Why we built The Concourse

Three o’clock on a Saturday.

For a lot of us that’s the most reliable thing in the week. The world outside can be frightening and it rarely makes sense, but at three o’clock you know where you’ll be and who you’ll be with. Your dad. Your sister. Your best mate. The same faces in the same seats, riding the same ups and downs together. Football is a shared emotional journey, and most of the people we’ve shared it with are the people we love. That’s not a small thing. That’s the whole thing.

It’s the best game in the world. We’re not going to pretend that’s a balanced take — it isn’t, and we don’t care. Loved on every continent, in every language, by more people than anything else humans have ever made up. You only have to look at who stops to watch a World Cup to know there’s nothing else like it.

And here’s the strange magic of it: football divides us, and then it turns round and brings us together. A Middlesbrough fan and a Southampton fan might have been at each other’s throats a fortnight ago. Come the summer they’re in the same shirt, screaming the Three Lions on, arms round each other. Same game that splits us down club lines is the one that unites a whole country behind eleven players. We don’t know anything else that does both.

Football is memories. The goal you saw with someone who’s gone now. The away day that went wrong in every way except the one that mattered. The relegation you cried over and the promotion you cried over harder. A home and a community deserve to exist for all of that — for the conversation, the debate, the shared emotion, the love of the thing.

But there’s a bigger reason than all of that, and it’s the one that actually got us off the sofa.

Football belongs to ordinary people. It always has. So many of our clubs in the industrial north and the midlands were started by working men who suddenly had a Saturday afternoon to themselves — factory teams, church teams, lads with a bit of leisure time and a ball. It’s the same game as kids kicking a bottle round a playground, the same game as a kid in a favela who grows up to light up a World Cup. That’s the root of it. That’s the soul of it.

And that soul feels like it’s being quietly drained out. Football today can feel corporate, sanitised, packaged, sold back to us at a markup. We’re not naive — the game costs money and always did. But somewhere in the polishing it started to forget whose game it actually is.

So we built a place where the fans come first. Not the sponsors, not the algorithm — the people in the seats. Keeping a place like this going costs money, and we won’t pretend otherwise: there’ll be the odd ad down the line, kept light, clearly marked, and never the kind that takes over your screen or jumps in front of what you came for. If you’d rather not see them at all, there’ll be a cheap way to switch them off. Either way the football stays free, nobody gets locked out of their club, and you’ll never be the thing we’re selling.

And it’s a place for the football and nothing else. Whatever’s going on out in the world — and there’s always something — it doesn’t have to follow you in here. We’re not social media. We’re not interested in your politics and we’re not the place to fight about them. For ninety minutes and the arguments either side of it, it’s just the game. That’s the whole point of it.

A digital concourse: that bit of every ground where everyone gathers before kick-off, no matter who they support, made into somewhere you can stand all year round.

We’re two lads from Bristol who love this game and love Bristol City. We built the home we wanted to drink in.

Pull up a spot. You’re among your own.

Always believe.

— Ashley & George