluded the number of travelling Sheffield United followers “should not be far off that freely talked of in London — well over 20,000.”
The article referred to the 1899 final, which Sheffield United had won 4-1 against Derby County, and stated that fervour was “far in advance of that known two years ago.” A new sporting phenomenon was upon us: football’s away fans.
“Football took off in the 1890s, there was just this huge appetite to attend games,” says Paul Brown, author of Savage Enthusiasm, a history of football supporters. “And the only way to see football then was to watch it in person. You had to go.
“The alternative was that you waited outside a newspaper office for a telegram or carrier pigeon to arrive with the score. There was no other way of knowing and there are reports of people outside newspaper offices watching these pigeons fly in. Imagine the cheering, the anticipation as a pigeon came into sight.”
There was much sociological analysis of this new breed of “fan”, a term first used in England in 1913. The late 19th century Factory Acts passed in parliament had brought extra free time for workers on Saturday afternoons and football was affordable. The fact football is a brilliant sport was of course fundamental, but Brown cites newspaper commentary about Aston Villa fans boarding trains to go to Sunderland for a match and the “romance” of the journey. They were “spectators” then, who became “followers”. “Fanatics” or “fans” came later, a term imported from American baseball coverage.
Before the 1901 Cup final the Sheffield Independent considered other explanations for the boom in away fans — “There is, in the first place, local patriotism.” An example of it could be seen in the name of Brighton & Hove Albion — a combination of geographic place and poetic Englishness — though Brown says “local patriotism existed long before football.
“If you take Blackburn and Burnley, those towns were rivals before football. They were rivals as industrial mill towns, but now they had a new means to channel their rivalry. Blackburn Rovers or Blackburn Olympic were wanting their team to beat Burnley to show their dominance as a town. Football was a vessel for their local patriotism and, for away fans, you’d want to go onto their turf to show that.
“It wasn’t just a negative thing, about derision, it was about pride in your own town. It was benign. There was a sense of belonging, camaraderie — this need to be there, to be part of it. There was the supporting aspect: they knew their team was away and they wanted to help it win and their presence gave them a better chance.”
Clearly the hooliganism of the late 1960s through to 1980s distorted the general impression of the away fan and, when asked for the changes he noted from the 1901 fan to the 2021 version, Brown replies: “You know what? I noticed more similarities than changes.”
Meetings between Liverpool and United just aren’t the same without two sets of fans (Photo: Getty)
Foxsmith’s experience of following Plymouth supports Brown’s statement. His first away game was Argyle’s 3-0 defeat at Wigan Athletic in 1986. The journey was taken on a supporters’ bus, as was some cider by the young teenager and his mates, and he has been going ever since, even though he and thousands of others have left Plymouth.
“Our away support is divided into two distinct camps,” Foxsmith explains, “firstly the Plymouth-based fans who have enormous logistical difficulties as the most-travelled away support in terms of mileage, and the second group, the Plymouth diaspora.”
Regional unemployment and the Londonization of the economy from 1980 meant tens of thousands of local fans brought their local patriotism to the capital. As Foxsmith says: “From the recession of the 1980s onwards, Plymouth, like a lot of industrial towns, haemorrhaged jobs when our biggest employer, the dockyard, lost about 90 per cent of its workforce.
“Many people from Plymouth moved, and you’ll find Plymouth fans all around the country. For some of us, away games are often easier to attend than home games and for us, following Argyle away becomes an important link to our roots. We miss not only Plymouth Argyle, but Plymouth, family, our friends. So travelling away is how you can bond with fellow Plymouth expats. If that makes sense.”
Plymouth’s geography means each away day is an endurance test — Bramall Lane is a 600-mile round trip but to Foxsmith and the other long-distance travellers “the journey becomes as much a part of the day as the match.
