The final whistle of Rochdale’s encounter with Charlton Athletic this Saturday will signal more than the end of just another League One football match. It will also mark the conclusion of a remarkable odyssey for one football fan. Barring disaster, Ed Wood, a Derby County supporter, will leave Spotland having reclaimed and smashed the Guinness world record for attending a match at each of England’s 92 league grounds in the shortest time. This modern day, football-loving Phileas Fogg will have gone around the stadiums in 189 days.
Truth be told, it is actually 93 league grounds. To mix things up a bit, Shielfield Park, the home of Berwick Rangers, an English side from Northumberland who compete in Scotland’s League Two, was included in the itinerary of Mike Jones and Bob Wilson, who set the original record of 264 days in 1968-69.
The record captured Wood’s imagination when he read about it as a seven-year-old and he obliterated it in the 1991-92 season by attending a league match in each of the 93 stadiums in 231 days.
Three years later a sports journalist named Ken Ferris shaved six days off Wood’s record, but this weekend in Rochdale the Leeds-based 51-year-old will reclaim his crown as football’s most peripatetic supporter. It will have cost him £5,500, on top of the four months’ salary he sacrificed by taking unpaid leave from his job with Lloyds Bank to embark on this peculiar wheeze.
One obvious question springs to mind: why? “When Ken beat me I heard about it on the day of my sister’s wedding and it didn’t bother me,” says Wood. “I thought it was great. I’m not doing it to get it back, because even if he hadn’t beaten me I’d have done it again and I plan to do it again in another 25 years when I’m 75. I’ve had such good fun doing it.
“I’ve met loads of new people, I’ve done loads of stuff I’ve never done before. It’s always nice to have a chance to pause from real life and reflect and do something different.”
It is something different, all right. Since 14 August (Bristol Rovers v Oxford United), Wood has averaged one league match pretty much every two days, driving the length and breadth of the country adhering to a timetable painstakingly drawn up after the summer release of the football fixtures and constantly amended subject to the whims of the television schedulers.
He has seen Southampton play six times in six grounds and in one week he drove from Leeds to Reading on a Friday before hitting Bristol, Plymouth, Swansea, Leeds, Sunderland, Norwich and Rotherham. “It was absolutely crazy,” he says.
If you did not know better, a cursory look through the photos on Wood’s mobile phone suggests he is some sort of deviant with a fetish for middle-aged men wearing high-viz tabards. To prove he has visited each ground, he keeps his match ticket and asks a random steward to pose for a selfie with him and sign an official form from Guinness World Records before and after each game.
The swipe system means he does not always have a paper ticket but most clubs are happy to provide one on request. “Most, but not all,” he seethes quietly. “Arsenal charged me an extra tenner on top of what I’d already paid.”
Otherwise, his experiences have been largely positive. “Everybody’s been really nice to me,” he says. “It’s not about the games, it’s about who you go with. Of the 93 games, I’ll have been to them with 60 people and 33 I’ve just turned up to on my own. But I’ve been tweeting about it and random people have just met me at grounds and sat with me and told me about their teams, their players, their clubs, themselves. I’ve enjoyed hearing all that; hearing what state various clubs are in, whether it’s Hartlepool or Millwall or Crewe or whoever.”
As astonishing as it might sound, Wood has a girlfriend. Samantha gave him her blessing to take on the record when he was nursing a broken arm from a bike-riding accident and tentatively suggested it on the day the Tour de France passed by their Yorkshire home in 2014. “I met this guy, Simon Hood, who had written a book about cycling to every single York City game,” he recalls. “So it’s a sunny day, the barbecue’s on the go, Tour de France going past and I thought: ‘I’d love to do it again’, and she said OK. To be fair to her, she’s not kicked off. We’ve had three big arguments, but that’s probably less than normal because I’m never there to argue with her.”
Modern technology, specifically mobile phones, the internet and satnav, along with Sky’s determination to show as much football as possible throughout the week, mean that Wood’s record-breaking heroics have been a lot easier this season than they were 25 years ago.
“Back then I was doing it while holding down a full-time job and couldn’t even drive when I started,” he says. “I passed my test about 12 games in but because I was so inexperienced I ended up crashing about five times.”
Once Spotland is ticked off his list and he has reclaimed the record, he was hoping to add a flourish by adding a 94th ground that has proved to be a controversial bone of contention. Park Hall, the stadium of the Welsh Premier League club The New Saints, is located in the English county of Shropshire, but unlike the home of Berwick Rangers, potential record-breakers are not required to go there.
“I was on Colin Murray’s old show on Talksport and I got some TNS fans trolling me because it wasn’t on my itinerary,” says Wood. “They were really, genuinely upset so I went to Guinness World Records and asked if I needed to include them, but they said I only needed to do what the two blokes who originally created the record did.
“I’m raising money for a prostate cancer charity and their chairman said he’d throw £500 in the kitty if I included them. Although it isn’t needed to be part of the record, I would have gone the next weekend if they were at home, because I’m going to Shrewsbury for a few days with my girlfriend once this is all over.”
TNS, having recently broken Ajax’s 44-year-old record for consecutive wins by securing a 27th successive victory, no longer need the bonus publicity from the presence of their fellow record-breaker and that is just as well as their next home game is not until 4 March. Instead, Wood’s girlfriend will have his undivided attention for the first weekend since mid-August, which for the sake of their relationship is probably just as well.
More information on Ed Wood’s Prostate Cancer UK fundraising effort at www.justgiving.com/fundraising/edwood93challenge
