The story that will reconcile you with football is in the English sixth division (and was written by a Spaniard)

There are stories that deserve to be told. There are stories that captivate, that generate a feeling of almost unbreakable attachment, of empathy with the characters.. If football also sneaks into the equation, the cocktail is explosive. A similar feeling is what the journalist Nacho González (Madrid, 1995) had when chance took him to Maidstone to recount the rise and fall of the city’s team: Maidstone United. He has done it in Nomad United (Panenka and La Media Inglesa, 2024), a work in which there are improbable anecdotes and diverse characters.

The book is the culmination of a process that began with a simple joke. After publishing a video about the club in La Media Inglesa, he proposed a challenge: get on the dinosaur at the city train station if they reached a certain number of visits. The hearing was never met, but in return he received a message on Twitter from one of the players, as well as the author of the epilogue of this book, Sam Bone, in which he invited him to meet the challenge.

“When Sam wrote to me is the moment when the story captivated me,” González says in conversation with El Confidencial. “When I received your message, I realized that we had a story, and that it was also coming to us. It was a story we could make our own. It was then that I started researching and realized that there are many things that have not been told about Maidstone in Spanish. But not in English either. “The club and its people had gone through obstacles and incredible situations.”

Sam, without Hispanic roots, He spoke fluent Spanish, justified by his addiction to two audiovisual products.: The one that is coming and The English Media. Likewise, he had gone through different categories of English and Irish football and had overcome testicular cancer. His story was curious to say the least.

The refoundation of the club

“I realized that there was material for more than a report when I discovered Sam’s biography. The day he wrote to me, I researched at home for three hours. It is true that it was later, when visiting the place, when I discovered many more things, but it was already reason enough to move around and talk to people. When the history of the club and the player intersected, I saw that he was perfect,” explains González.

This is the main motif of the book: the intertwined stories of club and player. In fact, a strong dose of chance has made it possible. “Sam was at a point in his life where he didn’t know if he was going to give up football. Maidstone had changed coaches just when he was barely taking center stage, but he was not going to show up for the first training session because he preferred to stay at home sleeping and no alarm was set. As he was sleeping at his uncle’s house, his cousin woke him up by entering the bedroom to get a jacket. Finally, he went to training, the coach liked him and he stayed at the club.”

Maidstone has a particular idiosyncrasy, partly as a dormitory city for London. “They can’t help but live in the shadow of the capital, because the tentacles reach. If you talk to people from there, you realize that many work in London because it is an hour away by train. There are citizens who are from Chelsea, from Arsenal …But Maidstone has an advantage: that there is only Maidstone United, that’s why “When the club disappeared, everyone gathered to re-found it.”

The visit to the stadium

The documentation and interviews for the preparation of the book became an arduous task. González chatted with Maidstone fans, most of them over 50 years old. “They were the ones who could tell me what happened in the 80s, in the 90s… They were people who never talked about the quality of football they were going to see, because they remembered things that their friends had said, that had happened in the stands… They had a highly developed ability to laugh at themselves.”

González has told numerous stories in La Media Inglesa, but why was he caught with this one and not others? “Because of the comeback component. It is very difficult to stay afloat with the number of clubs in England. Maidstone can boast of being the one that has fallen the lowest [estuvieron en la Décima División] after being refounded and the one that has been without a stadium the longest. That made the story very powerful. It was an opportunity, as I say in the book, that you don’t know how many times you will have in your career as a journalist.. “As many factors came together at the same time, we grabbed it and didn’t let it go.”

Their trips to Maidstone had involved several things: walks around the city, talks with members of the club, visits to Sam… The only thing left to do was watch a game at the stadium. “I only had one bullet, in March, when the book was already being developed at that time, because there was no Premier League that weekend and I didn’t have to comment on any matches on DAZN. “I forced myself to go and it was a very important experience for the book.”

Taxis instead of buses

Maidstone was nicknamed last century the Manchester United of the Non-League, a pseudonym that has now disappeared. “It was in the days before the disappearance. They called it that because the owner put a lot of money into making them stand out for their sophistication. They say that they went to the games in suits, in first class on trains or in a spectacular bus.”.

One of the anecdotes has to do with the bus. On the way to a game, they had a flat tire and someone else came to pick them up with the bad luck that they had a flat tire again, and they almost didn’t make it to the match, with constant glances at the clock. Since then, for a time, they went to the meetings by taxi. “Now they go by bus when they have to go to distant places, taxis are over”.

The club led a particular remodeling of its stadium: it sold the land to generate income, pay off debts and build a new one. The problem? That they bought some plots on which construction was never authorized. “It is a story of negligence on the part of their owners. In England, many of the disaster stories have to do with the teams getting rid of their most important asset: the stadium. The owners were wrong, but the city council was even worse, because he did not let them build almost anywhere in the city, citing problems with the neighbors. In those places, after the fact, supermarkets and complexes were built that also contradicted the regulations.. “This is an example of the fans’ resilience, because they dreamed for more than 20 years of recovering their stadium.”

Sympathy for Maidstone

Maidstone appeared on the scene last year because they advanced rounds in the FA Cup until reaching the round of 16 as the club in the lowest division (the sixth). “They probably became the nicest team in the tournament. Everyone was waiting for me to advance. But there were also fans of his category waiting for them to lose to laugh at them. “English football cannot be understood without rivalries.”

In short, this is a book that also reflects the purity of modest English football, even if there are changes that threaten it. “Many times the big teams manage to impose their agenda. One of them is the parties of replay in the FA Cup, because they have managed to ensure that there are none from the first round onwards”. Despite this detail, there are still puritans who continue to support those humble people who sometimes defeat the giants. Or that they see mills, as is perhaps the case with Maidstone.