Ground Hopping in England: A Guide to Doing the 92
How ground hopping in England works, from the rules that decide when a ground counts to route planning, non-league hops, budgets and neutral tickets.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Grounds & Matchday20 min read
- Grounds in the 92
- 92
- Premier League clubs
- 20
- EFL clubs
- 72
- Promoted from the National League each season
- 2
A Tuesday in November, a retail park somewhere off the A1, and a floodlit ground you have never been to and will probably never return to. That is ground hopping in England reduced to its essentials. The pursuit has a target number attached — 92, the Premier League and the English Football League combined — and a body of unwritten rules that hoppers apply with more rigour than any governing body would.
The FA sits above all of it, the EFL and the Premier League set the fixture structures that make the whole thing plannable, and the National League System underneath supplies several hundred more grounds for anyone who finishes the 92 and finds they have nothing to do on a Saturday. This guide covers the English version: the rules people use, the routes that work, what a stadium relocation does to a completed list, and the practical business of buying a ticket at a club you have no connection to.
What the number 92 is actually made of
Twenty in the Premier League, twenty-four in each of the three EFL divisions. The arithmetic has held since the Premier League reduced to twenty clubs for the 1995-96 season, and it is the only reason the target is a stable round number rather than a moving one.
The clubs inside those slots churn constantly. Two clubs are promoted from the National League into League Two each season and two go the other way, a system that has run since the early 2000s and which quietly guarantees that nobody's list stays complete for long. Finish the 92 in May and you can be one ground short in August, through no fault of your own, because a club you had ticked has dropped out of the EFL and a club you have never visited has come up.
Hoppers deal with this in one of two ways. The strict school treats the 92 as a live list and accepts that completion is a state you pass through rather than reach. The pragmatic school records the grounds visited and treats the achievement as permanent, on the reasoning that you cannot un-watch a football match.
Both positions are defensible. The strict one is more common among people who have already finished once, which tells you something about how the pursuit works: the target exists mainly to give shape to a habit that would otherwise have no end point. If you want the underlying structure of promotion and relegation that keeps the list moving, our explainer on the English football pyramid sets out how the tiers connect.
The rules hoppers use for a completed ground
There is no governing body for this. The conventions come from The Ninety Two Club, formed in the late 1970s to recognise supporters who had watched a match at every current league ground, and from decades of argument in club bars and on forums.
- Competitive matchA first-team fixture in a league or cup competition. Friendlies, testimonials and reserve games are excluded by most hoppers.
- First teamBoth sides must be fielding first teams. An under-21 side in a senior competition is disputed and many exclude it.
- Full ninety minutesAttendance for the whole match, not a look at the ground from the car park or a stadium tour.
- Inside the groundWatching from a hillside, a block of flats or a neighbouring car park does not count, however good the view.
- Current groundThe club must be playing at that ground at the time of the visit for it to count toward the current 92.
The rules used by long-standing English hopping groups. There is no governing body, and stricter and looser variants both exist.
The disputes are all at the edges, and they are more interesting than the rule itself.
Neutral-venue fixtures are the first. A club playing a home game at somebody else's stadium — because of a ban, a construction overrun or a safety certificate problem — has not given you their ground, and nobody claims otherwise. But it does mean you have been to the borrowed ground, and whether that ticks the borrowed club off is a matter of some heat if the fixture was not that club's own.
The second is the EFL Trophy and its inclusion of academy sides. A senior competition, a competitive fixture, and one team that is emphatically not a first team. Most hoppers count the visit because the home club is fielding a first team; a minority refuse it on principle.
The third is the ground that has changed beyond recognition without moving. A club that demolishes three sides and rebuilds them on the same footprint is at the same ground under every conventional rule, and if you visited before the work you will find nothing you remember when you go back.
