The non-league football pyramid

It’s not often I go to a non-league game. It’s barely ever I go to an away game. It’s almost non-existent that I go to an away non-league game, but last Saturday I found myself singing along at Woking’s Kingfield Stadium. The relationship between a fan and a player at non-league level is something you could find in your school playground. Lads at the back of the bus were saying how they were having a pint with the captain the other night and I was thinking, you would never be on your way to Stamford Bridge and hear; “Oh yeah, remember the other night we had those drinks with John Terry? What a laugh he was. Or when we bumped into Capello outside Marble Arch tube station and we were like, ‘Orite’.”

The whole point with non-league football is that your team is your second, local and very-interchangeable team. You can go see Cambridge United one week, and Cambridge City the next and not a peep is heard. You couldn’t say, for example, “Last week I went to a cracking game at the Etihad. Roberto’s really got his team together, I hope City do really well this year. Now, how do we get to the Stretford End?” Truth is, you’d be kicked till Jerusalem and back. It also seems that at non-league level the fans can sing a song to any tune about any player. The group of around 30 I was with on Saturday sang songs to tunes as afar as ‘Old McDonalds has a farm’ to ‘ Born in the USA’.

How ever ‘non’ your local team are, I implore you to go and watch them. Trust me, you’ll be rewarded when your team march to the FA cup. The FA cup is the holy grail of non-league and it’s a sanctuary to be relished and dreamed about. The image of your team travelling to Old Trafford, Anfield or Stamford Bridge, stadiums which have seen so much football history but one day could see Jamie Jackson score a bicycle kick for Worksop Town FC in front of more people than have ever even heard of his home town. The FA cup has thrown up some of the greatest ties of all time in the past; Histon vs Leeds United, Sutton United vs Coventry, Manchester United vs Crawley, Liverpool vs Havant and Waterlooville, and on the 12th of September minnows Halifax Town will face Charlton at home, in what is unquestionably the biggest game in the clubs small history. Of course I’m with every single person in the country who doesn’t support Charlton and hope that Halifax can be associated with something more than a failed bank.

The other beauty with non-league football is that unless you are a Buddha of the Isthmian League, you haven’t a clue how good the players your signing are. This means the first match of the season has a massive sense of; “Are we gunna be any better than last season?” This obviously changes the higher up the football pyramid you go, but you’re still looking at players who only got released last year.

Non-league football in European countries is completely different. If you go to the 5th tier, Blue Square level here in England, you will find tremendous fans singing their heart out and 80% of the teams getting 1500 or more attendance figures every game. But you hop on a plane to France, Italy, or even the new hub for football worldwide,  Spain, you’ll find that at 5th tier level they will struggle to even get half that amount of people coming to their games. The British fan is a different beast to any other. For me I’d rather be singing ‘We support our local team’ in the Habbin Stand at Cambridge United than be one of the 120,000 rabid Barcelona fans jumping up and down in the Camp Nou. Any day. Well, actually, not every day. Every other day. No, scrap that, once a week I think. Hmm… actually, maybe only once a fortnight….