County Down Outlook - Features - There is much more to English Football than just Manchester United News

Features

There is much more to English Football than just Manchester United News

Thursday, 25 November 2010

If you are new to the game of football and your child has developed an interest in the sport, you would be forgiven for thinking that there are only a handful of clubs worth following. There is always a plethora of Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United news and these clubs are continually talked about in the media, while their matches are always on television. You can also guarantee that they're being discussed 24 hours a day, seven days a week on a constant loop on Sky Sports News, many of the online newspaper websites and the thousands of unofficial fan sites and blogs that can be found all over the Internet.

While football news is there for everyone to access, depending on your circumstances, it may be difficult to get Premiership football tickets to games. The top clubs generally experience very high demand and are almost constantly sold out, and you may live a very long way away from the main centres of English football, which are London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. Even if you are lucky enough to finding available tickets, you may end up with little change from £100 just for an adult and child to gain entry to the stadium, not to mention the cost of fuel or train tickets.

There is an alternative to this, which is going to watch your local league team. England, for a reasonably small sized nation, has a huge concentration of professional football clubs across its length and breadth, and this means that there are plenty of teams struggling to stay afloat financially. Even in the Premier League, teams like Wigan Athletic and Blackburn Rovers are struggling to fill their stadia, but you can occasionally see a high quality game against one of the big boys, although there will be plenty of non-regulars trying to get in on the action, so you may have to be prepared to be disappointed.

Below the top level, there are still 72 clubs to choose from, barely any of which will be sold out every game, and they will be more than welcoming to any new supporters. Rules and regulations put in place over the last 15 years have made English football stadia very safe and family friendly places to visit and watch football and even if they lack the huge size of Old Trafford or the Emirates Stadium, they make up for that with an intimacy and charm that really makes you feel part of a community.

When you add increased availability to lower ticket prices, and more games for your money if you purchase a season ticket (teams in the Championship, League 1 and League 2 play 23 home league games compared to 19 games in the Premier League), the Football League really is a great environment for newcomers to immerse themselves in the atmosphere of going to live football matches. Also, the standard of football, although lower than the Premiership, is reasonably good, and the divisions are more unpredictable in terms of potential league winners, as the clubs are generally on more of an even footing financially.

So what are you waiting for? Take the plunge and start taking an interest in your local league side and before you know it, you could be a fully-fledged football addict scouring the various papers and websites in search of Championship football news. You could also be staying up until the ungodly hours of Saturday night, waiting for the League 2 goals round-up on the Football League Show, moaning about the price and quality of pies available in the ground, and nodding your head at fellow supporters at motorway service station stops on long trips to away matches to Plymouth, Gillingham, Carlisle and Hartlepool.

Whatever team you follow, you may suffer heartbreaking last-minute defeats on those long treks on freezing cold winter afternoons, but there will always be the dream of that brilliant solo goal or long-range volley that keeps you going back for more. At least nobody can question your commitment to the shirt, merely your sanity, which is when you know you're a die-hard football supporter!