Doing the 92 is etched into the folklore of English football supporters. It is simple in theory: watch a match at each of the current 92 league stadiums in England. Some collect pin badges, scarves or mugs. Some have a scratchable poster. Some merely add a tick onto a spreadsheet with a flourish. All of these are my people.
In reality, it takes most supporters years due to real-life commitments. But each completist will speak wistfully of their memories: the walk to the ground, as a dribble becomes a throng and nervous chats turn into chants; the first sight of a floodlight above a row of terraced houses (extra points if it is casting light through winter mist); the green of the pitch and the vista of the stands; the goals and games they saw.
This season, that dream will be my reality. Not only will I do the 92, I will also supercharge it by visiting all 92 English league grounds for a match in the space of a single season. If that wasn’t enough, I also want to report on one aspect of every league club in England. Ninety-two matches at 92 league grounds and 92 stories on 92 clubs.
What am I doing?
This season-long project can easily be broken into two parts:
1) Matches
The maths is easy, but daunting. Between 10 August (the first Saturday of the EFL season) and 3 May (the end of its regular season) there are 38 weeks, which means that I will need to average five live games every fortnight. I am only including competitive first-team matches, but I have league games, three cup competitions and European fixtures to pick from.
I am fortunate that I live in the East Midlands – centre of the world, etc – but, yes, there is still Plymouth and Barrow and Norwich and Gillingham and Swansea and Newcastle. The principal issue is of running out of weekends and, as such, the match schedule will be front-loaded towards the earlier months of the season. Nobody wants to reach the end of May and have Leyton Orient still left to go.
The idea, assuming all goes well, will be to finish this journey on 26 May 2025 at the Championship Play-off final at Wembley, stadium number 93.
2) Articles & Podcast
These will not strictly follow the order of the matches (that would be impossible, I think), although there clearly will be some degree of similarity. The crux of this project is not to watch every team play a home game, but to offer a unique perspective on every club in the Football League. Just as the matches need to come at a rate of five per fortnight, so roughly do the articles.
And there will be a podcast as well, which will be launching in the next few weeks. More on that to follow, but it’ll be an opportunity to get into these clubs in even more depth.
There will be interviews with players, managers and chairpersons. There will be deep dive features and the occasional match-related tale (particularly on Premier League games). There will be stories of unexpected promotion campaigns, risible relegations, ownership crises, potential stadium moves, managerial personalities, rising stars and derby days.
This is most of my job for the season. I will still be doing The Score (with the help of some brilliant colleagues) and columns on significant breaking news. But the idea is to submerge myself in a warm lair of the 92 and wake up some time in May from this deep hibernation in time to scratch off the poster and tick off the spreadsheet.
Why am I doing this?
The Football League is England’s (and the five Welsh clubs) greatest cultural asset. Last season, on an average weekend, 850,000 different people watched a league game in England. Only universal religions bring together people in such volume and regularity as the 92 clubs within it.
You might say that it has never been harder to watch your team live. Ticket prices continue to rise (albeit with initiatives) and England’s public transport system is on its arse. Pockets are emptier following recessions and a global pandemic that only made life tougher. The rampant capitalism at the top of the game has seen working-class communities frozen out.
And yet still this magnificent entity rolls on. In 2022-23, the EFL recorded its highest attendances for 70 years and the Championship recorded its highest overall attendance since records began. League One is the third tier of a league system in the 24th biggest country in the world by population (when adding together England and Wales), yet it is ranked 21st of all world leagues for average attendance. This is not normal.
All of these 92 clubs are playing the same sport and all ultimately have the same goal: to win. They provoke the same emotions in those who follow them – loyalty, pride, angst, joy, hope, despair – and those emotions define what it means to be human. That is why we all keep coming back.
And yet, for all that unites us, it is what makes our clubs unique that is of most interest. Football clubs aren’t only football clubs. They are social institutions, centres for the young, the old and the vulnerable. They are community assets whose impact forms bubbles many miles wide over their local areas. They are where people make friends and where families connect and reconnect in a dance that persists through generations. These are the stories that deserve to be told.
Why is this the best time to do it?
In his magnificent book A Last English Summer, author Duncan Hamilton spends a cricket season touring England’s counties and stadiums following England’s national summer sport at a time of great upheaval and uncertainty, questions of money and ethos that simultaneously affect the game at micro and macro levels. It acts as both a wonderful snapshot in time but also casts fondness on what may soon be lost and cynicism on where cricket may soon be going.
The same now applies to English league football. There is a financial chasm between the highest and lowest within the 92 that grows with each passing season and that chasm has created an unsustainable desperation culture to join the elite. That makes life chaotic the further up you go and more precarious the further down. Clubs routinely lose money and spend close to their annual revenues on wages alone.
This is not quite The Last English Winter, but the questions are no less pressing. Greater wealth distribution is necessary to improve the health of this cultural asset and yet self-serving is commonplace. The recent general election has caused a delay to the formation of an independent regulator for the professional game, but the urgency of its need can never cease.
A regulator will not be a catch-all solution and will come laced with caveats and flaws; still it might be the best hope we have. The state of the game is a sentence increasingly laced with cynicism and deliberate emphasis: “The state of the game”. What better way to examine this than by telling the story of every club? Hamilton only had 18 cricket counties, bless him.
How can you help?
Firstly, the kind request. Good journalism and writing costs money and relies upon the support of those who read and enjoy it. Even if you don’t have a passionate interest in news, politics, money, opinion and all the other sport i produces every day, a digital subscription averages out at £1.53 a week. I would say this, but I think this is good value for the Doing the 92 project alone. I really hope that you agree. Like and subscribe, like and subscribe.
Finally, because each of the 92 clubs are unique they have unique aspects and unique supporter bases too. More may unite than divide us, but we are proudly independent of one another. We know that if our parents or grandparents had been born 10 miles down the road, had different friends in their youth or simply made slightly different decisions, we might support our greatest rival. But we ignore all that. We are who we are.
These are the stories we want to tell: what makes your club, your club. I will write about each and I hope to get it right, but you can help me. Tell me the idea that you always wanted to see explored, the feature that hasn’t yet been written and the people you want to hear from. My DMs are open on X and I can be contacted at daniel.storey@inews.co.uk. At the risk of becoming Alan Partridge speaking into a dictaphone, no idea is a bad idea.
The point is this: we must try to tell the story. The best feeling in my job is to hear a group of supporters saying that you get them and that you got it right. Nobody knows your club better than you and very few of you want to be told what to think by somebody who hasn’t done their homework. That is more important the further down the pyramid you go, where supporters often feel ignored. Representation needs to be right.
I desperately hope that you will enjoy following this season with me half as much as I will enjoy doing it. Here’s to Hillsborough on 11 August, followed by Kenilworth Road on 12 August, followed by Elland Road on 14 Augu…
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