This Leicester Life: I picked Leicester at random - 4 years on, I built my honeymoon around them
My efforts to discover the effect Leicester City have on people’s lives took me to Denver, Colorado (via the power of Zoom) to hear how Clayton Stage went from liking the fox on the club’s crest to making a friend for life this side of the pond.
DB: What got you into football before you'd heard of Leicester City?
CS: I played for a few years when I was a kid. I played in fourth, fifth and sixth grade, so between 10 and 12 years old. But the sport was so young here, we didn't have the next level. From that point, it just died for me as far as playing goes. I occasionally caught it on TV. But I didn't really start paying attention to it until I was considerably older because we didn't have access to watch the Premier League in the States unless you paid for a special cable package. It wasn't easy to watch back then for us.
I played tennis and I ran cross country. In college I started watching American football considerably more. Then about ten years ago I was complaining to a buddy of mine about not having anybody to root for because my college team was done for the year. And he was like, "How about you start watching real football?" And I'm like, "Well, what the hell do you mean by that?"
His dad was a soccer coach and they paid for the cable package so he'd been watching the Premier League for as long as he could remember. I thought, "Okay, well, I'm not gonna cheer for one of these teams that has Chevrolet across their jersey because that just pisses me off." Eventually I picked Leicester because I liked the crest. My buddy was already a Liverpool fan but he said if he’d had to pick a team at that point, he might have gone with Leicester too because they were up and coming at that moment.
DB: What was it like trying to watch Leicester games at first?
CS: When I moved to Denver in 2014, the first bar I walked into was more like a British pub and it was filled with two teams' fans. Immediately I had the thought that I didn’t belong in there. I think it was full of Chelsea and Manchester United fans. So I found this other bar where they had every game on. Some random guy poked me and said, “Hey, you're over there". So I was over in the corner with nobody else watching. Vardy scored late in the game and it was a big deal. It didn’t really properly pick up until about 2017 when we were getting televised regularly.
DB: You skipped over quite an interesting period, the 2015/2016 season. What was your experience of that?
CS: I remember being back in that bar one time and somebody looked at my shirt. It was late in the season. And somebody said, "Oh, you're a Leicester fan. So you must be a bandwagon fan?" I'm like, "No, I'm not, damnit. I just couldn't really watch the team before now.”
Obviously they won the league and that was great. And then the guy that got me into it in the first place was pretty jealous, being a Liverpool fan. Because at that stage they hadn't won the Premier League.
DB: So what made you want to come over to watch a match live?
CS: Once I find myself rooting for a team, I tend to go all in, whether they're good or bad. I don't really care. It's just fun to experience it. I'd been to a couple of MLS matches, but that's not the same. It is what it is. I'm a stadium guy, I like stadiums in general. I'm actually trying to go to a home game at every FBS level for college football. I've been to 40 of them.
I got married in 2018 and my wife had asked me what I wanted from our honeymoon. Once we'd settled on going to England and Scotland, I said "Alright, what I really want to do is go to a Leicester match as part of this trip. That's the one thing I want to do." I reached out on FoxesTalk and a guy sent me a private message and told me not to worry about it. He'd sort the tickets. This was for the final game of the 2018/19 season against Chelsea.
Our plan was to just spend a couple of days in London. Then we'd be up in Leicester for three days around the game, then work our way up to Scotland.
Before the day of the game, the guy sends me a message saying he'd be at this particular pub at this time. We got there, I think it was the Rutland and Derby, he walked up and he gave us our tickets. All it took was me getting one round of beers for him and his buddies and before you knew it we were all friends and it was just a great day. Since that day the relationship's blossomed with him and his group of friends. The pandemic was shitty for everybody but it was convenient in one way because he and I started texting on the regular as we had nothing else to do.
But that first experience was amazing. My first view of the pitch coming out of the concourse in the Kop, how green the pitch was. Thousands of fans singing and waving flags. It brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it.
Since then I've been back to see Leicester lose to Everton, win 5-1 at Watford and get hammered at home by Liverpool. We're planning to come back again in February to go to the away game at Leeds, and again the following September when hopefully we'll be back in the Premier League.
DB: Have you stumbled across many other Leicester fans in the States?
CS: One time I was wearing a Leicester shirt at a bar downtown here in Denver. A random guy from England comes up and he kind of shoves me. So all my friends are wondering what's happening. There's drama and I'm wondering what he wants. He puts his arm out and he's got this whole Leicester City tattoo up and down his arm. Alright, situation has been de-escalated. Now we're friends. It turned out he was over here playing with his band.
Then my buddy who sorted the tickets for the Chelsea game wanted to visit New York with his wife and he asked my wife and I if we wanted to meet them there. Even though it's crazy that their flight from England was only a little longer than ours from Denver. So we went to the Football Factory in New York and watched a game there under the Empire State Building with the New York Foxes.
DB: Presumably with the international passes this season, you can watch every game? How do the kick-off times work for you?
CS: The early kick-off is the only one that's annoying - 12:30pm your time. That kicks off at 5:30am our time and that's a pain in the butt.
But the 3pm games kick off at 8am here so it's perfect. I have enough time to get up, make a little breakfast and then crack open a beer. All right, let's get the show on the road.
DB: I think you struck it lucky both with the friends you've made and the team you picked with what's happened since because Leicester are such an interesting team to follow. There's always something happening. We don't do boring. It's always this emotional rollercoaster. So that's what you're in it for.
CS: I mean, maybe it's like this for just football teams and fans over there in general. But I sometimes wonder if I’d picked any other team, would I have managed to meet the friend group that I have gotten. When I came over last May, my buddy let me stay with him and his family and I spent the whole long weekend with him.
I'm thinking: alright, he’s this random guy, just some man on the internet. We’ve hung out together once and then he invited me into his house, made me dinner and introduced me to all his friends.
One day he had to work and one of his friends who I'd only hung out with twice before that picked me up, I spent the whole day with him checking out the local area around Leicester in the villages outside of town. It was so great.
Are all groups like this? Are all teams' fanbases like this? I don't know. I think this seems like a Leicester thing.
