Summery season summary

I didn't go to any football matches in May, but this week I went to watch Cymru's women's team play Czechia in their final group game qualifier for the Women's World Cup. It was my final game of the season. Cymru won 3-1 to make sure I wrapped up my season on a high.

I feel like I had a good season, even though 47 matches is a few less than I've managed in recent seasons. Even with the slightly reduced number of games I completed four and a bit of the six goals I set myself for the season.

My 9 new grounds this season means I hit a new milestone of 150 football grounds. That was one of my season goals. 

My season's map of all the 27 grounds I went to has one significant outlier. 

Yep, it was my trip to Malaga. (Read my match report.) Going to a game in Spain with my friend, Jim, was another ambition for the season that I'm happy I ticked off.

Two of the other new grounds were watching Shrewsbury playing away, at Swindon and Oldham respectively. At the start of the season I listed six possible Shrewsbury away games to go to. Swindon was on the list, Oldham was not. I didn't make it to any of my other targets on the list, a mix of other commitments and crap scheduling. 

Shrewsbury had a pretty dire season, saved by a new manager bounce when Gavin Cowan came in as manager and won 5 games in a row. I didn't see any of those wins. In fact, I only saw one win in the six matches I went to.

Cardiff Draconians had a good season, finishing sixth in their first season in the second tier. Barry Town also did well, finishing third and winning the MG Cup. I couldn't go to the final because I was at a bucket list Thousand Yard Stare gig. I went to the Welsh Cup final though, and saw Caernarfon lift the trophy for the first time in their history. 

The Dracs helped me to another one of my season goals - ticking off all the grounds in the Cymru South. I managed that early in the season, with a trip to Carmarthen Town in August. My final domestic game of the season was a play off match for Poole Town - this took me up to 10 Poole Town games, which was another target for me this season.

One goal I missed was another game in Scotland. My trip up there at the end of October didn't work out football-wise, but I had the fantastic consolation of watching a rugby international at Murrayfield instead. 

I'm currently thinking up some new goals for next year during a brief break from football. (I'm boycotting the ghastly World Cup!) However, pre-season friendlies and the qualifying rounds for UEFA competitions start soon so I don't have long to wait. 

Futbology milestone

Last night I went to one of the worst local stadia to watch a game, in vile weather. Happily though, Cardiff Draconians won, making this a great game to hit a Futbology milestone!

How bad was the venue and the weather? This bad:

Football season 24-25 review - Futbology badges

It's been a decent season for Futbology badges. My biggest achievement was hitting the 600 games mark in April.

Earlier in the season I passed a milestone for the number of games I've seen at Jenner Park - which, incidentally, is now the stadium I have seen most games at.

And in my last game of the season I hit the half century at Cardiff City Stadium.

Almost half those games haven't involved Cardiff City, which is quite amusing to me.

I got a couple of smaller milestones for other teams - including Caldicot where my friend Ben plays.

And Penybont, mainly for all the Barry games I've seen against them.

I also got a ten-game badge for Cardiff Corinthians - although I only arrived at this game at half time so really it should only be a nine and a half games badge!

I decided to go to the Welsh Cup final. It was a good game and I was able to pose with the actual cup before the game. Getting a badge was a bonus.

And a couple of international games at the end of the season came with badges too.

Not a bad season haul at all!

My 2023-24 Futbology badges

I use the Futbology app to record which football matches I see. Sometimes when I check in to games I hit a milestone and get a 'badge'. Here are some of the badges I collected in 2023-24.

First the biggie - completing a league! (In this case the Cymru Premier on the very last match weekend of the Cymru Premier season.)

My 500 game milestone came early in the season.

My personal records date from the start of the 1992-93 season. So this milestone is games since then. It doesn't include the games I went to as a kid. 

Just before the end of the season I reached 550 games recorded on the app.

While my 500th game was a regular league game, the 550th was the promotion play off game to decide which second place team in the third tier of the Cymru leagues would get promoted to the second tier. 

I visited my 125th football ground in May as well.

And some more big numbers - 200 games with Shrewsbury and 100 games with Barry.

And some smaller milestones with other clubs

According to Futbology, I'm currently the number one Cardiff Draconians fan using the app - so I know this badge is unique and nobody else has a 25 game badge with the team.

Plus, I got a badge for going to a Europa League game

I picked up a couple of other badges during the season as well. Checking in to a game on the birthday of a Ballon d'Or winner results in a badge. I did get a few of those. But these milestones are the ones that made me feel most happy when they popped up on the app.

Football recap - December 2023 and the rest of 2023!

