The 54-year adventure that has seen one football fanatic visit 2,689 stadiums

Martin Macdonald

• 7 Apr 2026 05:30 CDT
• 4 min read

News

This week, one man completed his quest to visit every professional league and non-league stadium in England.

In 1981, 17-year-old Tony Incenzo became the youngest person in history to visit all 92 grounds in the football league.

Over the course of the next 54 years, he put a plan in place to visit not only all the professional stadiums, but every non-league one, too.

He officially completed that odyssey on Easter Monday when he watched Fulwood Amateurs play at home against Thornton Cleveleys in the North West Counties First Division North.

"It's just overwhelming emotion", Tony says, following a guard of honour given to him by the teams.

"To finally do it, on a glorious sunny day, with a lovely green pitch, is a great relief."

Incenzo has kept a scrapbook detailing his adventures and it includes the date, fixture and scoreline and goalscorers of every single game he has ever attended. This includes matches from his beloved Queens Park Rangers and, remarkably, even though he travels the length and breadth of the country to see other games, he hasn't missed a single minute of a QPR fixture since 1973.

Across various iterations of the Football League system, as well as Scottish football and other European competitions, he has attended 2,689 stadiums spread across 5,804 matches in 54 years.

"I get as much enjoyment from going to humble non-league clubs as I do big showpiece games," he admits.

"You can turn up at a non-league game 10 minutes before kick-off, park outside, pay your admission, stroll around the ground, stand wherever you want, buy food and drink - and probably have change from about £15.

"I've been to places that I would never ever visit if it wasn't for football - lovely little villages in Devon, remote seaside spots up in the North East and so on.

"It's just great fun to travel all around the country and meet the people - people are what make a football trip special."

Tony often arrives at matches two hours before kick-off so he can buy a programme and talk to the locals to get a taste of what that particular fixture means to the home fans.

It has been estimated that he has watched over half a million minutes of football in person - 522,360 minutes, to be exact.

How does this impact his personal life, you ask?

Well, Tony is married with a seven-year-old daughter and he does confess that he almost missed his daughter's birth due to his exploits

"I actually almost missed my daughter being born", he confessed.

"My wife went into hospital six days beforehand, so I slept on a chair in the hospital for five nights and all the time I'm thinking, 'QPR are at home in a few days'.

"In the end, my wife had the baby, then I ran out of the hospital into my car and made it to Loftus Road just in time."

Tony was going to be presented with a special trophy by QPR after not missing a home match in 50 years.

The 62-year-old watches football games whenever he gets the chance - even if it means going to a prison.

"I got a special invitation to go inside Feltham Prison in 2011 to watch a match as the only spectator," he says.

"The prison team was in a league alongside companies with shift workers and obviously couldn't play away games!

"I had to get there an hour before kick-off, had my phone taken off me, got searched and then three prison guards took me and the away team through to a nice little ground in the prison with proper dugouts.

"It was just after the London riots so the prison team was full of good young players and they won the match.

"On the way out, some of the prisoners came out of their cells and started lambasting the away side for losing the game.

"One of their guys replied 'lost the match but at least we're going home, lads' and we were then rushed out of there very, very quickly."

It doesn't look like the scrapbook will be retiring even though Tony has visited all these stadiums, however, as he wants to travel around Europe more and around the entire world, creating additional memories.