Ninety-Two

A Life in Football Grounds
One obsessive football fan, and award-winning Chief Sports Writer's, 52-year odyssey to visit all 92 grounds in the four English professional league

"I've measured my life in football grounds. While my friends went clubbing I got my kicks from away days at Halifax and Rochdale." - Ollie Holt

Oliver Holt has measured out his life with football grounds. He went to his first stadium when he was six-years-old after his mother, an actress in Coronation Street, was given a pair of tickets for the Manchester derby at Maine Road in November 1972. That was the start of a lifelong addiction to the game and the grounds that are its theatres of conflict and cradles of devotion. When his mates discovered music and clubbing, Holt was discovering Bootham Crescent and Gresty Road.

It took Holt more than 50 years and a journey that led him from Maine Road to Wetherby Road, in Harrogate, to fulfil his ambition of visiting each of the current grounds of the 92 clubs in the top four divisions of English football. It spanned the first flush of his fanaticism as a teenage supporter and extended into his career as a journalist in local and national newspapers. This is the story of a quest fuelled by the fear that lower league clubs and their stadiums are a disappearing world, a precious part of English culture put at risk by the greed and acquisitiveness of some Premier League clubs. Along the way Holt charts the changes that have swept through the game in the last half a century, transforming it from a working-class pilgrimage into a corporate amusement.

The Ninety-Two explores the beauty of the stadiums in which the game is played and the sadness of the destruction of so many of them. And it is the story of the family ties that draw us to football, sometimes without us realising it, and make the magic of visiting the football grounds of England such a compelling and life-affirming experience.

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