21 Apr, 2025 @ 12:50
1 min read

Hordes of frenzied Spanish football fans travel 1,600km to support tiny non-league English team

LOCALS in sleepy Market Harborough in the UK were left gobsmacked when more than 100 Spanish football fans descended on their non-league ground – chanting, singing, and turning a routine Saturday match into a fiesta to remember.

Harborough Town FC, who usually play in front of a modest crowd in the seventh tier of the English league, found their Bowden Park stands packed with noisy visitors in yellow kits, all the way from sunny Spain. 

It comes from a wild partnership with Spanish YouTube channel La Media Inglesa, whose 440,000 subscribers voted to ‘adopt’ the Bees as their English club of choice.

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The Spanish supporters – some travelling nearly 1,000 miles – brought drums, banners, and a carnival atmosphere, belting out chants in Spanish and even teaching the locals a few songs.

“Some of them didn’t understand and were shocked – but in a good way,” said Carlos González León, who helped organise the trip.

“Everyone was really pleased with our attendance and support. We made a lot of noise. It was something huge and groundbreaking,” he told MailOnline.

Despite the continental backing, Harborough Town fell 2-1 to St Ives Town.

Dilip Kuner

Dilip Kuner is a NCTJ-trained journalist whose first job was on the Folkestone Herald as a trainee in 1988.
He worked up the ladder to be chief reporter and sub editor on the Hastings Observer and later news editor on the Bridlington Free Press.
At the time of the first Gulf War he started working for the Sunday Mirror, covering news stories as diverse as Mick Jagger’s wedding to Jerry Hall (a scoop gleaned at the bar at Heathrow Airport) to massive rent rises at the ‘feudal village’ of Princess Diana’s childhood home of Althorp Park.
In 1994 he decided to move to Spain with his girlfriend (now wife) and brought up three children here.
He initially worked in restaurants with his father, before rejoining the media world in 2013, working in the local press before becoming a copywriter for international firms including Accenture, as well as within a well-known local marketing agency.
He joined the Olive Press as a self-employed journalist during the pandemic lock-down, becoming news editor a few months later.
Since then he has overseen the news desk and production of all six print editions of the Olive Press and had stories published in UK national newspapers and appeared on Sky News.

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