Non-League football – The purest experience of the sport

Prices

Throughout British football, the sight of ‘Against Modern Football’ signs and the tweeting of the hashtag ‘’#AMF’ is becoming more and more prevalent as fans are beginning to show their disdain towards all seater stadiums, expensive food and the perpetual rising price of matchday tickets.

To go watch Swansea City play these days, I could end up paying anything between £30 and £50, yet my stubborn love of Swansea City is ultimately going to lead to me paying these extortionate prices to watch them play their admittedly sumptuous football.

However, price-wise it could be worse I suppose: incredibly, Manchester City fans travelling to West Ham are expected to pay in the region of £70 for a ticket for their upcoming game at Upton Park, which quite frankly is a joke.

I recently read an interesting article on the Football Ramble website by Matt Rogerson, titled the Myth of Non-League Affordability, detailing how football in the Blue Square Conference leagues (tiers 5th and 6th of the English league and now rebranded as the Skrill Conference) are not as cheap as many perceive.

It cost me just £5 to enter this game at Rochdale Town’s beautifully scenic ground

Many of the teams at that level of non-league are ex-Football League teams maintaining professional status and large stadiums and fanbases (e.g. Wrexham and to Luton to name just two) and tickets can cost up to £19.

However, there is much more to non-league than the Skrill Premier and the Skrill North and South leagues. I’ve personally revelled in the thrills and spills of my two regional umbrella leagues since I’ve moved to the northwest: the Evo-Stik Northern Leagues and the North West Counties Football League.

Entry is between £3-8, and for that price, I’ve witnessed some truly superb games of football with some memorable goals. Throw in the fact that the food is usually around the £1.50 mark, tea/coffee less than a £1 and programmes, which are usually lovingly put together by fans and volunteers of the club for absolutely nothing, sell for £1, you could have yourself a great day at the football for £10-15 quite easily. Don’t expect prawn sandwiches though.

Community Feel

I’m going to pick on Chelsea here sorry, but it’s hard to imagine how a local of the affluent Kings Road area of London truly feels a part of their club these days.

Chelsea is a multinational company run by a Russian oligarch and the fans are merely the consumers of a product. You could replace Chelsea’s name with virtually every Premier League and the majority of the Football League clubs in that statement really. Non-league clubs puts the fans before anything – in fact many are directly run by the fans.

Up and down the non-league grounds of the UK, fans can be found selling their club’s programmes around the ground, writing the programmes themselves, running the turnstiles, attending the car parks, serving the food and drinks and doing practically anything possible to keep their club running and to make the club as welcoming a place for visitors as possible.

A welcome! That’s one thing you won’t get at a Premier League ground this season – take your money and run is the usual stance of a Premier League setup.

However, if there is one thing a non-league club provides more than anything, it is a welcome. It doesn’t matter who you support or if you’ll ever show up at their ground again, that welcome will be there, and it won’t be in the pursuit of trying to brainwash you into supporting their club either – they just want to show you a piece of their passion and make their club seem as wonderful for you as it is for them.

Of course, there are some clubs that take the whole ‘fan community’ that little bit further with the fans owning part or all of the club: clubs such as Wrexham, the recently formed phoenix clubs of 1874 Northwich and Darlington 1883, and even my hometown club Merthyr Town FC.

However, perhaps the club that truly embraces fan power more than any other is FC United of Manchester – the club which was formed as an offshoot of Manchester United in protest against the Glazer family takeover and the general money-orientated, corporate direction of the Old Trafford club.

The club, which prides itself on its ‘punk football’ ethos, is 100% owned by the fans with every fan having a vote on a whole series of important club decisions; season tickets are on a ‘pay what you want’ basis (within reason of course) and the atmosphere created by the fans is one of the best I’ve experienced in any league, not just non-league – the FCUM fans relentlessly sing for the whole 90 minutes, regardless of what is going on the field.

I’m still very much a Swansea City fan, but no club I’ve visited in non-league has cared about that – every club has welcomed me, obviously some more than others, and if you were to attend a game this weekend, it would be exactly the same for you.