Planning routes around the English fixture calendar
The calendar does the work if you let it. English football gives you a Saturday three o'clock core, a Tuesday and Wednesday midweek programme, a Friday night fixture or two, and a Bank Holiday Monday round — and the EFL's willingness to shift kick-offs for broadcasters, which is a nuisance for supporters and a gift to hoppers, because a Friday night League One match and a Saturday lunchtime Championship match are a comfortable double.
Geography sorts itself into obvious clusters. Greater Manchester and Merseyside between them hold a remarkable density of league grounds within an hour of each other. London holds more still, all of them reachable on a travelcard. The West Midlands, South Yorkshire and the North East each give you three or four in a small radius. Against that, the coastal outposts — the far South West, East Anglia, the Cumbrian and North Wales edges of the English pyramid — are single-ground days that eat a whole weekend.
The efficient approach is to bank the awkward ones first, in the months when they are pleasant, and leave the dense urban clusters for the dark end of the season when a fixture pile-up gives you three midweek options a week.
- Pick the anchorChoose the fixture with the least flexible kick-off, usually a televised game, and build everything else around it.
- Check the gapAllow for the second half running long, the walk to the station and a delayed departure, not the timetabled journey alone.
- Buy the far ticket firstSecure the harder ticket before committing to the pair, since the easier one will still be available later.
- Confirm after selectionsBroadcast picks are announced weeks in advance and routinely move a Saturday game to Sunday, so re-check before booking travel.
- Plan the last trainWork backwards from the final departure home, because an evening kick-off in a small town has no fallback.
A planning sequence rather than a guarantee. Broadcast selections move kick-off times at short notice and can break a planned double.
One genuine warning. Fixture postponements in England are decided late, and a ground you have travelled four hours to reach can be called off at two o'clock on a Saturday afternoon for a frozen pitch or a policing problem. Nobody who has done this for long has avoided it.
How long a completion actually takes
There is no fixed answer, but the arithmetic is easy enough to run yourself. An English league season gives each club twenty-three home league fixtures in the EFL and nineteen in the Premier League, spread across roughly nine months, plus cup rounds. A hopper attending one additional match a fortnight alongside following their own club adds something like twenty grounds a season, which puts a first completion four or five years out.
Compressing that into a single season is possible and changes the whole character of the exercise. It means abandoning your own club for most of the year, treating the fixture list rather than the league table as the thing you follow, and accepting that a January week will involve three midweek matches and two overnight stays. The people who have done it describe the last twenty grounds as an administrative problem rather than a football one — a scheduling puzzle in which the remaining clubs stubbornly refuse to be at home on days you can reach them.
The genuine obstacle is not distance. It is that a handful of clubs will play their home fixtures against the wrong opposition on the wrong nights, and there is nothing to be done about it except wait.
Stadium moves that reset your list
Brentford left Griffin Park for the Gtech Community Stadium in 2020. Tottenham Hotspur left White Hart Lane in 2017 and opened their new stadium in 2019. Everton moved from Goodison Park, a ground that had been in continuous use since the nineteenth century, to Bramley-Moore Dock. Each of those moves added a ground to every hopper's outstanding list and removed one from their completed total, instantly and without appeal.
This is not a modern phenomenon. The decade after the Taylor Report produced a wave of relocations that rewrote the map: Middlesbrough to the Riverside in 1995, Bolton and Sunderland both moving in 1997, Derby to Pride Park the same year, Southampton from The Dell to St Mary's in 2001, Leicester off Filbert Street in 2002, Manchester City into the City of Manchester Stadium in 2003, Arsenal from Highbury to the Emirates in 2006. Hoppers who had completed the 92 in the late 1980s were a dozen grounds adrift within twenty years.
| Move | From | To | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Middlesbrough | Ayresome Park | Riverside Stadium | 1995 |
| Bolton Wanderers | Burnden Park | Reebok Stadium | 1997 |
| Sunderland | Roker Park | Stadium of Light | 1997 |
| Derby County | Baseball Ground | Pride Park | 1997 |
| Southampton | The Dell | St Mary's Stadium | 2001 |
| Manchester City | Maine Road | City of Manchester Stadium | 2003 |
| Arsenal | Highbury | Emirates Stadium | 2006 |
| Brentford | Griffin Park | Gtech Community Stadium | 2020 |
The practical lesson is to prioritise grounds that are known to be leaving. A club with planning permission granted and a construction start date is a ground with a countdown on it, and the last season at an old ground is the one people regret missing. Our guides to lost English football grounds and to new stadium builds cover both ends of that process.
