The 10 worst football away days in England
What are the worst away days in English football? It’s a debate that we see pop up frequently across various platforms – and one we had quite recently on our WeAreBrighton.com social media channels.
That was inspired by the Top 10 Worst Places to Live in England survey. Looking through the list, we quickly realised that we’d seen Brighton in eight out of the 10 towns – and the only reason we hadn’t ticked the other two off was because they don’t have Football League clubs.
Supporting a team who have played in all four divisions over the course of the last 20 years certainly helps formulate an opinion on what’s good and what isn’t quite so good. So much so that we decided to seek nominations from Albion supporters on the worst away days they’d experienced.
We’re going to say right now that we don’t agree with all the entries on this list. How in the world has Yeovil with its station in a different county not made it? Where is Hull? Last time we went to Doncaster an 80-year-old woman attacked one of the party with a handbag.
We’ve been locked in a Burger King in Blackpool while a man covered in blood stumbles around outside trying to fight anyone he comes across. Grimsby is terrible, even more so when you get relegated there. And yet none of those places make the top 10.
Here’s who does…
10) Coventry
In 10th place on our WeAreBrighton.com list of worst football away days is Coventry. A harsh entry perhaps as prior to World War II, Coventry had one of the best medieval hearts of anywhere in Britain. The Luftwaffe put paid to that when they firebombed the city and as a result, the majority of Coventry had to be rebuilt.
Dresden suffered a similar fate at the hands of the RAF, but it was largely reconstructed largely to its original plans. Coventry meanwhile was turned into an ugly, concrete jungle. Not that anybody was taking the history of Coventry into consideration when putting it forward for inclusion:
“Absolute SHIT hole is Coventry!”
“You really don’t want to be walking around in Coventry after dark.”
Not that walking around Coventry at any time of day is a problem which currently preoccupies football supporters. The Sky Blues are on their second exile from the Ricoh Arena of the past seven years, currently playing home games at Birmingham City’s St Andrews Stadium.
A football club forced from their home ground because of owners who want to eke every last penny for their own personal gain. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Doesn’t stop Coventry being dismal, though.
9) Wolverhampton
Want to know how bad Wolverhampton is? Brighton have a ridiculously good record against Wolves and yet not even consistently getting results at Molineux can save it from ninth place in the worst football away days in England list.
The barometer of shitness was set in the 2012-13 season. Before the game, every single pub in the two centre was home fans only. The police rounded up as many Brighton supporters as possible and bundled anyone they could into the Walkabout.
We escaped the herding and ended up having to drink cocktails in a nightclub which was inexplicably open at 1pm on a Saturday afternoon. There was a bit of handbags outside the ground afterwards, someone was sick in a bush while all this was going on and we probably all caught tuberculosis, mumps and every single other 19th century disease because the air felt like sucking on a car exhaust due to the town centre being surrounded by a massive ring road.
There is just one saving grace about Wolverhampton – Birmingham is only 20 minutes away by train.
8) Middlesbrough
We’re not going to lie – every time we end up in the same division as Middlesbrough, it’s one of the first games we look out for here at WeAreBrighton.com Towers.
Anyone who’s had a takeaway in Middlesbrough knows why – the parmo. A trip to the Riverside means a chance to gorge on the local delicacy consisting of a massive piece of pork covered in breadcrumbs and lathered with cheese and bechamel sauce.
And that’s about all Middlesbrough has got going for it. That isn’t to say the town isn’t improving. When we first went there as a Championship club for a 1-0 defeat under Gus Poyet in December 2011, Wetherspoons was the best pub in town – even though it had managed the impossible of running out of turkey lunches two weeks before Christmas.
Over the intervening 10 years, better pubs have begun popping up as part of the craft beer revolution. None of that is enough to prevent Middlesbrough securing eighth place in our list of worst football away days, however. As one of the politer nominations read:
“Middlesbrough. A deprived city after years of minimal investment and in a very sorry state.”
Hopefully, by the time we next have to go back to Teeside for a parmo (and football), the improvements will have continued.
