I’ve been to all 92 Football League grounds – these are the 5 WORST, writes OLIVER HOLT

On Tuesday night, I’ll take my place on the terraces at Harrogate Town’s Wetherby Road stadium for their match against Tranmere Rovers and, after a lifetime of trying, complete my set of each of the current 92 league grounds in the English game.

I’m a stadium nerd. I love grounds like they are people, their character and their quirks and their beauty and their architecture.

I’ve ranked my favourites from 1 to 92.

The best and the rest will come later but there are a handful I would happily never set foot in again.

92. The Den, Millwall

I’m banned from The Den at the moment, in a professional capacity anyway. I could still go in a personal capacity but, on balance, I think I’d rather not.

The Daily Mail has been told our reporters are not welcome at the club because we had the temerity to report on the horrendous challenge by Millwall goalkeeper Liam Roberts on Crystal Palace’s Jean-Philippe Mateta during the FA Cup tie at Selhurst Park a few weeks ago.

Let’s be honest about this: there are worse places to be banned from. Being banned from The Den is the football equivalent of being banned from your local abattoir.

You don’t have to be a racist, misogynistic, homophobic bloke with anger issues and a penchant for tragedy-chanting to feel at home at The Den. But it helps.

And, yes, I know Millwall are trying to rebrand themselves a ‘family club’ now and the odd Tarquin and Tabitha stray across the county lines from Blackheath and Clapham to keep it real but that just makes The Den experience even worse.

The last time I went as a supporter was 15 years ago to watch Stockport County play there and the walk from South Bermondsey station to the away turnstiles was an eye-opener.

Not that there were any problems: even at Millwall, football has moved on since the 70s. But this still felt deeply dystopian: for their own safety, away fans walk to the ground through a long wire mesh cage that seems to have no end.

It felt like embarking on a tour of Jurassic Park: you know that if the fences fail, the dinosaurs are going to take a run at you.

Inside the ground, which is modern and neat and relatively characterless, the level of hatred for visiting supporters feels unusually visceral. It’s loud. I’ll give it that. It’s primeval.

It’s unreconstructed, which can be a good thing, too, and it breeds a sense of togetherness. If medievalism is your thing, you’re in for a treat. If not, give it a miss.

91. Stadium MK, MK Dons

I know it’s a soft target but I really don’t care much for Stadium MK.

Or for MK Dons themselves for that matter, even if they are inviting supporters to redesign their club crest and rethink their name.

The club was born under a bad sign when it was jemmied out of Wimbledon and moved to Milton Keynes in 2003 and it has never been able to shake the stigma since. 

The stadium fits the club. It is a soulless, faceless, gloomy place. More than that, there is something rather forbidding about it.

Its 30,000 capacity is too big for the club it hosts and, apart from the joys of the local KFC and McDonald’s, there is little to recommend its immediate surrounds.

Its black seats lend it a sinister air, too. It’s the kind of stadium only its mother could love. And it doesn’t have a mother. Unless you want to do the 92, give it a miss.

90. Kassam Stadium, Oxford United

I feel ashamed to say it, given that it is my local club, but the best experience I’ve had at the Kassam Stadium was getting my Covid jab there during the pandemic.

When they moved, around the turn of the century, abandoning the chaotic charm of the Manor Ground in Headington and swapping it for an isolated plateau outside the city, they only completed three sides, abandoning the fourth because of rising costs.

A particularly bitter wind blows in off the car park behind one of the goals and, from the main stand – in fact, from every stand – there is a magnificent and uninterrupted view of the Frankie and Benny’s in the mini retail park that abuts the ground.

The empty end kills a lot of the atmosphere, too, although the Oxford fans are to be commended for the noise they do generate given they have endured a generation of being stuck here.

Firoz Kassam still owns the stadium but not the club. That kind of separation always spells trouble.

Oxford are hoping to move to a new stadium to the north of the city in a couple of years’ time. It can’t come soon enough.

89. London Stadium, West Ham United

I don’t even like calling it the London Stadium. It’s the Olympic Stadium but it suits the David Sullivan-Karren Brady rebrand of the club to give it the capital’s name.

It was a great athletics arena and home to a whole host of golden memories at London 2012 but it’s a dog’s dinner of a football ground.

It’s also a monument to much that is wrong with the top flight of the English game: a surrender of identity and tradition as collateral damage in the owners’ pursuit of profit.

Walking to it, sadly, feels a bit like walking through a wasteland and its odd configuration inside harms the atmosphere even though the fans are right up there with the best in the country.

The old stadium at Upton Park was intimate and raucous and intimidating. The London Stadium is nothing like that.

The owners spent a lot of time congratulating themselves on the deal they did to move to the new ground: they’re the archetypes of football owners who know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

88. Hillsborough, Sheffield Wednesday

I used to think of Hillsborough as one of the cathedrals of the English game but since the disaster that claimed the lives of 97 Liverpool fans in 1989, it is hard to get past its association with so much death and despair and heartbreak and betrayal of supporters.

I know, obviously, that this would punish Wednesday fans who do not deserve to be punished for something that had nothing to do with them but Hillsborough, and its Leppings Lane End in particular, has such a cursed legacy that part of me thinks it should have been demolished and that the club should have moved elsewhere.

Even in the last couple of years, fans of Newcastle United and Leeds United have reported serious safety concerns in the Leppings Lane End.

I recognise the flaws in my argument about demolishing the stadium, or part of it, and the emotions it provokes on all sides so perhaps it’s just enough to say I’ll never feel the same about the stadium as I once did.

Visiting it now feels like an intrusion.