Renaming does not reset anything, incidentally. A ground that acquires a new sponsor is the same ground, whatever the tally on your spreadsheet says.
Non-league hopping and the scale of the challenge
Below League Two the National League System opens out, and the numbers stop being manageable in the way the 92 is. Step 1 is a single national division. Step 2 splits into two regional divisions, Step 3 into more, and by the time you reach Step 6 you are looking at dozens of leagues covering every county in England. Add the levels below that and the number of grounds hosting eleven-a-side football on an English Saturday runs into the thousands.
Nobody completes that. Which is exactly why a lot of hoppers prefer it.
The appeal is partly practical. Non-league grounds are cheap, ticketing is straightforward, you can walk the full perimeter at half-time, and the clubhouse is open before and after. It is partly aesthetic: a Step 4 ground with a covered terrace on one side, a wooden stand on another and a hedge behind the far goal has a character that no modern bowl reproduces. And it is partly that the grounds are genuinely at risk — non-league clubs fold, merge, groundshare and relocate far more often than league clubs do, so a ground visited is frequently a ground recorded.
The structure that governs all of it is set out in our guide to non-league steps, and it matters to hoppers because ground grading rules mean a club's facilities are partly determined by the step it plays at. A Step 3 ground has to meet a floodlighting and covered-accommodation standard that a Step 6 ground does not, which is why promotion in non-league so often comes with building work.
Grading also produces the single most useful piece of planning intelligence available to a non-league hopper. A club that has just won promotion is a club whose ground is about to change, usually by the following autumn, and often in ways that remove exactly the features that made it worth visiting. The wooden stand goes. The grass bank behind the goal is levelled and railed. If a ground has a reputation for character and its club is top of a Step 5 division at Christmas, that is the season to go.
Groundsharing complicates the tally further down. Two clubs playing at the same venue means one ground and two ticks under a lenient reading, or one ground and one tick under a strict one, and hoppers genuinely disagree about it. The consensus, such as it is, holds that the ground is the thing being collected, so a groundshare gives you the ground once — but plenty of people count clubs instead, and there is no referee for the argument.
What a season of hopping costs, and where the money goes
Travel, not tickets. That is the whole story of hopping economics in England, and anybody who budgets the other way round gets a shock in October.
Match tickets across the EFL are modest by the standards of top-flight football, and non-league admission is a fraction again. Premier League grounds are the expensive exception, and the £30 cap on away tickets that Premier League clubs first agreed in 2016 does nothing for a hopper sitting in a home end, where prices are set by the club and vary by fixture category.
Rail is where the money goes and where it can be reclaimed. Advance tickets released roughly twelve weeks ahead are dramatically cheaper than walk-up fares, and the entire discipline of hopping cheaply is the discipline of committing to a fixture early enough to buy them — which collides directly with broadcast selections that move dates at six weeks' notice. Railcards pay for themselves within a handful of trips. Split ticketing works on long journeys with multiple stops. Group travel discounts apply to three or more people, which is one reason hoppers travel in pairs and threes.
Driving changes the calculation for two-match days and for grounds that rail does not reach at a sensible hour, at the cost of the pint and of the flexibility to leave when you like. Our guide to train travel to English football matches goes into the timetable side in more detail.
The category most people underestimate is accommodation. A completion attempt inside one season means overnight stays in towns where the only hotel is fully booked because the away support got there first.