“It’s about the camaraderie, the day out. Obviously, the 90 minutes of football is small proportionately to the travel time. I think fans look on the away trip experience in total, rather than just focusing on the 90 minutes. It’s planning, how you travel, who you travel with. And your away wins are cherished all the more when, comparatively, they’re rare.
“Away support is more vociferous, louder. I suppose it’s the hardcore fans, the really passionate ones who go away. That reinforces the enjoyment. It’s one of the opportunities to be in a heaving, visceral noise and if you have to put in extra commitment for that, you’re still going to have more fun than when you’re at home the next Saturday.”
Miles, who is a home-and-away Newcastle United fan as well as chief executive of the FSA, agrees. “An anthropologist would have a field day considering the whole ritual,” he says. “Because of the partisan nature of football, the fact you’re on ‘hostile’ territory and in a minority inside the ground, the role of supporting your team develops a bit of a siege mentality. Because you’re away, you also feel a bit of an underdog. Collectively you’ve had to put the effort in to get there. There’s a stronger group mentality, you’re in one corner together, not scattered around. There’s a strong identity in your ‘otherness’ compared to the home fans. It’s almost like home fans squared.
“The FSA has had an umbrella campaign slogan ‘Away Fans Matter’ since 2013 in which we describe away fans as ‘the distilled essence of football supporters’. With the distances travelled, the time invested, away fans have a kudos even among their own fanbase. The ones who are able to go to all away games have kudos among their peer group because of the sacrifices involved. You get a hardcore who go to all the games. They tend to have more of their life built around the game, football has more importance in their life.”
Brown adds another factor: “The routine of going to away matches, there’s something extra special about it. Especially if you win.
“You come back home and you feel almost like you’ve achieved something. ‘We’ve brought three points back’. It’s more difficult to get to an away game, it’s more difficult to win an away game — there’s a sense of achievement.”
As Kevin Miles speculates, there may be no away fans inside grounds this season. If so, could it be 2022 before away fans return? Travelling on packed buses, in cars or public transport — the away fan experience is often the polar opposite of social distancing.
But although football at the top level has continued seemingly successfully as a television sport during the pandemic, Miles thinks television will definitely welcome the away fans’ return as much as the fans themselves.
“In terms of generating atmosphere at grounds, away fans are absolutely crucial,” he says. “A good home atmosphere tends to be sparked by an away presence. And atmosphere is a huge part of the television ‘product’ being sold by broadcasters.
“The Premier League, by a distance, is the biggest seller and revenue generator of any league in the world. The quality of football in other leagues may be as good if not better, if judged, say, by the winners of the Champions League. It is the atmosphere that sets the Premier League apart.
“Some of the Premier League’s own research from a few years ago about audience attitudes underlined that. They surveyed Thai fans in Thailand about the idea of playing, for example, a Liverpool-Man United match in Bangkok. The Premier League were perhaps surprised to find that, overwhelmingly, Thai fans said: ‘We would rather have the chance one day of one of us going to Old Trafford or Anfield to watch that match rather than have it here — because it wouldn’t be a proper Liverpool-Man United match if it was in Bangkok’. They wanted the atmosphere from Anfield or Old Trafford. They really prized that.”
Sadly, what atmosphere there will be at Old Trafford, Bramall Lane and every other ground this FA Cup fourth round weekend will either be piped in via television or generated out on the pitch by the managers and players.
COVID-19 presumably also precludes Plymouth recreating an old FA Cup gesture of theirs mentioned by Foxsmith. Drawn at Arsenal in 1932, Argyle arrived at Highbury, as the Western Morning News had it, cheered on by the “London Devonians and London Cornish”, those on the hundreds of “excursions” from Plymouth and presented their hosts with a giant pasty. It was “huge” and “decorated in Argyle colours!”
The crowd roared, all 65,311 of them.
(Top photo: Steve Bardens/Getty Images)
Bramall Lane should be going green on Saturday afternoon. In different times, in better times, Plymouth Argyle would have 5,000 fans travelling north to south Yorkshire for a fourth-round FA Cup tie. From noon they would be arriving in Sheffield, heading for a pint in the Howard opposite the station or circling Sheffield United’s ground, pocketing a programme, queuing outside the chippy on Shoreham Street.
