On planning a footballing trip
A planner in planning heaven: the world of football ticketing and train travel
First of all, let me get this out of the way up front.
As I've done before, I'm going to be referring to the sport that uses 11 players on each side, a net at each end, and a single, round ball as football. This is not a political statement or an endorsement for "football" over "soccer" but simply a recognition that this tour is taking place in a country that calls it "football" and it's easier to say "footballer" than "soccer player" when I’m talking about the people on the field.
So don't read into it, I shall not be engaging in the “football or soccer” fight, I have no opinion beyond being tired of the conversation.
Moving along.
If you are based in the US and used to how the US does tickets for sporting events, you might assume this was easy to plan. In the US, teams release a schedule and most, if not all, of the tickets for the regular season before the beginning of the season. You can simply look at a calendar and choose the game(s) you want to go to. The post-season part may be a little more complicated, especially in sports where there are two-city series played, but generally, the teams seem incentivized to make it as uncomplicated as possible.
Also, to buy a ticket, all you need is the money to do so. The trickiest part used to be Ticketmaster, et al. adding mystery fees to the tickets so you didn't know the final price until you got to the end of the process. Now even that is gone, given the law requiring "all in" price transparency. I don’t know if that’s a federal regulation, or just Massachusetts, but I am a fan.
In English football, it's a little different. There are a few reasons for that.
To begin, the schedules that are released at the beginning of the football season—which runs from August to May, roughly—are more like suggestions. Penciled-in plans, if you will. It really only tells you which "Round" of the competition two given teams will be meeting and which team will host. These rounds will roughly track to a given week in the Gregorian calendar, but the match could end up scheduled on Saturday or Sunday...or Monday. Or maybe Friday or Wednesday. Or it could end up scheduled in an entirely different week. It's pretty unlikely it will be on a Tuesday or Thursday, as those are normally when the European competitions take place, but it could happen.
Speaking of European competitions. The regular league play is only part of what’s happening. In fact, a team could be involved in up to four different competitions running at once.
Let my pause here for a quick acronym breakdown all at once. It doesn’t really matter, but for those keeping track at home:
EPL: English Premier League, the men’s top flight league
WSL: Women's Super League, the women’s top flight league
UEFA: Union of European Football Associations, the FIFA confederation governing Europe
UCL: UEFA Champions League, top UEFA men’s league
UEL: UEFA Europa League, second UEFA men’s league
UECL: UEFA Conference League, third UEFA men’s league
UWCL: UEFA Women's Champions League, UEFA women’s league
EFL: English Football League
FA: (English) Football Association, the governing body of association football in England and the Crown Dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man (inexplicably, while the FA does not govern Welsh or Scottish national teams, Welsh club teams are included in the FA Cup. Don’t ask questions, I have no answers.)
Back to business.
On the men's and women's side, there's the league competition, which runs in league segments up and down the "football pyramid." If you want a primer on the football pyramid, the first episode of Welcome to Wrexham will cover this quite well. It would be a whole separate newsletter to explain here. The league competition is generally considered the "main" competition, at least in England, where the leagues are relatively competitive.
Outside of that, there are the men’s and women’s FA cup, which all clubs in England can compete in, and the men’s and women’s League Cup, which is only open to the top four men’s leagues, up to the EPL at the top of the men's pyramid, and top two women’s leagues, up to the WSL at the top of the women's pyramid.
Then, for the elite top teams from the top league of the previous season, there is what is referred to as “European football.” This refers to three different competitions of the top clubs from all the European leagues that are UEFA members: UCL, UEL, and UECL, in order of significance on the men’s side. The women’s side has the UWCL and something called the UEFA Women's Europa Cup, which I learned about today but definitely exists.
Are you keeping track? Confused yet? Don't worry, it took me years to get this all sorted in my mind but I can barely describe it all, let alone succinctly and accurately. So if you're confused, that's probably on me.
