Why I built Stay Eventful

Long before the website

I originally imagined Stay Eventful as a way to make groundhopping easier. The irony is that I am not much of a groundhopper myself. I have visited roughly 20 to 25 grounds, which puts me a long way down Football Ground Map's top-fans list. I simply enjoy watching football live whenever time and opportunity line up.

My first vivid memory of live football comes from childhood. Nessegutten, the team I grew up with, played Norwich City in a friendly at Nesseguttbanen, and I remember Robert Fleck having a great match. About eight years later, I watched an English team play again: Tottenham against Bolton at White Hart Lane in 1998. Spurs won 1-0, but the performance I remember is Norwegian goalkeeper Espen Baardsen's.

The question that started it

The idea behind the site took shape much later, during a work trip to Liverpool and Dublin. Football was not the purpose of the trip; a group of colleagues had planned it around several concerts. While we were in Liverpool in 2010, a few of us realised that Birmingham City's match against Tottenham was close enough to add to the itinerary.

That combination was the revelation. I liked making more of a weekend by fitting different events together. It left me with a question: What if you could find every football match within reach of the place where you were staying?

I could answer that question for one trip with enough manual research. Turning it into a useful website was another matter. At the time, it was more work than I could sustain, so the idea remained a draft.

The trips that kept the idea alive

Later trips kept proving the idea. On one built around Leeds United against Chelsea, we also fitted in a rugby match in Huddersfield. More recently, I took my two oldest boys to Chelsea against Burnley. That weekend we also saw Back to the Future: The Musical, which they found every bit as memorable as the match.

The point was not to cram as much as possible into an itinerary. It was to find combinations that made the whole trip more worthwhile while still leaving enough time to enjoy it.

From a draft to a product

Recent advances in AI tools changed what was practical for me. They did not provide the idea, but they helped me close gaps in design, code and content and turn a long-standing draft into something people could use.

The Stay Eventful trip explorer is built to help answer three questions:

• Which weekends offer a home fixture worth travelling for?
• What other football is realistically reachable from the same base?
• What concerts, family events, theatre shows or other experiences are happening nearby at the same time?

Much of the site's data refreshes automatically, and the project is designed to stay inexpensive enough for me to keep running and improving it.

What comes next?

I do not want Stay Eventful to remain football-only. There is more to a great trip than football, and not every trip needs to start with sport. Could the same approach help someone choose the best weekend to see a favourite band, artist or comedian, then discover what else is happening nearby? That is a direction I hope to explore.

Football still offers the clearest next additions. The UK is a great starting point, but Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, France and Spain all offer remarkable stadiums and atmospheres. Adding them well means more than putting another country in a menu: the site needs reliable fixtures, useful places to stay and realistic travel connections.

I built Stay Eventful first because I wanted to use it myself. I hope it helps you make more of a trip too. If you try it, tell me what worked and what did not through the contact page or on Facebook.