But there will be none of this, there will be no Pilgrims progressing across England, just as there were no Wolves fans travelling to Chorley in hope of revenge on Friday evening. There won’t be thousands of Wednesday fans exiting Sheffield for Goodison Park, or Blackpool supporters travelling in number for their match at Brighton’s Amex Stadium; Luton, who have not played at Chelsea for 27 years, would have filled an end of Stamford Bridge; and of course Liverpool would have taken so many to Old Trafford all police leave would have been cancelled. For those fans, this weekend would have been one of the biggest of the season.
Every weekend England bears witness to these tribes shuttling across the country, meeting at arranged locations or bumping into each other at service stations or on train platforms. This FA Cup fourth round would have been a bumper version.
But coronavirus has placed all travel on hold, and as Kevin Miles of the Football Supporters’ Association says: “Travelling to support football is a habit and it’s a habit that’s been broken. It remains to be seen how many will get back into the habit. We’d argue that away fans are a bit of an endangered species, something that needs to be preserved and encouraged.”
The away fan is a particular staple of English football and has been virtually since the game turned professional 130 years ago. As Greg Foxsmith of the London branch of Plymouth Argyle supporters puts it of Bramall Lane: “We’d have sold out, just as we’d have sold out Huddersfield in the last round. We hold the away record turnout at the Emirates.”
Plymouth took 9,000 fans to Arsenal in the Cup in 2009, and more recently took over 8,500 to Anfield in 2017. Argyle, like Grimsby Town or Carlisle, are one of those geographically-challenged lower division clubs for whom away wins are nearly as rare as trophies, yet who can be counted on to take large numbers on the road every other Saturday. Or midweek.
Some of the 8,500 Plymouth fans who travelled to Liverpool in 2017 (Photo: Getty)
Relegated to League Two in 2019, Plymouth began the 2019-20 season under new manager Ryan Lowe, whose first game was at Crewe Alexandra. Argyle took 1,700 fans on the 500-mile round trip for a fourth-division match and their new Liverpudlian manager was astonished and beguiled.
“It was one of the reasons I joined the club, because I knew the fanbase was massive,” Lowe says. “When we pulled up at Crewe for the first game, on the right-hand side of us they were banging on the windows, the flags were out. It was like when I used to go to Wembley and watch Liverpool coming in on the coach. That’s what it reminded me of. I thought ‘Wow’. Then when I got out and saw the whole end was full, I was thinking: ‘Yes, this is rocking.’”
Plymouth won 3-0 and Lowe’s opinion is that “100 per cent” it was down to the presence of away fans he describes as “noisy and effective”.
It is therefore no surprise that Lowe is “disappointed” there will be no green support at Bramall Lane, though he understands the pandemic reasoning.
As to when away fans might be seen in their usual place inside grounds, Miles of the FSA says: “Those of us who spent months at the end of 2020 working to establish protocols to enable fans to get back into grounds had to accept away fans were probably the last group to return. With the return even of home fans paused, sadly it seems to be the case that we’ll not get away fans back in grounds this season.”
Sheffield United know all about the FA Cup and away fans. There were more than 110,000 people at the 1901 FA Cup final and while there is no definitive figure as to how many of them wore Sheffield red, contemporary reports suggest the tally was at least 30,000.
The 1890s in England and Scotland was professional football’s first boom time. Rising attendances at the Cup final charted the surge in football’s popularity — from 42,000 in 1895 to 74,000 in 1899 and then, for Tottenham Hotspur versus Sheffield United in 1901, the first crowd of over 100,000. These finals were held at the old Crystal Palace stadium in south London with Blades-Spurs having the extra appeal of a first north-south clash of the professional era.