7) Rotherham
This one is a harsh entry on the worst football away days list for our money – especially since the Millers moved to the New York New York Stadium. We’ve been to Rotherham three times since the new ground opened and enjoyed every trip, especially the two Tuesday games which involved nights out in Sheffield afterwards.
Rotherham itself has some decent pubs, two Wetherspoons for those who like a £1.99 Magners and you can even get into the Millers’ abandoned former home of Millmoor for a walk around – if strolling about disused football grounds is something that interests you, as it did us.
Not that many of you agree with our assessment of Rotherham:
“Rotherham wins this by a mile. Honestly felt like you’d gone back 40 years walking around that place”
“Walked out the car at Rotherham away to get called batty boys, a new record for quickest homophobic mention at an away ground. Town was a massive shit hole too.”
Would it help if we reminded everyone that the Chuckle Brothers came from Rotherham?
6) Oldham
While Manchester itself is one of our favourite cities for an away day, the towns surrounding it could almost warrant a worst football away days list of their own. That point is hammered home by the fact that the next three places on our list are all within 35 miles of each other – starting with Oldham.
Oldham ticks all the normal boxes for a crap away day with the added bonus of Boundary Park being the coldest football ground in the world. You could draw the North Pole away in the Champions League and it would be warmer.
It’s also the windiest ground going. For the majority of our most recent League One visits, that wasn’t helped by the fact that there were only three stands present. As a result, a hurricane force gale would blow in from one unbuilt side every time.
Only once have we gone to Boundary Park in the sunshine. That was the opening day of the 2003-04 season when Leon Knight marked his Albion debut with two goals in a 3-1 win. Even then, most people had set off with scarves, jumpers and woolly hats packed, such was Oldham’s reputation for being colder than Katie Hopkins’ heart.
The worst Brighton day out experienced at Oldham? That was in December 1990. Rob on Twitter tells us:
“Went to Oldham in ’90. Saw us get hammered 6-1 and get called a “homo” by a 10 year old Oldham fan. I swore I’d never go back there and thankfully we’ve not needed to very often since!”
And practically every time we have needed to, it’s been freezing.
5) Burnley
There wasn’t much separating Burnley and Oldham in the list of worst football away days. Whisper it quietly, but Burnley does actually have some decent pubs. It was also the first place we ever encountered a doner kebab pizza, which gives it plenty of credit in the bank.
Why then is it a worse place to visit than Oldham? Probably because of the people. Most visits there come with a full serving of homophobia and there is sometimes even a little bit of a racism thrown in for good measure.
The locals seemed to have a particular disliking of Gaetan Bong for having the nerve to report that he believed he’d been racially abused by Jay Rodriguez. Seemingly, Clarets fans are too thick to understand the difference between “not proven” and “not guilty”.
As a couple of Brighton fans put it:
“Burnley. Quite simply awful.”
“It’s like going back to the 1970’s, visiting Burnley.”
1870’s, more like.
4) Blackburn
Blackburn’s place on the list of worst football away days can be best summed up by our visit to Ewood Park in March 2015. Firstly, we stumbled across a pub before the game in which all the locals were sat around watching Jeremy Kyle on the big screen. This despite the fact that the live lunchtime football was well underway.
To try and find somewhere showing said lunchtime game, we went to another pub. In this one, a man had decided that he didn’t need to get changed to come for his 1pm pint and had simply popped out in dressing gown and slippers.
Then, after Matt Kilgallon had scored the own goal which gave Brighton a 1-0 win – which proved to be our final victory of the 2014-15 season – we had some charming 14-year-olds wearing second-hand Adidas tracksuits and fake Burberry caps launch a fantastic tirade about gays, faggots, bum boys and AIDS at us.
Blackburn fans didn’t just specialise in homophobia. One Albion fan on Twitter nominated the town by saying:
“Travelled to a match away at Blackburn on a Seagull Special which had bricks thrown at windows and needed police protection from the station to the ground and back.”
Lovely.
3) Stoke
The biggest problem that Stoke has got – other than the fact it is Stoke – is that it has two football teams. Until the last 15 years or so, they’ve always been within a division of each other too.
