How to plan a football away day: the complete guide

Why away days matter

Home matches are comfortable. You know the route, you know the pub, you know where you're sitting. Away days are the opposite — unfamiliar cities, hostile crowds, questionable pies — and that's precisely why they stick in your memory longer than any home fixture ever will.

There's a reason the best songs in any club's songbook reference away trips. Travelling four hours on a Tuesday night to watch your side scrape a 1-0 in the rain is not rational behaviour. It's devotion, and it creates the kind of stories you'll still be telling in twenty years. Whether it's Newcastle fans filling up the away end at every ground in the Premier League or a handful of League Two diehards making the drive to Barrow, the away end is where the real support lives.

If you've been thinking about doing more away days — or if you've never done one and want to start — this guide covers everything you need to know.

The planning timeline: four weeks to matchday

Four weeks before

This is when the fixture becomes real. Check the date is confirmed (broadcasters move Premier League games constantly) and make sure you're free. If the match has been moved to a Sunday evening or a Friday night, your travel plans change completely. Set a calendar reminder for the ticket sale date — this is the single most important thing you can do early.

Two to three weeks before

Book travel. Trains get expensive fast in the UK — booking three weeks out instead of the week before can halve the price. If you're driving, sort the parking now. Many grounds are in residential areas where matchday parking restrictions are strict, and the club car park sells out or costs £15+. For European trips, flights booked at this stage are usually still reasonable.

One week before

Confirm your ticket, double-check the kick-off time hasn't shifted, and plan your day around the ground. Where are you eating? Where are you drinking beforehand? Is there anything worth seeing in the city? A good away day is never just ninety minutes of football — it's the full day.

Matchday morning

Check for last-minute postponements (weather, police decisions, European competition clashes). Charge your phone. Bring a portable battery if you're out all day. Screenshot your e-ticket in case signal is poor at the ground. Leave earlier than you think you need to — delays are the rule, not the exception.

Getting tickets: members schemes, general sale, and hospitality

Away tickets in English football are capped at £30 in the Premier League, which is one of the few genuinely fan-friendly policies in the modern game. The problem is not price — it's availability.

Members schemes and loyalty points

Most clubs allocate away tickets through a loyalty points system. The more away games you attend, the higher your priority for the next one. If you're starting from zero, you'll struggle to get tickets for the big fixtures — Anfield, St James' Park, the London derbies. Start with the less popular away days: midweek games, lower-profile opponents, early-round cup ties. Build your points. Within a season or two, the bigger games open up.

General sale

Some clubs release unsold away tickets on general sale a few days before the match. This is your route in if you don't have loyalty points, but it's unpredictable — popular fixtures never reach general sale, while others have spare tickets right up to kick-off. Follow your club's ticket office on social media and be ready to act fast.

Hospitality and neutral tickets

For the biggest grounds, hospitality is sometimes the only realistic option if you lack loyalty points. It's expensive — £100 to £300+ depending on the package — but it gets you in the door. Some fans buy home-end tickets as a last resort. This works, but be sensible: don't celebrate goals in the home end, don't wear colours, and accept that you're a guest in someone else's house.

Travel: train, car, or plane

Train

The default for most away days in England. Pros: you can drink, you don't have to park, and there's a social element to travelling with other fans. Cons: UK rail prices are absurd if booked late, services get cancelled without warning, and the last train home after a Saturday 3pm kick-off is often uncomfortably tight. Book an advance single as early as possible — open returns are rarely worth the premium. If the game is moved to a Sunday, check the engineering works schedule before you commit.

Car

Better for midweek games (less traffic, easier parking after dark) and for grounds outside city centres. Split the fuel cost four ways and it's almost always cheaper than the train. The trade-off is that the driver can't drink, and motorway traffic after a Saturday 3pm kick-off can turn a two-hour drive into four. Park at least a fifteen-minute walk from the ground — you'll get out faster and avoid the post-match gridlock.

Flying (European trips)

European away days are a different beast entirely. Budget airlines make it surprisingly affordable to follow your club into the Champions League or Europa League — a return to Milan or Munich can be under £100 if you book early. The key is flexibility: fly into a nearby airport if the main one is expensive, travel hand-luggage only, and treat the trip as a mini-break rather than a pure football outing. Two nights in the city, the match in the middle, sightseeing around it.

Budget breakdown: what an away day actually costs

People always ask "how much does an away day cost?" and the honest answer is: it depends entirely on what you're doing. Here are three realistic scenarios for a Premier League away day in England.

The budget day out

Ticket: £30 (PL away cap)
Train (advance single, return): £25-£50
Food and drink: £15-£25
Total: £70-£105

The standard away day

Ticket: £30
Train (off-peak return) or fuel + parking: £40-£70
Pre-match pub + food at ground + post-match pint: £30-£50
Programme or merch: £10-£15
Total: £110-£165

The European weekender

Ticket: £50-£80 (UEFA away pricing varies)
Flights: £80-£200
Hotel (two nights, budget): £80-£150 / €95-€175
Food, drink, transport in city: £60-£100 / €70-€115
Total: £270-£530 / €310-€610

The budget day out is genuinely accessible. The European weekender is a proper trip, but it's not dramatically more expensive than a weekend away anywhere else — and the football gives it a purpose that a random city break doesn't have.

What to do around the ground

The worst away days are the ones where you arrive at the ground fifteen minutes before kick-off and leave immediately after. The best ones fill the whole day.

Find the away pub. Almost every ground has one — the pub where visiting fans gather before the match. Your club's fan forums or social media will tell you which one. This is where the day starts properly: flags on the wall, songs being rehearsed, an atmosphere that builds for two hours before you even enter the ground.

Walk the area. Football grounds are often in interesting parts of cities — old industrial areas, docklands, suburbs with their own character. Anfield sits in one of the most storied neighbourhoods in English football. St James' Park is right in the centre of Newcastle, ten minutes from the Quayside. Give yourself time to see the place, not just the turnstile.

Eat locally. Skip the burger van at the ground (or don't — matchday food has its own grim charm). But if you're in a new city, eat something the city is known for. Pie and mash in London, a proper curry in Birmingham, fish and chips in any coastal town. The food is part of the memory.

Logging your away days

Here's something every seasoned away-day traveller will tell you: after five or six seasons, the matches start to blur together. You remember the big moments — the last-minute winner, the red card, the freezing Tuesday in Stoke — but the details fade. Which season was that? What was the score? Who scored?

Logging your matches solves this completely. Every away day becomes a permanent record: the date, the ground, the teams, the score, the competition. Over time, it turns into a personal history of everywhere you've been and everything you've seen.

Some fans keep notebooks. Some use spreadsheets. The simplest approach is an app built for the job. Footbeen has 472,000+ fixtures pre-loaded, so logging a match takes seconds — find the fixture, tap it, done. Your away days show up on a map, your stadium count grows, and your stats track everything from countries visited to goals seen. It turns groundhopping from a mental list into something you can actually look at and share.

Whatever method you use, the principle is the same: log the match before you go to bed that night. Tomorrow you'll remember the result. In three years, you won't remember which ground it was.

Start planning your next away day

The best away day is the next one. Pick a fixture, check the ticket sale date, book the train, and go. It doesn't have to be a European final or a top-six clash — some of the best away days happen at grounds you've never heard of, in towns you'd never otherwise visit, watching football that nobody outside the ground cares about. That's the whole point.

If you want to track every away day you take — and build a map of everywhere you've been — Footbeen is free on iOS and Android. Log your matches, watch your ground count climb, and turn your away days into a journey that's bigger than any single fixture.