Groundhopping is the habit of collecting football grounds instead of results. You go somewhere you have never been, you watch whatever happens to be on, and you add the place to your list. Who wins is a detail. The point is that you stood on that particular bit of terracing, on that particular grey Tuesday, and now it's yours.

It costs less than you think, it needs almost no planning, and there is very likely a game within half an hour of your house this weekend that you could walk into for the price of a pizza. Here's how to start.

What groundhopping actually is

Groundhopping is visiting new football grounds as a hobby in its own right, with the match as the excuse rather than the point. Some people count grounds, some count countries, some just want to see a floodlight pylon they've only ever seen in photos.

The word itself is fairly young. It surfaced in the late 1980s among fans in Germany, then spread through the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Norway, and more recently into Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea and Singapore. The behaviour is much older than the label. The 92 Club, still the most recognised groundhopping institution in England, was founded back in 1978 by Bristol Rovers supporter Gordon Pearce and 38 others, long before anyone thought to give the thing a name.

What hooks people is usually the ordinariness of it. A clubhouse that smells of chip fat and Deep Heat. A tannoy announcer who reads out a raffle result at half time. Somebody's dad on the gate who says "enjoy the game, mate" and means it.

Where to go first: pick something small and close

Your first ground should be non-league, inside an hour of home, and picked on a whim. There's no ticket ballot, no membership scheme, no away-end allocation. You turn up, you pay at the turnstile, you walk in.

England makes this absurdly easy. For the 2026-27 season the FA placed 996 clubs across 48 divisions, 19 leagues and six steps of the National League System, and that's before you count the county leagues below it. Most of those clubs play somewhere you could reach on a bus.

Cup football is the best entry point because the fixtures are unfamiliar to everyone, including the regulars. Look at ONTOUR's upcoming fixtures for Tuesday 22 September and the midweek FA Cup qualifying ties give you Chippenham Town against Yate Town, Dorking Wanderers against Southall, Farnham Town against Cirencester Town and Truro City against Merthyr Town, all kicking off at 18:45. Four ties, four grounds most people have never set foot in, all on the same evening. Pick the one you can get home from.

What a groundhopping day actually costs

Admission at Steps 3 to 5 of the pyramid typically runs from £8 to £14 for an adult, according to The Non-League Football Paper's 2026 breakdown of away-day costs. Go a step higher and it climbs, but not far: Brackley Town in the National League North list 2026-27 adult entry at £18 bought online in advance or £20 at the ticket office on the day, with concessions at £13 and £15, and under-16s free.

The travel is what actually moves the number. The same breakdown puts club coach travel at £10 to £25 a head, advance rail returns to a ground 100 miles away at £25 to £50 (and roughly double that if you leave it late), and a 200-mile round trip by car at £30 to £40 in fuel, which stops hurting the moment you split it four ways. A programme is £2 to £4, and a meat pie with a cup of Bovril for under £5 is still achievable at this level.

Add it up and a proper away day more than 100 miles from home lands between £50 and £80 per person. A local hop is a different animal entirely. Bus fare, a tenner on the gate, a pie, and you're out the other side having spent less than a cinema ticket and a large popcorn.

One warning worth taking seriously: advance rail tickets are non-refundable and non-league fixtures move. Pitch inspections, cup replays and rearranged dates turn a £40 advance single into a £40 donation. Book the cheap train for grounds you can reach without one.

What to check before you travel

Check five things, and you'll almost never have a wasted trip.

  • The kickoff time and date, on the club's own channels, the day before. Midweek replays, postponements and pitch inspections are normal at this level, and the club's social feed updates faster than anywhere else.
  • Whether tickets are cheaper in advance. Plenty of clubs now price online entry below the gate price, the way Brackley do.
  • How you're getting back. Non-league grounds are often a twenty-minute walk from the nearest station, in the dark, in the rain, and the last train goes earlier than you'd like.
  • Where away fans stand, if anywhere. Below the National League, segregation is frequently nonexistent and you can simply walk round to whichever side has the better view.
  • What's actually at the ground. Tea bar, bar, programme seller, covered standing. This is the sort of detail groundhoppers have been swapping for decades, and the tradition goes back to Duncan Adams' Football Ground Guide, which paired directions by road and rail with recommended pubs, record and average attendances, and programme prices.

Keeping a record of the grounds you've done

Start your list on the first ground, not the tenth, because reconstructing it from memory later is genuinely miserable. Ask anyone who has tried to work out whether a 2009 pre-season friendly counted.

How you keep it is a matter of taste. Some people keep the programme and the ticket in a shoebox. Some keep a spreadsheet with a column for the weather. Plenty now use a groundhopping app so the list lives in their pocket and the photos attach themselves to the right fixture. We built ONTOUR's ground tracking for exactly that, and the stadium directory currently holds 416 venues worldwide, 133 of them in the UK. Crucially it runs well past the professional 92, so Aggborough at Kidderminster sits in there alongside Hayes Lane, Gander Green Lane, the Recreation Ground at Altrincham, Moss Rose and Holker Street.

If you want a finish line to aim at, the 92 is the obvious one: the current ground of every Premier League, Championship, League One and League Two club. The qualification rules carry more edge cases than most people expect, and the set of grounds is redefined every summer, so it is worth reading them properly on the 92 Club page before you count anything as ticked.

The culture, and how not to be a nuisance

Groundhoppers are welcomed at non-league grounds because the money matters and the interest matters more. A Step 4 club running on volunteers notices an extra thirty on the gate. The unwritten etiquette is light: pay at the gate, buy a programme, spend something at the tea bar, and don't perform a loyalty you don't have. Nobody minds a neutral. Everybody minds a neutral pretending to be a lifer.

Talk to people. The bloke next to you will tell you which of his centre-halves can't head a ball, which of his old players went off to the EFL, and where the good chip shop is. That conversation is the reason people keep doing this, far more than the ticking off of names.

There's a calendar to it too. Non-League Day, started in 2010 by James Doe, is deliberately scheduled for a weekend in an international break so fans of bigger clubs have nothing else on, and the 2026 edition fell on Saturday 28 March. Hoppers also build their own challenges, the silliest and best example being the four Swindon Town supporters who did all 92 grounds in 72 hours in 2015 for charity.

You don't need any of that to begin. Find a fixture, get on a bus, pay at the turnstile, and write the ground down before you forget it. Then do it again in a fortnight somewhere else. Six months of away days later you'll have a list you're quietly proud of, a phone full of floodlights, and a far better answer to "what did you do at the weekend" than most people manage. Ours is over on the groundhopping hub if you want somewhere to put yours.

Club and division counts from the FA's National League System allocations for 2026-27. Prices from The Non-League Football Paper's 2026 away-day breakdown and Brackley Town's published 2026-27 tariff. Venue figures from ONTOUR's public venues API on 22 September 2026. Written with AI assistance and edited by a human before publication.