Anyway, because of all these concurrent competitions, matches are frequently moved around, or maybe not even scheduled more than a few weeks in advance.
Beyond the schedule itself, there’s the process of buying the tickets. See, clubs in the UK, and most of Europe, have ticketing schemes where tickets are released in certain membership areas for away and home members, for chichi corporate types, and for areas serving families, and people with different accessibility needs.
This is generally great, in my opinion. It avoids that thing where you end up sitting amongst fans of the team you oppose, or where you bring your baby niece and the drunk guy a row behind you spills his beer all over you two, theoretically speaking.
But if you are visiting from another country and navigating numerous different ticketing portals, it gets weird fast!
You can buy tickets without engaging in the membership schemes, called “Hospitality tickets” but they are normally much more expensive and I wasn’t totally sure, but it really looked like they might involve socializing with strangers, which, no, thank you.
All of this to say I am now a proud member of several football clubs in England, including two that I actually despise! (More on that in a future dispatch)
So, an example using Chelsea women's side: when I started this process, Chelsea had zero matches scheduled during my visit. Now they have three. Two European competition matches in the UWCL and one WSL match rescheduled from earlier this season that was postponed due to their participation in the FA Cup. I think. Honestly, no clue, but it’s a fair guess. To buy these tickets, I also had to become a Chelsea FC member. In this case, I didn't have to pay a fee for membership, but in a few cases I did, ranging from £20-£40.
Even though I knew all this, I was a little worried when I booked this trip in February and found very few matches were actually scheduled during my visit. I chose the dates because it was a time when I could catch three matches of the team I’ve been following the longest, who are really performing poorly and therefore their schedule is pretty well established in advance.
Early on in the planning process, I boldly bought tickets for the only match that was available on sale, which was Manchester City Women’s. For reasons that probably have a lot to do with their international fan base and star-studded lineup, these matches go on sale a bit prematurely, and with no barrier for entry. All I had to do was cough up £14, and voilà, a ticket in my inbox.
But then, Man City continued to do quite well in the UWCL and it became clear that if they won a particular match against Chelsea in late March, my match ticket would be moot, as the match would have to be rescheduled. I anxiously watched that match, rooting vociferously for Chelsea, and thankfully Chelsea pulled off the win. This meant that not only would I be able to catch the Manchester match, but also would be able to fit in a Chelsea UWCL match during my visit. As soon as tickets were up, I bought one, but I still am not totally sure what day that match will be. Saturday or Sunday? Hopefully?
Over the last week or so, the match schedules have been finalized-ish and the tickets have started to become available, and my own schedule has become much more concrete. I have booked most of my tickets, and blocked off time for matches I know are happening, where tickets are not yet available. I could probably write a whole dispatch on that process alone. It was a lot.
Which leaves the other half of the trip logistics: Trains.
I had hoped to take a wider variety of trains, and maybe I’ll still be able to fit some in, but mostly, I’m just going to be going north and south on one route between London to Manchester, through Stoke-on-Trent. But. That route is currently interrupted with a bus shuttle connection at one point. So there will be lots of transfers too. There’s still a lot to be determined here, but hopefully I haven’t misunderstood the function of an “open return” or else some things will get…interesting.
Then there’s the question of scheduling these train trips around the still somewhat amorphous match schedule. For example, last week, a match I had a ticket for was shown to be in the evening in London, followed by one the next day around the noon hour in Manchester, so I booked a non-refundable ticket for first thing in the morning, but turns out they’re both afternoon matches, and I could have booked an easier train to Manchester in the afternoon and gotten a cheaper hotel outside of London, but here we are.
So far, I’ve booked only the train rides that are going to be tricky—due to tight times between matches, or knowing that I will be to tired to figure it out in the moment. I’ve left the rest open for two reasons: to give me a chance to get weird and creative with the routes, maybe see something new, and to leave open the possibility that I’ve completely misunderstood things and the trains I have already booked will be total disasters. It will be fun to find out!
More to come.