A new start for Leicester City but a season of looking to the past
Leicester City’s 2024/25 season begins tonight but with many fans feeling apathy towards the current regime and the state of modern football, that sense of detachment will manifest in many different ways.
Some supporters will be just as excited as they always have been. But there are also plenty, like me, who feel something has been lost recently, for whom the big kick-off doesn’t bring the same sense of anticipation.
I began to think about what I like most about football, about what still gives me that buzz regardless of what’s happening.
And it’s always been the trips, whether that’s been Bruges, Eindhoven, Southend or Scunthorpe. There’s nothing quite like the lure of the away day. Going to someone else’s patch and representing the club that’s close to your heart off the field while those lucky enough to wear the shirt do battle on it. Us against them. Us against the world.
Away days are passed down through generations. Your parents take you. You take your children. It made me start to wonder - when did supporters first start going to away games and what was it like? How did the experience change as the country changed over the decades?
As the new season kicks off, normally I’d be fretting over the players we have available and whether we have enough resources to achieve the desired target for the campaign.
But this summer has been different.
Once I’d made my mind up I wasn’t going to write about this season, I had to find a different vehicle for my obsession with Leicester City Football Club for the season ahead.
My thoughts shifting away from the current predicament thanks to the way fans have been treated recently, I was drawn to the past. I decided to explore Leicester fans’ historical experiences through 19 games that mirror the trips we’ll be taking over the next nine months.
The idea: to give an incomplete but illustrative history of Leicester City away days, to give a parallel narrative to the season - each published here in the days before the corresponding fixture.
That was the initial idea anyway, but once I started researching, I let myself get lost in myriad tangents and decided to see where the stories took me - often veering far from the away day experience into entirely different plotlines.
In some cases the grounds are different to those we’ll be visiting this season too - one is closer to a fierce rival’s current home, another is a one-off at a cricket ground. There are also stories of new beginnings - the first weeks of a famous old stadium, a stand that was in its infancy but which is now well over 100 years old.
And they’re not all new stories by any means. Almost all have been told before, but I tried not to think about that, instead concentrating on how interesting it was to knit them together into a new narrative.
The stories uncovered include things you might have thought were modern phenomena, things you never thought happened at all. Heroes of the past both famous and less storied. Coincidences, mishaps, tragedies and controversies - and that’s just those corresponding to the first four fixtures of this season.
It draws heavily on the British Newspaper Archives, with help from Of Fossils and Foxes, various historians connected to the opposition clubs and, you’ll notice straight away, the influence of the Kushiro Archives. It began with a casual glance at The Telegraph’s free archive from the late 1800s which led to a rabbithole of research and revelation.
In picking the 19 games to focus on, there were some fascinating tales that had to be left behind.
Some of those not included happened in many living people’s lifetimes and have been told in depth before, like a crucial victory at Fulham and its impact on the controversial end to the 1982/83 season. Some are more obscure and felt like uncovering something forgotten, such as what happened to one of the Southampton players on the night of their victory over Leicester Fosse in 1898. My intention is to touch on anything interesting while featuring a chosen game in more depth.
That Southampton story had to be weaved in rather than the focal point once I settled on only including victories. That decision meant I had to lose nights like the 2-2 draw at Villa Park in 1975, the same night as two plane crashes in foggy conditions - one in Birmingham, the other in north London claiming the life of the racing driver Graham Hill.
There was quite a lot of endless reordering and refining which games to pick and I had to be ruthless to get the desired overall structure right. Particularly the recent ones. How can you tell a story of Leicester City’s away days without including the biggest of all, the biggest of any team in the Premier League era? But there’s always another story to tell. So instead of the 9-0 at St Mary’s, there’s a rare goalscorer at The Dell.
It made me think about those lost venues. My own solitary experience of The Dell, for example, was a winning goal going in off Muzzy Izzet’s backside. But we didn’t win there for decades. That was a recurring theme, not winning at Villa Park or the City Ground or Stamford Bridge or Highbury for huge swathes of time.
That made the reordering and refining a lot easier, because there were so few examples to pick from for some clubs. I knew about some of those barren spells. The year 1972, for decades our most recent win at the City Ground, was etched into my brain and still remains there now really. Revisiting that period made me want to win there even more this season.
This research also told me more about the club I’ve supported for thirty-five years, about what it must have been like to support this club for the one hundred years of its existence before I was born.
I don’t like it when we lose, and I revel in the aftermath of a win, especially away from home, which is why I decided to make all the 19 games victories. The biggest gap between them is 13 years and I’ll try, in time, to fill those gaps with a potted history of what happened in between, both to the club and the country as a whole.
Sifting through the newspapers of old, it’s impossible not to be drawn into what Britain and the world was like at the time. The language is particularly interesting to me, from an early description of good goals as a “Clinker” to the existence of a “charabanc” to ferry Leicester Fosse players from St Pancras to Selhurst Park in the 1920s.
To see what was happening in the wider world at the time Leicester were travelling up and down the country was just as interesting as finding out how they fared on the field.
I started to feel a strange emotional connection to the players to whom the club meant something 100 years or more ago, and opposition players too. Some of those were killed in battle abroad, while one died as a result of injury sustained during a game.
It’s also fascinating to read how the game has changed. Early reporters paid huge attention to which way the wind was blowing. And how the game has stayed the same. Referees’ performances have always been scrutinised and there have always been conmen and nefarious types dotted around.
I relished the descriptions of our team going away from home and demolishing their opponents. The newspaper reporters of the early 1900s didn’t hold back in their vitriolic criticism of these hapless home teams, nor did they refrain from lavishing praise on Leicester.
Reading those words was like a new win each time, and that’s one of the greatest feelings of all. That’s what keeps us going back for more and, as we embark on another season in the top division, let’s hope for more victorious stories to pass down to future generations.
