Being a football fan is easy when your team is playing at home in the sunshine. True fandom is forged on the long, grueling bus rides across the country to support your team in hostile territory. Page 30 of the September 2013 matchday programme shows exactly how FC Groningen actively cultivates this “away day” mentality in its youngest supporters through the Junior Club.
The main article on the page is an enthusiastic invitation: “FanTour naar Vitesse, ga je mee??” (FanTour to Vitesse, are you coming??). The club organizes a dedicated, supervised bus trip for kids to travel to Arnhem for an away fixture. “At home games, the Euroborg is full of FC supporters, but the FC desperately needs your support at away games too!” the text reads. For just 30 euros, kids get the bus ride, a match ticket, and snacks.
This is a brilliant piece of fan engineering. By organizing safe, fun away trips for children, the club is normalizing the culture of traveling for the team. Alongside this announcement, the programme immortalizes the names of the kids who participated in the matchday line-up, including Patrick Vonk, Ruben Koen Zigterman, and Rayhan van Dijken, ensuring their loyalty is cemented in print.
A Look into the Future
The kids who boarded that FanTour bus to Vitesse in October 2013 are now adults in their twenties. The seeds of loyalty planted on those supervised bus rides have blossomed into hardcore fandom. Today, many of those former Junior Club members are the ones organizing their own carpools and train trips to away games across the Netherlands, forming the vocal backbone of the traveling Groningen support. The club understood in 2013 that if you teach a child to love the away day, you have won a fan for life.