Under a headline of “The Exodus from Sheffield”, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph reported two days before the game: “On all three railway systems big business is being done.” It said between 150 and 200 saloon carriages had already been booked and they expected many more. It concluded the number of travelling Sheffield United followers “should not be far off that freely talked of in London — well over 20,000.”
The article referred to the 1899 final, which Sheffield United had won 4-1 against Derby County, and stated that fervour was “far in advance of that known two years ago.” A new sporting phenomenon was upon us: football’s away fans.
“Football took off in the 1890s, there was just this huge appetite to attend games,” says Paul Brown, author of Savage Enthusiasm, a history of football supporters. “And the only way to see football then was to watch it in person. You had to go.
“The alternative was that you waited outside a newspaper office for a telegram or carrier pigeon to arrive with the score. There was no other way of knowing and there are reports of people outside newspaper offices watching these pigeons fly in. Imagine the cheering, the anticipation as a pigeon came into sight.”
There was much sociological analysis of this new breed of “fan”, a term first used in England in 1913. The late 19th century Factory Acts passed in parliament had brought extra free time for workers on Saturday afternoons and football was affordable. The fact football is a brilliant sport was of course fundamental, but Brown cites newspaper commentary about Aston Villa fans boarding trains to go to Sunderland for a match and the “romance” of the journey. They were “spectators” then, who became “followers”. “Fanatics” or “fans” came later, a term imported from American baseball coverage.
Before the 1901 Cup final the Sheffield Independent considered other explanations for the boom in away fans — “There is, in the first place, local patriotism.” An example of it could be seen in the name of Brighton & Hove Albion — a combination of geographic place and poetic Englishness — though Brown says “local patriotism existed long before football.
“If you take Blackburn and Burnley, those towns were rivals before football. They were rivals as industrial mill towns, but now they had a new means to channel their rivalry. Blackburn Rovers or Blackburn Olympic were wanting their team to beat Burnley to show their dominance as a town. Football was a vessel for their local patriotism and, for away fans, you’d want to go onto their turf to show that.
“It wasn’t just a negative thing, about derision, it was about pride in your own town. It was benign. There was a sense of belonging, camaraderie — this need to be there, to be part of it. There was the supporting aspect: they knew their team was away and they wanted to help it win and their presence gave them a better chance.”
Clearly the hooliganism of the late 1960s through to 1980s distorted the general impression of the away fan and, when asked for the changes he noted from the 1901 fan to the 2021 version, Brown replies: “You know what? I noticed more similarities than changes.”
Meetings between Liverpool and United just aren’t the same without two sets of fans (Photo: Getty)
Foxsmith’s experience of following Plymouth supports Brown’s statement. His first away game was Argyle’s 3-0 defeat at Wigan Athletic in 1986. The journey was taken on a supporters’ bus, as was some cider by the young teenager and his mates, and he has been going ever since, even though he and thousands of others have left Plymouth.
“Our away support is divided into two distinct camps,” Foxsmith explains, “firstly the Plymouth-based fans who have enormous logistical difficulties as the most-travelled away support in terms of mileage, and the second group, the Plymouth diaspora.”
Regional unemployment and the Londonization of the economy from 1980 meant tens of thousands of local fans brought their local patriotism to the capital. As Foxsmith says: “From the recession of the 1980s onwards, Plymouth, like a lot of industrial towns, haemorrhaged jobs when our biggest employer, the dockyard, lost about 90 per cent of its workforce.
“Many people from Plymouth moved, and you’ll find Plymouth fans all around the country. For some of us, away games are often easier to attend than home games and for us, following Argyle away becomes an important link to our roots. We miss not only Plymouth Argyle, but Plymouth, family, our friends. So travelling away is how you can bond with fellow Plymouth expats. If that makes sense.”
Plymouth’s geography means each away day is an endurance test — Bramall Lane is a 600-mile round trip but to Foxsmith and the other long-distance travellers “the journey becomes as much a part of the day as the match.