I made it to just one game in December, on the very first day...

Game 32: Notts County 2-3 Shrewsbury Town

Reason for going: When Shrewsbury were drawn away at Notts County in the FA Cup, my Nott-supporting friend Paul said we had to go! So we did. 

Point of interest: Ryan Bowman scored a hat-trick after three woeful defensive errors that became memes for how bad they were. The first goal came after a Notts defender just fell over instead of clearing the ball. It was very hard to cheer the goal because I was laughing so hard. 

And then the fixtures conspired against me for the rest of the month. On Saturday the 9th I was working. Barry Town's home game on the 16th got swapped for an away game. I was driving up to Shrewsbury on the 23rd but getting there in time for Shrewsbury's home game was a bit too much, logistically. Shrewsbury weren't playing at home on Boxing Day. And then on the last Saturday of the year I had other plans. So, that means December 2023 is a one game month!

Despite the low tally of games for December, 2023 as a whole calendar year has actually set a new record for me. I went to 62 games since my first game of the year on the 2nd January at Llantwit Major. 

Futbology has given me a handy summary

Futbology also produces a map showing all the new grounds I visited in 2023. There were a lot in Port Talbot, but I got a decent spread of football grounds across England as well.

As I am the kind of nerd who dissects his football attendance data, I have a breakdown of the games I have been to as monthly totals. This past year I set new monthly records for February (8 games), May (6), July (7) and September (5). I also equalled previous records in March and November (both 5 games). 

If I equalled all the monthly records in 2024 I would end up going to 76 games. That feels like a lot!

Football season review 2022-23 in figures

Here's my season in stats courtesy of the lovely Futbology App.

The blank team logo in the highest score is Aberystwyth Exiles. Their logo isn't included on the app. I'd never seen a team score 16 goals in a competitive game before this season. I doubt I will see it again. Cardiff Corinthians are probably going to be my all-time top scorers in one game. Strangely, a few months later I found out that a new guy in my office called Charlie played in goal for Aber Exiles in this game! He made some good saves in the game as well and prevented it being an even higher score. 

I went to 21 new grounds - one fewer new ground compared to 2021-22. They had a nice spread to them, though, with those far-flung grounds in England all places where I watched Shrewsbury play.

My new grounds in Cymru were all in the South. 

This southern bias is mainly because the furthest North that Barry played was in Newtown and it wasn't a new ground. Oddly, I've seen Barry play at Latham Park in Newtown more than I've seen Newtown play there!

Some other random stats

488 - the miles in the round trip to see Ipswich Town v Shrewsbury Town. I wasn't driving. 

15 Shrewsbury Town games - which is a new personal record in the 21st Century! I haven't been to that many Shrewsbury games in a season since I was a youth. This also included 'home and away' games against Cheltenham Town and Peterborough United and both teams 'did the double' over Shrewsbury.

3 Trophy Presentations

2 cup finals - both won by Barry Town

2 penalty shoot-outs

1 nil-nil scoreline (in May! It was my first 0-0 for over a year and 75 football matches)

Another highlight was seeing the son of one of my longstanding friends as Shrewsbury mascot for the day in a fantastic win over Cambridge United. We also took my youngest nephew and niece to their first ever Shrewsbury game and they even got certificates to prove it, although they were more happy about being given Easter Eggs. It feels like the flame is being passed on to a new generation of fans!

And some Futbology milestones

I loves me a Futbology badge. I picked up a few for total numbers of games, grounds and times seeing particular teams. 

(I blogged about this particular badge back in November because I realised my behaviour was being shaped by the app!)

Two badges for Cardiff teams - the Dracs...

...and Cardiff Met. Getting this badge for my only 0-0 game of the season was amusing. 

And finally, a day out in Brizzle earned me my first badge for another English football league club besides Shrewsbury.

Although there is something reductive in describing a season in stats, I feel this is probably the best way to summarise it!

Review of my record-breaking football season

On Wednesday I went to my 60th and final game of the 2021-22 football season. This was a record number of games for me and through judicious planning I ended on a nice round number!

The result of the game on Wednesday was disappointing, as Wales succumbed to a late, late goal and lost to the Netherlands. At the end of the game, Gareth Bale's body language said it all.

Still, at least the rain held off. I got there early with my friend Paul and we were able to thoroughly dissect the Barry Town AGM that we attended the previous week, and discuss how we felt the team would fare in the coming season in the Cymru South. 

Anyway, on to my season stats, courtesy of the Futbology app.

