Illustration by Matt Littler
The winning entry in our 2024 writers’ competition tells how a failed romance sparked a groundhopping race. Entries are now open for the 2025 competition
By Jen Steadman
April 18, 2025
It started with a bad date. We’d connected over a shared love of football. He knew of my beloved sixth-tier team, Tonbridge Angels. He too had been to Leiston and Maidenhead – places so often met with a shrug. He replied erratically but still I smiled when, after a week of silence, he messaged to tease me about our rivalry with Maidstone.
In person, the teasing was less playful. Having travelled down from London, he casually insulted my family, my hometown and my pets. I retreated to football chat, surely safer territory, and told him I wanted to do “the 92”: the ambitious task of watching a match at all 92 current League grounds.
The Londoner asked how many I’d been to and laughed, gently mocking, at my response. “Why would you bother when you’ve only been to nine?” Most people take years – decades, even – to complete the 92. Clubs soar from and sink into non-League, stadiums come and go; decaying shells from a pre-Taylor Report era replaced by safe but soulless new builds on industrial estate badlands. And Kent is hardly an ideal starting point. But everything was ammunition to him. Of all the evening’s small humiliations, this was the one I couldn’t shake.
The 2021-22 season ended in a flurry of spreadsheets, maps and wince-inducing train prices. Each person doing the 92 has their own set of rules. Mine were those of the official Ninety-Two Club – competitive games only, abandonments don’t count – and one more. Tonbridge home games came first. Whatever bilge I’d seen at Longmead over the years, no League game could bring me greater joy than the best days on the terraces with my dad and brother.
Planning complications went far beyond this self-inflicted restriction. Monitoring capricious TV schedules, cup fixtures and endless train strikes became a second job. Still, logistical stresses only heightened the buzz of each new ground. Being pelted with flares by Anderlecht ultras and discovering a full nappy on the floor of my coach to Liverpool couldn’t dampen the triumph of visiting six new grounds in seven days.
Historic stadiums really scratched the itch. Kenilworth Road’s tatty glory was only elevated by the scoreboard’s enthusiastic dot matrix messages, which read like those of an excitable mum on Facebook. My favourite, though, was Fratton Park. Even before I arrived, the omens were good; a driver serenaded fans on the stadium approach with a perfect car horn rendition of Darude’s Sandstorm. But at the end of a tough week, it was the otherworldly chorus of 18,000 fans singing around the ground that brought me to a tearful kind of nirvana.
As the season’s end approached, things were going swimmingly; I’d just passed the halfway mark without losing a single game to postponement-prone winter. The bad date with the Londoner had never seemed further away. Then a freak half-time downpour led to Rotherham v Cardiff in March being abandoned on 48 minutes, after a first half played on a bone-dry pitch in the sun. The wastefulness of the trip made me feel sick, a feeling only compounded by the home fans’ nihilistic jubilation and the prospect of three hours on a rock-hard Flixbus seat.
Consistently getting to multiple grounds in a week required creativity. Often, it involved women’s football, with a surprising number of teams playing at League grounds.Though I loved the fans’ burgeoning passion, I worried that my way of doing the 92 wasn’t authentic enough. Did a trip to Villa Park count if only a sixth of the seats were filled? Imposter syndrome had long dictated my experience of football, and here it was again.
I fell in love with Tonbridge because it was the first place I’d felt truly welcome. As soon as I stood behind the goal I was one of them, and this sense of community made each teenage downturn a little easier. Emboldened, I sought that kinship from football fans beyond Longmead. But the search for commonality so often ended in suspicion or scrutiny. Stony silences. Patronising comments. I didn’t think girls liked football.
So I talked less and listened more. I didn’t watch the game in the same way the guys in the office did, through player ratings and “all time” rankings. I worried. Perhaps it didn’t matter that I’d watched non-League football in all weathers – I was a fraud for not knowing what Gegenpressing was.
Without these doubts, maybe I’d have laughed off the Londoner’s snark. But I’d battled my whole life to be taken seriously in football. Years of gatekeeping now led me to the shuttered streets of Grimsby, to Middlesbrough’s life-changing parm in a bun, an inch away from a bar fight in Walsall. The Londoner was the latest man to doubt me, but I wanted him to be the last.
As for whether women’s matches counted towards my tally, I got over myself. A well-liked ground like Brisbane Road had been deathly quiet for my visit, and that counted. So why not St Andrew’s for Birmingham Women v Southampton Women (attendance: 686)?
On the opening day of 2023-24 I embarked on an ambitious trip to Carlisle. Twelve hours’ travel for a 90-minute match. My fellow Angels fans, on the other hand, had their 50-mile away day to Worthing ruined by train strikes. I continued to ride my luck. Blackpool v Forest Green postponed last minute? I veered eastwards to Hull. My final train to Barrow cancelled after a seven-hour journey? The train was miraculously uncancelled, and Halloween at Holker Street proved to be a season highlight.
A yellow weather warning from the Met Office took years off my life on the day of the Rotherham redo. Under darkening skies, the journey up the M1 felt like a funeral procession. But the pitch was only troubled by a light smattering of rain.
Towards the end, though, constant travel issues took their toll. Journeys to Swansea and Middlesbrough became frantic races against the clock due to wild train diversions. When the same happened en route to the penultimate ground in Wrexham, I couldn’t take it any more. My spectacular sobbing meltdown at Crewe did not deter a woman from asking me where Platform 11 was. If the finish line were further away, I’d have given up there and then. But I was so close.
Two years to the day after the bad date, I arrived at my 92nd ground – Morecambe’s Globe Arena – with four friends in tow. One flew in from Munich. Two didn’t like football. But they all wanted to be there. My best friend Sara, who had never been to a match, drove us 300 miles each way – some of it with a charcuterie board on my lap, in the style of a Fulham away day – to bypass the latest train strike.
In-form Doncaster battered the Shrimps. Grim-faced home fans scowled at our hand-drawn “It’s Morecambing home” sign and a pub local told Leah, who works in tech, that women know nothing about phones. But the final whistle made everything worth it. I had completed the 92, travelling 24,000 miles off the back of one snarky comment.
Or had I? My experience had been defined by the speed of progress, but I’d always planned to do the 92. I remembered the Londoner’s question, and realised I’d never really answered it. Why would you bother?
I love football. The breadth of human emotion it draws out: frantic limbs pulsing with joy, crushing despair wrought by the kick of a ball. The way it brings together communities and generations – patching over impossible divides, encouraging pantomime villainy with neighbouring towns. Hazy away days, magical cup runs. Lewd chants, flaking paint on the turnstiles, thin napkins soaked with burger grease. When I’ve had no community or sense of hope, I’ve found it in football. I wanted to see what that looked like, 92 times over.
Entries are now open for the 2025 WSC writers’ competition
This article first appeared in WSC 445, September 2024. Subscribers get free access to the complete WSC digital archive
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