Believe It, Bournemouth!

How did a team from a quaint seaside town rise from the bottom of Englands lowest division to play against the big boys in the Premier League? One miracle at a time.

- Bruce Schoenfeld

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It’s a typical November day in Dorset, on England’s southern coast, except that it’s August. The wind is blowing hard from the Channel. Raindrops pelt the tourists on Bournemouth Pier. The temperature hovers in the low 50s. “Football weather,” says a man in a puffy jacket outside the AFC Bournemouth shop in Vitality Stadium. That is far from ideal for a beach resort, but you won’t hear the locals complain. They have been waiting for this season for nearly a hundred years.

Six days earlier, on Aug. 8, Bournemouth played Aston Villa in an English Premier League match. It marked the club’s first game in English soccer’s top classification in the 85 seasons in which it has competed nationally. In doing so, Bournemouth became one of the smallest towns (population:180,000) ever to play in the EPL, and Vitality the smallest venue (capacity: 11,464) to stage a Premier League event. Imagine the Toledo Mud Hens suddenly showing up in the standings with the Yankees and Red Sox, wearing their goofy cartoon hats on national television at the Big A or Safeco or Camden Yards. Then understand that Toledo has a population one-third larger than Bournemouth.  

And such superlatives—or, in this case,diminutives—tell only part of the story. The 1-0 loss to Villa culminated a journey so improbable that it pushes the limits of conventional narrative. The idea of a team advancing through England’s 92-club, four-tier league system to the EPL is surprising enough. It rarely happens, even over a generation—let alone in the span of five years. In English soccer, the same marginal sides tend to bob up and down from the top of the second highest division to the bottom of the first.