Author Todd Smith’s ‘Relegated’ Ought to be Promoted to the Premier League
THE FXBG ADVANCE THURSDAY 7/16/26 AFTERNOON READ
By Penny A. Parrish, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR
You need to know the subtitle of this book before I go any further: “One American’s Pints-and-Pies Journey from the Top to the Bottom of English Football.” In other words, a book about what we in the U.S. call soccer. Which I have never been interested in. Until this book coincided with the FIFA World Cup.
I watched a match on an airplane recently and fell asleep. To me, soccer has always seemed boring, with people running up and down a field with very little scoring—in any. Rules went over my head (and still do). But thanks to Todd Smith, I now understand the passion shown by fans around the world.
Smith works at Hiawatha Supply in Minneapolis, a landscape supply yard. He’s a blue-collar guy who loves soccer. His dad was a trainer for the Minnesota Kicks in the 1970s, and Smith grew up playing the game. What Smith really wanted to be was a writer, though, so he decided to marry his love of English football with the written word and set off on a journey that took him across the Atlantic to immerse himself in English soccer—from Premier League venues to pick-up games he found on a social media site called Footy Addicts.
“Hi, I’m Todd from America” was his opening line when he met longtime fans. He began at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in North London with the Spurs facing Burnley. In England (and Scotland), away team fans are seated in a walled-off section of the stadium, and Smith joined them there. His first match put him and his son Murph in the middle of a crowd of profane fans in a glitzy stadium. Amazing athletes, but not what he was looking for.
Next came a match with the Clapton Community Football Club (level 9) at the Old Spotted Dog in blue-collar East London. There are several levels of football in England, from the Premier League (level 1), and English Football League (levels 2-4), on down to regional and county leagues (below level 10). When teams are doing well, they can be moved to a higher league—a promotion. When things go sideways, the teams might be relegated, or dropped down a level.
What Todd discovered was that relegation affects not only the team, but the community. Funding for athletes and maintenance of the pitch dry up. Attendance goes down. Bragging rights disappear. The turnaround and climb back up the ladder can take years.
Smith learned about this firsthand by sharing pints and pies with longtime fans, athletes, and landscapers. At Clapton, he met a guy named Mick who helped maintain the football pitch. “We have to look for foxholes, fox poo, or anything that could be dangerous,” Mick explained. The men bonded over that.
In Manchester, Smith got a chance to play with a local group of Footy Addicts. At 6:30 a.m. on a cold February morning, he found himself gasping for air, chasing a player from Romania. “He wore a Barcelona kit (uniform) and had the long, thick beard of a Cuban revolutionary,” Smith writes. “He casually feasted on me for the entire hour. It wasn’t a loud mauling but more of a subtle cleaning, like a hawk delicately picking the meat off the bone of a fresh kill, one piece at a time.”
The Stockport County FC (Football Club) was riding high in their league and hoped to be promoted. Todd met several men at a pub there, and heard from a fan named Dave about his history with the club. Dave and his dad had attended matches together for decades, until Dave’s mum got sick, and his dad needed to stay home with her. But in 2019, Stockport was on the brink of securing their first title in 52 years and being promoted to the National League. By the time Dave convinced his dad to attend the match, there was only one ticket left, and it was for a wheelchair seat with an attendant. Dave talked his dad into putting his butt in a wheelchair and together they watched the win. When his dad died, Dave got permission to bury the ashes behind the goal where they had sat for years.
A chapter near the end takes place on the Isle of Lewis and Harris in the Outer Hebrides where Mother Nature makes the rules. Pitches are often next to pounding waves and 70-mile-an-hour winds. Just trying to kick the ball might bring it back into your face. Though he was from cold Minnesota, Smith writes that he nearly froze to death in the icy rain while his tour guide wore shorts.
Later, he watched a match on TV there from inside a bar where the Rangers (founded 1872, Protestant) faced the Celtic (founded 1888, Irish Catholic immigrants). The Ranger fans were on the second floor, the Celtic fans on the first. It was the most dangerous situation he faced in his entire journey.
For a year after this trip, Smith worked his old job at Hiawatha Supply during the day and wrote at night and on weekends. The labor paid off. Relegated is a tribute to much more than English (and Scottish) football. It’s about the pride of communities. It’s about the bonding of (mostly) men. It’s about the trajectory of football in England where the success or failure of a team has major consequences. It’s about support from families. It’s about good pints and hot pies. It’s really a book about love.
I think this is the first sports book I have ever reviewed—a selection by my old Minnesota Zoom book club that I never would have chosen for myself. Now I recommend it to readers everywhere who enjoy brisk, colorful writing, an underdog story, traveling from places posh to poor, and soccer itself. It’s a great prelude to the final week of the FIFA World Cup—though I’d rather watch the match at the Old Spotted Dog.
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You can read more about Todd Smith and Relegated from the publisher, Simon & Schuster, HERE.