You might have thought “Think God we’ve been relegated, we don’t have to go to Stoke again next year”, only to realise that you’ve actually got a trip to Port Vale to look forward to. It’s little wonder it finishes third in our list of worst football away days.
Since our FA Cup Fifth Round visit to the Britannia Stadium as it was then known in 2011, we’ve stumbled across the trick of drinking in Newcastle-under-Lyme before games. That avoids the police escort to a pub of their choosing which often greets Brighton fans in Stoke – which is obviously required because Brighton are a fan base well known for our hooligan element and the past beef we’ve had with Stoke.
Speaking of beef – or in this case, lamb – Stoke also happens to be the place where our favourite ever away days story comes from. It’s one of those tales passed down through the generations, that takes on almost mythical status with each passing telling.
We’ve heard it from about five different sources down the years, so needless to say when John Palfrey popped up with it again on Twitter we were delighted. It’s the famous yarn of Stoke firm chased off with leg of lamb. Take it away, John:
“Stoke is the worst away day, for the occasion we won the meat raffle in a local pub at lunchtime. As a consequence we returned to the pub after the final whistle to collect a frozen leg of lamb. As we left with a rather large baseball bat sized lump of meat we were greeted with a hail of bricks from the other side of the road. They ran out of ammo quickly, we hadn’t.”
Cue the scene of several Stoke fans getting cracked around the head with a leg of lamb. You don’t see that in Football Factory.
2) Gillingham
Any non-Brighton fans reading this might be wondering why Gillingham finishes as high as second in the worst football away days list. There are far worse places to travel across English football than Gillingham away.
And while that might well be true, nobody else has had to undertake a soul destroying, 150 mile round trip to play ‘home’ games at the Priestfield Stadium every other week for two years. Two years which involved watching the likes of Damien Hilton and Michael Mahoney-Johnson in a Brighton shirt, no less.
That’s bound to have a bearing on judgements. As is the proliferation of fridges in front gardens, dog crap on the streets and the lack of any decent pubs – with the exception of The Cricketers, which always gave a warm welcome to Brighton fans during our exile there.
But not even a friendly pub could make up for the trauma of playing home games in Gillingham. As one Albion fan put it on Twitter:
“Gillingham! I never, ever want to go back there. I think they said if Kent is the garden of Eden then Gillingham was it’s cesspit.”
1) Luton
At number one on the list of worst football away days – and rightly so in our book – is Luton. So bad that it’s hard to know where to start.
There was of course the infamous Paint Pot Southern Final game at Kenilworth Road when Micky Adams’ side lost on penalties. Luton were through to a Wembley final but rather than celebrate that, their fans decided to invade the pitch and start pelting the away end with coins.
A season earlier and Ian Westlake and Glenn Murray had scored in a 2-1 April win which relegated Luton to League Two. A friendly police officer told us not to go into a pub on the way back to the station as “You’ll have your heads kicked in and we won’t help.”
We of course went in the pub anyway but ended up leaving after one pint, not through fear of violence but because drinking in St Albans seemed a better option.
Here are some of the best comments pertaining to Kenilworth Road:
“Luton – it’s even worse than its reputation.”
“Luton is an absolute shit hole and that’s being kind.”
I swear to god, Luton is the most disgusting place I’ve ever been to…”
“The gents are in someone’s back garden, and we got chased back to the station after a shite 0-0 draw by 50 Burberry clad dickheads. All in all a great day out.”
It will be interesting to see whether the Luton experience changes once they move to their new 23,000 capacity town centre stadium. Part of the reason so many people dislike Luton is because of Kenilworth Road, where you enter the away section through someone’s front door. And if you get stuck in the first 10 rows of seats, you’re actually below pitch level.
Cardiff City and Swansea City both used to be away days that were more punishable than five nights in a Turkish prison when Ninian Park and the Vetch were around. Since replacing respective grounds where you’d get pelted with Fanta bottles full of piss and the player’s entrance was opposite a prison, they’ve become two of our favourite away days.
What Cardiff and Swansea had going for them though is that they’ve always been decent places. Luton isn’t. New stadium there might be winging its way to Bedfordshire, but it will still be the same shit town full of the same shit people. You can’t polish a turd, as a great philosopher once said.