In addition to it being the highest number of matches I'd ever been to in a season, it was also the highest number of new grounds (22) that I'd visited in a single season. Futbology has a map feature that displayed all 22 grounds for me.

The majority of new grounds were in South Wales, naturally. Hillsborough in Sheffield was an outlier. The two grounds in North Wales were The Rock in Cefn and Cae y Castell in Flint. Over there right in the middle of Cardigan Bay is Aberystwyth Town.

The grounds I visited in South Wales fir the first time tended to follow the A470 corridor up to Merthyr Tydfil.

Heading from the bottom of the map, there's Bridgend Street's ground in East Cardiff, then that line of five grounds in sort of a row are Canton Liberals's brand new pitch in the Cardiff International Sports Village, Lydstep Park in Gabalfa where Cardiff Draconians play, Cardiff Corinthians's ground in Radyr, Taffs Well FC and then the University of South Wales sports park in Treforest that Pontypridd Town call home. Also on the map are Pontyclun, Clydach Vale, Treharris, Penrhiwceiber, Aberdare and Penydarren Park in Merthyr which hosted the Ardal Southern Cup final at the end of May.

The last two seasons really have been famine followed by feast. After the pandemic curtailed the season in Spring 2020, there was an entire year (actually 16 months) where I didn't go to football matches. This is reflected in my graph of games attended with a grand total of zero games rocketing up to 60. 

If the 60 games this season had been spread over the last two seasons I would be round about average compared to previous seasons. At the start of the season I had secretly hoped to make it to 40 games. I overshot that target by a considerable distance, despite the lockdown in Wales suspending football here for about a month over Christmas. I more than made up for that with my 'decamonth' in April - although that wasn't the month with the most games; I started the season strongly with 11 games in August.

And that just about wraps that up. There are already details of friendly fixtures coming through for a few weeks' time. The new football league season starts on 30th July. Football will be back soon enough!

Football nerdery data representation

When I was studying Business Psychology I briefly got sidetracked onto a tangent about the psychology of collecting (blogged here). I think that offers a good insight into why some people obsessively go to football matches - often called 'groundhopping'. It's a collecting impulse. 

People who go to a lot of football matches in a lot of different places tend to keep some sort of record of it, for example, in an Excel spreadsheet (I do this), or using an app created to help them, like the Futbology App (which I use regularly).

As an aside, Futbology was originally called Groundhopper, but apparently that had less of a cachet to it than the developers had hoped, so they changed the name.

The problem is if you have all this data, what do you do with it? Futbology has a neat feature where you can review your personal stats, looking at all the different grounds you have been to, and a list of all the clubs you have seen. But that only goes so far, and like a spreadsheet, it's not that exciting to look at.

I used the list of teams I've seen to update my Top 10 Table of teams that I have seen. I previously did this up to the end of the 2017 season and a lot has changed since then. This is my current top 10, up to the end of the 2020-21 season.

The big new entrant since the last time I posted a table is Barry Town, who weren't even in the top ten back in 2017. They are now second in the table, usurping Cardiff City, although I have seen the Bluebirds 18 times since I published my previous top ten. The New Saints are also new entries and are going to climb the table as well, given that I've already seen them twice since June!

Tables are all well and good, but I also have another project on the go. A long time ago, before we were married, even, Cathy gave me a 'Book of Days' as a present. 

These are handy books that you are meant to write birthdays and memorable events in on given dates. I wrote a few in, but then it sat and languished in a drawer for two decades. Then a few years back I decided to go through my lists of football matches and fill in the book with all the games on the date I saw them. The result is something like this.

If you look closely, you will see that a number of those games on the pages shown are international matches because the end of March tends to be an 'International Break' every year. Most of the time I just write the score but sometimes I add in other details, as can be seen on 30 March, where I noted that TNS v Barry was a Welsh Cup semi-final played at Newtown.

It is fun flicking through the pages, remembering games. It's also fun when I get to 'tick off' a day like I did when I saw TNS in a Europa Conference League game at the end of July.

The days either side of that game are still blank. The challenge is on for 2022!

I've also taken the data from the Book of Days and put it into grid format, blacking out all the days that I have seen a match. The result looks a bit like an elongated QR code.

The gaps in the summer months are really noticeable in this data display. That one lone square in the middle of June is the game I went to in Salt Lake City when we were on our road trip around Utah. (Here is a very old blog post about that game!)

Meanwhile, back to the Excel Spreadsheet and one way I arrange my data is games by month. The white gaps in the middle of the above grid is also noticeable in table form, as a large numerical disparity.

