How we actually research an away-day city guide

There is a particular kind of travel guide that reads like it was written by someone who has never left the airport. It tells you the city has "a rich footballing heritage" and "a vibrant nightlife scene", lists three restaurants with white tablecloths, and stops. If you're a supporter trying to work out how to get from a budget flight to the away turnstile and back to a cheap pint before the last tram, it is worse than useless.

We didn't want to build that. So the guides on this site are put together the slow way, one city at a time. It takes far longer than it looks, and here's roughly what goes into each one.

Start with the boring official sources

Every guide begins with the least glamorous part: the local transport operator's own website. What are the actual line numbers? What does a single ticket cost this year, and is there a day cap? Which zone is the ground in?

This matters more than it sounds. Get to Graz and the airport train is the S5, not the S1 you'll see repeated on half the aggregator sites — and the 12-minute ride into Hauptbahnhof is the single most useful fact for someone landing there. In Manchester, both grounds sit in the same fare zones as the city centre, so the all-zone travelcard people instinctively buy is a small waste of money every single trip. None of that comes from a tourism brochure. It comes from reading the operator's fare page and the club's own "getting here" notes, line by line, and writing down the version that's true this season.

Then read where supporters actually talk

Official sources tell you how a city is supposed to work. Forums tell you how it actually works on a matchday.

This is the part that can't be automated. We read club forums, supporters' subreddits, old matchday threads — the places where someone posts "which entrance for the away end?" and gets six replies, three of them contradictory and one of them right. That's where you learn that the away section at the Johan Cruijff ArenA is reached from Strandvliet, not the bigger Bijlmer ArenA interchange everyone defaults to; or that a pub advertised as "near the ground" quietly checks colours on European nights.

We don't take any single post as gospel. If three unrelated threads across two years say the same thing, it goes in. If it's one bloke with a strong opinion, it doesn't.

Trace the route from turnstile backwards

Where we can, we work the journey the way a visiting fan will: which station, which exit, which way to walk, how long it really takes when 40,000 other people are doing it too. The "walk from the centre" figure in each guide is meant to be the honest one — including the bit after full-time when the tram stop is rammed and walking back is genuinely faster.

Prices drift, so we date everything

A beer is not a fixed quantity. It's about €3 in Braga and closer to €7 in Lugano, and both of those numbers will be wrong eventually. So every price we quote is stamped with when we checked it. When you see "typical prices" on a guide, that's a snapshot, not a promise — but at least it's an honest snapshot with a date on it.

Why bother

Because the difference between a good away day and a miserable one is almost never the football. It's whether you knew which end you were in, whether you got fleeced on the airport transfer, and whether you found a pint somewhere you were actually welcome. That's all logistics, and logistics is exactly the thing the glossy guides skip.

We'd rather get the boring stuff right. The next few pieces will get into what supporters told us they actually want to know — which, it turns out, is not what most guidebooks think.