Long Journeys, Service Station Sing-a-Longs and Flares: The Chaos and Cost of Away Days

6am starts, frustrating traffic jams, unforeseen late night motorway closures and over-priced food with little taste (I’m thinking of you, Barnsley, with your odd tasting pizza rolls). A combination of things that those who regularly attend away games have come to know and, in a masochistic sort of way, have come to love. Let’s be honest, unless it’s for a trip, how many of us enjoy getting up so early on a Saturday?

There’s something addictive about away games that is difficult to describe to non-football fans, who cannot understand why a Tuesday night trek to Blackpool to sit in an uncovered stand in the pouring rain for two hours would be fun. Or how a sing-a-long between Foxes fans in a service station late on a Tuesday night after a loss left me with goosebumps.

Away fans by large are mentalists. In a league of their own you could argue and now glorified by the various social media accounts and forums that promote just away days. Having been an away day fan for a while, I sort of understand it. You feel a togetherness and possibly an ‘us against the world’ feel that you just wouldn’t see or experience at a home game. The support is usually upped a notch, louder, more energetic. More and more, fans in this country are trying to rival the displays demonstrated across Europe with tifos and flares. While we haven’t achieved, and likely won’t due to health and safety, pyrotechnics displays of other clubs, flares are on the rise again.

This is regardless of the form the club is in, or if you only just got over a long trip after a heavy defeat three nights earlier, you’re raring to go again the following weekend. It’s as if the result is just a side note for the day itself rather than the main attraction. Having been an away fan for Leicester when we won just 6 out of 23 away games under Eriksen in the 2010-11 season, losing 13 of them to compound a generally mediocre season. You have to believe that there is something about an away game that’s unrivalled to any other experience as a fan otherwise why would we torture ourselves with away losses of 6-1 and 4-3, both just four days apart?

Of course, away trips in the Premier League are quite different to those that I recall so fondly from both the Championship campaigns and our season in League One. While those seasons included some of my most memorable away trips (the conga at Southend and eight hour journey home from a snowy Ipswich), the conditions were somewhat different. Being in the top flight ensures that at no away game do you risk being completely unsheltered from the weather, and the quality of food and drink is usually better. The main difference though is, as expected, in the cost of the games.

There was an article on the site earlier this week about the cost of following your time for either all matches or you could filter it just for away games based on where you live and who you support. It calculated that if I were to travel to every away game in the Premier League this season to watch my beloved Leicester, it would cost me over £500 in fuel alone so without tickets and food added on. While Leicester’s cost/distance is the 2nd lowest in the Premier League, it’s Newcastle fans who have the most amount of travelling to do should they want to go to each away game. They’d have to cover nearly 9000 miles compared to our 4150.

On average a Premier League fan will pay £1,035 to travel to all of their away games. You’d be forgiven for wondering just who can afford this on top of a season ticket and the general cost of living but Leicester have yet to fail selling out our away allocation for a league match this season. I genuinely can’t recall the last time that we haven’t taken the full allocation.

This weekend when Leicester travel to Carrow Road to take on Norwich, both sets of fans will be supporting the Football Supporters’ Federation campaign, ‘Twenty’s Plenty for Away Tickets’. October 3rd marks their next nationwide protest against match-day prices and every Premier League club as well as many others are backing it.

I know what some people have said, why do fans not just boycott where prices are unreasonable, that way things would have to change. As a student who scraped money together to ensure that I didn’t miss a single match for two seasons, it’s not that easy. If you support your club then you want to be there and ultimately clubs and the various footballing bodies know this and benefit from it. You could even throw in the word exploit.

Swansea City made headlines pre-season when they announced that they would be capping the cost of away tickets to £20. While Leicester haven’t got a blanket cap, the club do a lot to help fans and are currently looking at other ways. They seem to have implied in a recent fan forum that they don’t want do a flat subsidy as this puts money into the pockets of other football clubs rather than our own fans, so I am interested to see what suggestions they come up with.

For Saturday’s game at Norwich, the actual cost of a ticket to a Leicester fan for the game is £45. The club are subsidising that to make it a slightly more reasonable £35. On previous occasions as well as reducing the cost the club have laid on free coaches, food vouchers that can be spent at the away club and even given out free breakfasts and t-shirts to those attending. They’re certainly trying to ease the costs for us.

Cup matches on the other hand, have the right idea. Capital One Cup matches fall on Tuesdays, couple this with costs, work and travel and your attendances will likely suffer. Whereas a crowd of maybe 18,000 were expected for the visit of West Ham, it was over 21,000 due to cheaper tickets, around £15 for adults. Hull announced prices for the next tie which takes place towards the end of the month and have set a price of just £10 for adults. This should give more Leicester fans an incentive to make the awkward Tuesday night trip up there. Although most Premier League clubs can sell out the average league game without lowering to these kind of prices perhaps they should consider the revenue they could make on food, drink and merchandise if they did. That in itself is a proven sales strategy.

I’m nowhere near the first to say or suggest it, but should clubs and the footballing bodies in this country not look to emulate the German model? The average season ticket in Germany is half the price and average cost of a ticket for a cheap area comes out close to £10 over there where it’s around £30 here. While a season ticket at Leicester is fairly reasonable for 19 Premier League matches, I’m aware of fans who only pay slightly less to watch League One matches each week. Surely something has to give before the majority of fans are simply outpriced and it becomes no longer a choice to pay the high prices, but an impossibility?

It would be tragic to lose the chaos and culture of an away day. I can think of few feelings that rival scoring a last minute equaliser or winner away from home. The adrenaline and excitement accompanies you for the entire journey home, even if this means dealing with a long trip home and a diversion into the middle of nowhere due to a motorway closure! It’s something that anybody who loves football should experience at least once. Though don’t count on your knees or voice being in tact the next day.

October sees the Foxes play four matches, three of which are away from home. Starting with Norwich this Saturday, Southampton after the international break and concluding with West Brom at the end of the month. The players and Ranieri have been very vocal about how important the support from our fans has been since the start of the season. Arguably so far our home form has been better but this is why the away support will be even more crucial.