Pubs Galore Sports Ground Guide

[Pubsignman]

Hi everyone

As someone who travels the length and breadth of the country, haplessly following my football team, I’ve always struggled to find a single source of information detailing the best pubs in the vicinity of each football ground. Planning a trip to a new ground with a few beers lined up before or after the match requires looking at lots of individual pub pages on sites like PuG, or putting faith in guides like awaygrounds.com or footballgroundguide.com which are often out of date or vague as to the type of pub they are suggesting.

I thought there might be an opportunity for PuG to create a definitive guide for travelling fans. As Conrad pointed out when I ran the idea past him, football forums often have threads discussing which away pubs are the best to visit and it would be nice if they could be pointed in the direction of this site.

My initial thinking is that we would aim to create listings for each of the 92 football league clubs, covering a variety of pubs that will appeal to all types of football fans. For example, a listing may contain options close to the ground or train station, real ale pubs, pubs with football memorabilia, pubs that can cope well with large groups or just pubs that sell cheap lager in an away-fan friendly environment. Hopefully this will help the site to promote pubs that the predominantly real ale-drinking contributors (myself included) tend not to review.

I certainly don’t have enough knowledge to compile lists of pubs for each ground, so such an enterprise would be reliant on contributions from users of this forum – being a football fan is not a requirement for would be contributors, just a bit of local knowledge of pubs in any of the various towns and cities with a league club will suffice.

I’ll leave this thread for people to discuss the idea and how it might be incorporated into the site. If there is enough interest, I’ll start another thread so that pubs can be nominated for each ground.

PSM

[RogerB]

As a member of the 92 Club I am no stranger to football grounds and I've been known to visit the occasional pub as well! I'll put my thinking hat on.

[aleandhearty]

I thought there might be an opportunity for PuG to create a definitive guide for travelling fans.

Although I'm not a footie fan, it strikes me as an excellent idea.

[Quinno]

sounds good to me - I can do Reading!

[hondo]

Most of my drinking is based around trips to fitba and horseracing. Usually try and mention any relevant information for sports fans in the review. Not going to be any help with your 92 my english grounds visited are old wembley twice, stoke city victoria ground and millwall the old den which was interesting to say the least.

[Strongers]

Sounds like an interesting project.

I can chip in with both the Bees, Arsenal and Eastbourne Borough! I think that something can be put together for clubs not known by contributors on here by using the vast array of knowledge at our disposal via the web.

I'm interested to hear some ideas of how this would actually work.

[Conrad]

The first idea would be just to think of them in the same way as areas. So we could come up with something like the areas that would allow pubs to be gathered together.

We could add more to that though, so for instance allow come sort of comment/limited review to be shown with the pubs name to illustrate why the pub is included (welcomes away fans, home fans, serves real ale).

[Al 10000]

Sounds like a great idea,

I would be willing to help out with a few i have been on about 34 league grounds but some of these were quite a while ago.

I think there should be warnings about pubs that dont welcome away fans,though i dont know how this could be done without causing grief for Conrad.

I did put a warning on a review of a pub very close to Nottingham train station that away fans were made very unwelcome here i dont know if that is the best way of doing this.

[Maldenman]

I'll assist where I can although most of my watching is at non-league grounds, although I can certainly do AFC Wimbledon, Crawley, Stevenage and Fulham.

[Farway]

Not a footie fan, so I would have no idea, clue or interest TBH, if a pub welcomes or hates away fans

That aside I could drag myself around Fratton park surroundings, not on match days though. But would have to draw the line at Fratton Station area, 'cos it is all rough and not at all suitable for a nice boy like me