“It’s about the camaraderie, the day out. Obviously, the 90 minutes of football is small proportionately to the travel time. I think fans look on the away trip experience in total, rather than just focusing on the 90 minutes. It’s planning, how you travel, who you travel with. And your away wins are cherished all the more when, comparatively, they’re rare.
“Away support is more vociferous, louder. I suppose it’s the hardcore fans, the really passionate ones who go away. That reinforces the enjoyment. It’s one of the opportunities to be in a heaving, visceral noise and if you have to put in extra commitment for that, you’re still going to have more fun than when you’re at home the next Saturday.”
Miles, who is a home-and-away Newcastle United fan as well as chief executive of the FSA, agrees. “An anthropologist would have a field day considering the whole ritual,” he says. “Because of the partisan nature of football, the fact you’re on ‘hostile’ territory and in a minority inside the ground, the role of supporting your team develops a bit of a siege mentality. Because you’re away, you also feel a bit of an underdog. Collectively you’ve had to put the effort in to get there. There’s a stronger group mentality, you’re in one corner together, not scattered around. There’s a strong identity in your ‘otherness’ compared to the home fans. It’s almost like home fans squared.
“The FSA has had an umbrella campaign slogan ‘Away Fans Matter’ since 2013 in which we describe away fans as ‘the distilled essence of football supporters’. With the distances travelled, the time invested, away fans have a kudos even among their own fanbase. The ones who are able to go to all away games have kudos among their peer group because of the sacrifices involved. You get a hardcore who go to all the games. They tend to have more of their life built around the game, football has more importance in their life.”
Brown adds another factor: “The routine of going to away matches, there’s something extra special about it. Especially if you win.
“You come back home and you feel almost like you’ve achieved something. ‘We’ve brought three points back’. It’s more difficult to get to an away game, it’s more difficult to win an away game — there’s a sense of achievement.”
As Kevin Miles speculates, there may be no away fans inside grounds this season. If so, could it be 2022 before away fans return? Travelling on packed buses, in cars or public transport — the away fan experience is often the polar opposite of social distancing.
But although football at the top level has continued seemingly successfully as a television sport during the pandemic, Miles thinks television will definitely welcome the away fans’ return as much as the fans themselves.
“In terms of generating atmosphere at grounds, away fans are absolutely crucial,” he says. “A good home atmosphere tends to be sparked by an away presence. And atmosphere is a huge part of the television ‘product’ being sold by broadcasters.
“The Premier League, by a distance, is the biggest seller and revenue generator of any league in the world. The quality of football in other leagues may be as good if not better, if judged, say, by the winners of the Champions League. It is the atmosphere that sets the Premier League apart.
“Some of the Premier League’s own research from a few years ago about audience attitudes underlined that. They surveyed Thai fans in Thailand about the idea of playing, for example, a Liverpool-Man United match in Bangkok. The Premier League were perhaps surprised to find that, overwhelmingly, Thai fans said: ‘We would rather have the chance one day of one of us going to Old Trafford or Anfield to watch that match rather than have it here — because it wouldn’t be a proper Liverpool-Man United match if it was in Bangkok’. They wanted the atmosphere from Anfield or Old Trafford. They really prized that.”
Sadly, what atmosphere there will be at Old Trafford, Bramall Lane and every other ground this FA Cup fourth round weekend will either be piped in via television or generated out on the pitch by the managers and players.
COVID-19 presumably also precludes Plymouth recreating an old FA Cup gesture of theirs mentioned by Foxsmith. Drawn at Arsenal in 1932, Argyle arrived at Highbury, as the Western Morning News had it, cheered on by the “London Devonians and London Cornish”, those on the hundreds of “excursions” from Plymouth and presented their hosts with a giant pasty. It was “huge” and “decorated in Argyle colours!”
The crowd roared, all 65,311 of them.
(Top photo: Steve Bardens/Getty Images)