I have been to almost 10 times as many games in August as I have in June. Although I do watch a lot of games in June if there is a tournament happening. It's just that tends to be on TV! November and February are the months I'm less likely to go to a live game during the season. February is a short month (although I did manage a five Saturday February just before the world was pandemified back in 2020!). I don't know what November's excuse is.

One of the fun aspects of collecting is arranging and rearranging, cataloguing and organising your collection. Playing around with different ways of displaying the data from intangible collected items is the same impulse. I find a sense of satisfaction from looking at my spreadsheet's many pages, my Book of Days, and the blacked out year calendar, which is akin to looking through a binder of baseball cards, or a full football sticker album. 

The challenge is on to "complete" the year!

Football watching - the first quarter decade

I've been logging the football games that I've been to since the 1992-93 season. It was my first year at VI Form College and I got into going to football in a big way. I was helped by my Dad being a keen fan of football and got the opportunity to visit a number of grounds near to where we lived in Shrewsbury. I saw 29 games that season, mainly Shrewsbury Town, but also games at Wrexham, Telford, Bridgnorth, Crewe, Walsall, and strangely, Cardiff City's Ninian Park. Little did I know that I would end up living barely a 20 minute walk away from that now-demolished stadium for a good chunk of my adult life.

Here's a graph of my game attendance from 1992-93 through to the 2016-17 season.

The blue line marks all the games I went to in a given season. The red line is the number of Shrewsbury games as a subset of that total. There are three seasons when I was a one club man, but most years I've been to a few more games. For most of the noughties the other games were Wales Internationals, but there have been others. Recently, thanks to my friend Steve, I've been to quite a few QPR games and some Poole Town games as well. And my friend Sara, a season ticket holder at Cardiff City has helped me catch several games at the new CCFC Stadium, built opposite where Ninian Park used to be.

My record high point of 37 in 1993-94 is probably going to stand for all time. I joke that year was BC - Before Cathy. But it was also a year when I possibly should have spent more time concentrating on my A-levels, rather than going to football matches. Ah, the freedom of youth! And I had my Dad seeking out more games for us to go to when Shrewsbury weren't at home. That's how I went to a Shifnal Town game.

I still like going to football matches with my Dad. Last week we froze in the permanent temporary marquee that is the away end at Bristol Rovers. Shrewsbury's late winner warmed us up a bit.

In this 25 year span, I saw Shrewsbury 149 times, and a total of 269 football matches. These are small beer compared to the numbers racked up by serious groundhoppers, but still a lot more than many people manage. The average is dragged down by seasons like 2009-2010 when I only went to two games. I have seen at least one Shrewsbury game every season, literally just the one in 2005-2006.

In the process I have visited 59 different football grounds, ranging from Elgin to Plymouth, Norwich to Newtown, and including a MLS game in Salt Lake City. Several of the grounds have disappeared. Ninian Park, obviously, the Gay Meadow, which I loved and can picture clearly in my mind's eye even after ten years in the new stadium, the frankly horrible Vetch Field, and even the original Wembley.

In total, I have seen 148 different club sides. I expected it to be higher given the number of games, but I have seen some clubs a surprising number of times, and I'm not counting International or Representative teams. Some of the teams I've seen no longer exist, disappearing through mergers or just going bust. A number have reformed lower down the league. I am counting Wimbledon prior to the move to Milton Keynes and AFC Wimbledon, founded by fans in protest, as the same club. It's my list; my rules.

Here's a table of the teams I have seen most often

As you'd expect, Shrewsbury lead the way. I'd been to more Cardiff matches than I thought when I totted them up. I haven't seen Bridgnorth play since 1994-95, but I did see them 9 times over three seasons in the 90s. Torquay place quite highly, thanks to the influence of Cathy's cousin, Adam, who supports them. Inter Cardiff won't be improving on their position. They disappeared in a merger with UWIC several years ago. UWIC then evolved into Cardiff Metropolitan. I have seen Cardiff Met play, but it's not the same club at all.

The top ten will change next year. I've already seen QPR lose narrowly at Cardiff this season, so they will move up to joint 5th. And I've mentioned how I've seen Bristol Rovers again, so they will be on their own in 10th.

In 2016-17 I went to the highest number of games for 20 years (14), but that was a precursor to a real renaissance in matchgoing this season. The game at Bristol's Memorial Stadium last Saturday was my 20th of the season so far. I have plans to see Shrewsbury again on my birthday and they are also one game away from another Wembley appearance in the football league trophy, which I will really want to go to. If they get to Wembley it will be the fourth time I have seen them play there. They've lost all three previous games, so they are due a win. I feel I am due a win too.