AmexRuislip
Retired Spy 🕵️♂️
Gloucester City may not ring bells in the higher echelons of the footy world.
But their story does bring back memories similarly to what happened to the Albion, such like ground share and distance travelled by hardened fans.
It's a good read.
"It's like moving house 21 times a season," says joint chairman Alex Petheram. "We arrive for home games at someone else's ground in a different county, set up, play, pack up and go."
Welcome to Gloucester City, a non-league club with 136 years of history - the last 12 of which have been spent on the move since floods destroyed their Meadow Park ground.
Without a permanent home and with nowhere to store anything, Gloucester's kit man Mike Nash puts balls, bibs and cones used for training in his garden shed, while Chloe Lees, the physio, transports the treatment table for the dressing room to games in the back of her Nissan Micra.
Since 2007, the National League North club - nicknamed the Tigers - have entered into groundshare arrangements with four different clubs, their current 'home' 25 miles away from Gloucester in the Worcestershire market town of Evesham.
"You've got to be pretty committed to support a team which involves a 50-mile round trip for home games," says Dave Jones, a Gloucester fan for almost 40 years.
"Playing at another ground has made life very difficult. You lose all the supporters who might go now and again. Eventually some of your hard-core support start to drift away and find something else to do."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/49803354
But their story does bring back memories similarly to what happened to the Albion, such like ground share and distance travelled by hardened fans.
It's a good read.
"It's like moving house 21 times a season," says joint chairman Alex Petheram. "We arrive for home games at someone else's ground in a different county, set up, play, pack up and go."
Welcome to Gloucester City, a non-league club with 136 years of history - the last 12 of which have been spent on the move since floods destroyed their Meadow Park ground.
Without a permanent home and with nowhere to store anything, Gloucester's kit man Mike Nash puts balls, bibs and cones used for training in his garden shed, while Chloe Lees, the physio, transports the treatment table for the dressing room to games in the back of her Nissan Micra.
Since 2007, the National League North club - nicknamed the Tigers - have entered into groundshare arrangements with four different clubs, their current 'home' 25 miles away from Gloucester in the Worcestershire market town of Evesham.
"You've got to be pretty committed to support a team which involves a 50-mile round trip for home games," says Dave Jones, a Gloucester fan for almost 40 years.
"Playing at another ground has made life very difficult. You lose all the supporters who might go now and again. Eventually some of your hard-core support start to drift away and find something else to do."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/49803354
