Blogs Dashboard

The English football season is almost upon us again and while the players chase the silverware and the goals there is one record that ordinary fans can try to break.

I am the proud holder of this record, which I set in the 1994-95 season. In The Guinness Book of Records it is called ‘most peripatetic supporter’.

For the uninitiated ‘peripatetic’ means ‘travelling about’, which I certainly did a lot of when I watched a league match at 93 football grounds in record time.

My mark stands at 237 days and broke the record set in 1992 by Edward Wood of Derby by six days. Before that Michael Jones and Bob Wilson (not the former Arsenal goalkeeper!) held the record of 264 days, which they achieved in 1969.

Postponements due to bad weather and the rescheduling of fixtures brought about by the arrival of live football on Sky Sports helped my quest. Nevertheless, watching all those matches takes some doing in terms of planning. I travelled almost 20,000 miles starting at Carlisle in September and finishing at Everton in May.

The 93rd ground, by the way, belongs to Berwick Rangers who play in the Scottish league but whose ground is just over the border in England and so, according to Guinness, must be visited to break the record for league grounds in England and Wales.

As well as a train timetable, plenty of money, a dogged determination and endless patience, you must get each visit verified by a club official to qualify for the record.

I wrote a book about my adventures that season called Football Fanatic which was book of the week in The Independent and made it No. 4 on the sports books bestseller list.

It now ranks 1,204,306 on Amazon — still in the top 2 million some 12 years after it was written!

The book recounts the high points of my trip — such as meeting Juergen Klinsmann — plus the low points, like a cold, rainy night in Rotherham when after 65 matches I almost could not bear to suffer another dreadful game.

I made it, and my journey remains a record, but come on — somebody out there must want to break it…

Ken Ferris is a chief sub-editor on the Reuters sports desk in London