The costs that are not on the spreadsheet
Two more things eat money in ways people do not plan for. The first is the abandoned trip: a postponement announced after you have travelled leaves you with a non-refundable Advance ticket, a hotel booking and nothing to show for the day, and rail refund rules do not cover a football match being called off. Travel insurance does not either. This is simply a cost of the pursuit, and the only mitigation is to avoid booking non-refundable travel for January and February fixtures at grounds with a history of frozen pitches.
The second is the ground you visit twice. A hopper who arrives at a ground and finds the match switched to a neutral venue, or the fixture reduced to an academy side, has spent the day without progressing the list — and the trip has to be made again. Both happen more often than the neatness of a completion list suggests.
Set against all of that, hopping is a cheap hobby by the standards of following one club properly. A season ticket at a Premier League club plus away travel costs considerably more than a season of one-off visits to League Two and non-league grounds, which is a comparison worth making before assuming the pursuit is an indulgence.
Getting a ticket as a neutral at an English club
Most EFL clubs will sell you a home-end ticket without asking a single question. That is the baseline, and it holds for the large majority of fixtures across the three divisions.
The exceptions cluster in predictable places. Derbies and other matches classified as higher risk are frequently restricted to season ticket holders and members, sometimes with a minimum purchase history attached. Sold-out fixtures obviously close to general sale. Clubs with waiting lists for season tickets run priority windows that exhaust the allocation before a general sale ever opens. And a handful of clubs restrict away-end sales to supporters with a verified connection, which does not stop a hopper — you simply sit at home — but does mean that turning up at the away turnstile with a card is not the plan.
Three practical rules cover almost everything. Buy from the club, not from a resale site: unauthorised resale of football tickets in England and Wales is a criminal offence under section 166 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, which is unusual among sports and catches out visitors who assume the secondary market works here as it does elsewhere. Buy early, because restrictions tighten as a fixture approaches rather than loosening. And read the away-supporter clause in the club's terms, since sitting in the wrong end is grounds for ejection even when you were only there for the ground.
If a club's general sale is closed, a membership is often the cheapest route in — a small annual fee that unlocks a purchase window ahead of the public. For higher-profile grounds, the mechanics in our guide to buying Premier League tickets apply in full.
Recording visits, and the clubs that verify them
The Ninety Two Club asks members to have watched a first-team competitive fixture at every current league ground, and it is the recognised body for the achievement in England. Verification rests on the honour system backed by evidence, which in practice means a shoebox or a spreadsheet.
What hoppers keep varies wildly. The traditionalists keep programmes, and a run of matchday programmes going back thirty years is a genuine historical record — our piece on matchday programmes covers why they became a collectable in the first place. Ticket stubs served the same purpose until digital ticketing removed them, which is a real loss to the pursuit and one hoppers complain about with some justification. A screenshot of a barcode is not a souvenir.
The modern answer is an app. Several exist that let you log a fixture, record the score and attendance and produce a map of what you have covered, and they solve the problem of the spreadsheet that lives on a laptop that died. The trade-off is that the record is now on somebody else's server.
Keep two things regardless of method: the date and the competition. A visit you cannot date is a visit you cannot defend when somebody points out that the ground you claim was under construction that season.
Hop festivals and multi-match days in England
Groundhopping as an organised activity came to England from Germany, and the festival format came with it. The principle is simple: persuade a cluster of clubs to move their kick-off times, sell a combined pass, and let a coachload of people watch four or five matches across a weekend that would otherwise have been impossible to sequence.
English festivals are almost entirely a non-league phenomenon, for the obvious reason that a Step 5 club will happily kick off at eleven in the morning and a Championship club will not. Organisers work with a league or a group of clubs, publish the itinerary months ahead, and usually build in coach transfers between grounds so nobody has to solve the parking. The clubs get a gate they would never otherwise take on a wet weekend in the middle of the season.
