Back at the end of April, Mrs Football Nerd and I had gone to watch already-relegated Leyton Orient at home to Colchester United in their last home Football League game (https://football-nerd.org/2017/05/05/the-terrible-state-of-leyton-orient-is-this-the-end-for-a-true-community-club/). That game will always be remembered for the protests about then owner Francesco Becchetti whose inept, if not frankly malicious, stewardship of the club […]
In what should probably more accurately be referred to as ‘a summer with slightly less football than usual’, immediately after our return from a weekend in Stavanger in which we had taken in two games in a weekend; Mrs Football Nerd and I were off to the inaugural Star Sixes tournament over at the ‘Arena […]
This adventure actually started back in March 2015 in Valencia when Mrs Football Nerd and I first encountered three kindred Norwegian football obsessives in an Irish Bar (where else?) watching the North London Derby. Bonded by the common language, humour and nostalgia brought out by our passion for the game; Hans, Nils and Evan became […]
Ever since the recommencement of the Eredivisie season after the winter break, there was a feeling that, at long last, my boyhood club Feyenoord was on a path to fulfilling its destiny and securing their first league title since 1999. As the weeks passed and the momentum grew, that feeling only got stronger. The self-same […]
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this, in May 2014 as the (at the time) soon-to-be-Mrs Football Nerd and I walked out of Wembley reflecting on how Leyton Orient had been just two missed penalty kicks away from a place in the second tier of English football, we were full of hope and optimism […]
With things getting serious in the Eredvisie and belief growing that this might finally be the year that my boyhood team Feyenoord would finally re-establish themselves with a credible title challenge; my wife and I decided back in February that there was only one place that we were going to spend our Easter, at the […]
For a few years now there has been a bit of a buzz around South London non-league side Dulwich Hamlet FC; whose (re)positioning of themselves as London’s ‘most hipster club’ has seen a significant swell in crowds with attendances regularly numbering in the thousands. Suburban London’s answer to Germany’s revered left-wing rebel club St Pauli; […]
This time four years ago, on a return journey from Madrid (having of course been to the Estadio Santiago Bernabeu to watch Real Madrid), in a conversation with a TV cameraman working with BBC travel journalist Simon Calder, Mrs Football Nerd for the first time described us as football tourists. Since that day we have […]
A Tranmere Rovers fan, a Crystal Palace fan, a Manchester City fan and an Arsenal fan are on a train to Eastleigh; this isn’t the introduction to a new modern variation of the old jokes based on national stereotype, but a travelling party to a match in the fifth tier of the English football pyramid. […]
Ever since the days of Venables, Archibald, Schuster and then Lineker, the name of FC Barcelona has always represented something magical to me. The iconic strip, the cathedral-like ground, the history of the club which is so inextricably rooted in the Catalan culture, history and struggle, all contribute to a deep-held affinity I feel to […]
football nerd 