Anyone who has seen off their 40th birthday will remember what real football grounds used to be like, there was none of the luxury we are used to now, in fact looking back part of the romance of football was the conditions you had to endure to watch your team week in week out.

 

Im guessing as well that those of us who remember the feeling of being part of a massed rank of football fans swaying backwards and forwards sometimes wish we could go back to those days instead of the sterile conditions we have now.

 

Yes its great now being actually able to go to the toilets without wading through pools of p**** BUT you could only "enjoy" the toilets if you could get off the terrace to get to them, most of the time you didnt have a hope in hell of getting anywhere near them and I know for a fact that the stories of people just relieving themselves on the unlucky lad in front of them are really true !!

 

Food and drink? People take it for granted now that every ground will have fairly decent catering facilities and people who whinge about them nowadays should be transported back to the days when there was no such thing as catering in the football ground, the best you could get was the burger van outside.

 

Alcohol in the ground ?? Again, we now take it for granted that you can get a pint at half time, back then the only way the average fan could get a drink was smuggling it in, and that was a very dodgy game as nearly every one got frisked in them days.

 

So taking just the couple of things above into account what was great about the old style football grounds then ?

 

The answer is you knew you were part of something real, you knew that the people around you wanted to be there, they were willing to put up with the abysmal conditions because it was their team and they accepted that it was all part of the deal and that feeling when your team scored and you got swept up and down and around the terraces made up for everything.

 

Unfortunately the above will never be repeated but what we can at least is look back at what the grounds looked like back then before they were in some cases replaced by flat pack stadiums or the original grounds being so heavily redeveloped that its now unrecogniseable from the "good old days".

 

What I've done on this site is try to capture some of the old images of the football grounds that fans used to call home, hopefully these will bring back memories for some of us and to the others who werent "lucky" enough to be around then perhaps give them an idea of what they missed !! 

 

Please bear in mind it is a fairly new site and with so many teams to do it will take me a while to add them all, I will get round to your team at some point though so please keep popping back.