Beyond the organised festivals, the informal versions are constant. Bank holiday weekends produce clusters of early and late kick-offs. Midweek non-league rounds allow a seven-thirty match after a five-fifteen one within the same conurbation. Pre-season, before the league programme starts, is when the most ambitious multi-match days happen — although most hoppers do not count friendlies, which turns those days into reconnaissance rather than progress.
A word on the etiquette of a festival, since it is different from a normal match. You are one of perhaps two hundred visitors at a club whose usual crowd is a fifth of that. Buy things. The bar takings are the point.
Photography, etiquette and behaving as a neutral
Take photographs of the ground, not of the people in it. That single rule covers most of what goes wrong. Wide shots of a stand, the floodlights, the turnstile block and the view from your seat are unremarkable at any English ground; a camera pointed into a family stand is not, and stewards will treat it exactly as you would want them to treat a stranger photographing your children.
Professional-looking equipment attracts attention for a different reason. Clubs sell image rights, and a long lens can be refused entry under ground regulations even when the person carrying it has no commercial intent whatsoever. A phone is fine everywhere. A camera with a detachable lens is a conversation with a steward you may or may not win, and the answer differs between clubs.
Filming match action is restricted almost everywhere by the terms printed on the ticket, which reserve broadcast rights and prohibit recording for transmission. Nobody is going to stop you filming a goal celebration on a phone. Streaming the second half is a different matter.
Inside the ground the conventions are the ones any English supporter would recognise. Do not celebrate a goal in the home end when you have no allegiance to either side. Stand when the people around you stand and sit when they sit, in a seated area. Persistent standing in a seated block is a safety certificate issue rather than a matter of taste, and the licensed standing areas introduced in England from 2022 exist precisely to give that behaviour somewhere legitimate to happen — the detail is in our guide to safe standing.
Buy a programme and a pie. It is the cheapest possible way of paying for the privilege of being there.
Safety, segregation and the legal edges
English football has a body of law that applies at grounds and almost nowhere else, and a neutral visitor is subject to all of it. The Football (Offences) Act 1991 makes it an offence to throw objects towards the pitch, to take part in indecent or racist chanting, and to go onto the playing area without lawful authority. The Sporting Events (Control of Alcohol etc) Act 1985 governs drink on coaches and trains travelling to matches and inside grounds within view of the pitch. Football banning orders follow convictions for football-related offences and are enforced at ports as well as at turnstiles.
Segregation is the practical constraint on where a hopper can sit. At a designated match the home and away sections are separated on the safety certificate, and the sterile area between them is not a seating option. A neutral buying the cheapest available ticket can end up in a block adjacent to the away end, which on a quiet Tuesday is fine and on a local derby is not.
Read the fixture before choosing the seat. A hopper's interest is the ground, and the ground is just as visible from a quiet corner as it is from the middle of a singing section.
Late kick-offs deserve one honest warning. Small-town grounds served by an hourly bus and a station a mile away are a different proposition at ten at night in January than they are on the map, and the walk back is the part of hopping that people plan least and regret most. The interplay of evening kick-offs and travel is covered in our piece on floodlights and evening kick-offs.
Where English hoppers actually plan
The pursuit is unusually well documented for something with no governing body. Long-running forums carry threads on individual grounds — where to park, which end has the roof, whether the tea bar takes cards — and they are more accurate than any official source because they are written by people who went last month.
Fanzines and independent club sites carry the same information for their own ground and are worth reading before a first visit. Regional non-league blogs cover the Step 3 to Step 6 grounds that no national publication touches. Social media accounts dedicated to hopping post fixture lists for festival weekends and flag kick-off changes faster than the clubs do.
The best of the information is still oral. Turn up an hour early at a non-league club, stand at the bar, and somebody will tell you which three grounds within twenty miles are worth the trip and which one has a stand you should see before it comes down. That is how the good routes get passed on, and it is a large part of why people keep doing this after the ninety-second ground has been ticked.
Start with the section hub at /england for the rest of the English football guides, or the wider /sports/football pages if you want the competitions rather than the grounds.