Bournemouth prepare for first European night against Real Sociedad as club marks rise from brink to Europa League
Bournemouth’s Europa League debut caps 13-year rise
Bournemouth travel to San Sebastián on Thursday for their first competitive game against European opposition, a Europa League meeting with Real Sociedad that caps a remarkable journey from the brink of non-league football to continental competition.
The fixture comes 13 years after Bournemouth hosted Real Madrid in a balmy summer friendly officially billed as Carlo Ancelotti’s first match in charge. A wave of galácticos took to the Vitality Stadium that day — Cristiano Ronaldo, Luka Modric, Kaká, Karim Benzema — with an early wayward Ronaldo free-kick breaking the wrist of an 11-year-old boy before Madrid ran out 6-0 winners.
“I retired a month earlier, and I thought: ‘Yeah, that’s typical, isn’t it?’” says club ambassador and Bournemouth legend Steve Fletcher, who scored 121 goals across 728 appearances. “You play for a club for 20 years, and then you go and get the biggest team in the world to come down. I wanted to say to Eddie Howe: ‘Can I have five minutes on the pitch?’ For them to play here was utterly ridiculous.”
From relegation battle to San Sebastián
On the final day of last season Bournemouth’s staff and players celebrated Europa League qualification by gathering around a “Rayanair” flag depicting their Brazil forward piloting a plane, with supporters providing the backdrop for pictures. Those fans have since booked trips to Prague, Oslo and Vigo.
It is a moment Andoni Iraola, who grew up in the Basque Country, will help deliver. Iraola, who will return to Bournemouth with Liverpool on Sunday with assistants Tommy Elphick and Shaun Cooper — both of whom also played for the club in the third tier — has exchanged messages with Fletcher this week, sending best wishes including for a win.
“It is going to be a momentous occasion, an I-was-there moment,” Fletcher says. “I always say to people around Bournemouth: ‘Don’t ever take this for granted.’ It is for every supporter who has ever followed Bournemouth: past, present, for the people who passed away, grandparents, great-grandparents. I think everyone will feel very emotional on Thursday.”
La Real are playing in Europe for the sixth time in seven seasons, while for Bournemouth, coached by Marco Rose, this is new ground. At the end of 2023, when Bournemouth were 14th in the Premier League, owner Bill Foley predicted they would play in Europe within five years. Foley’s motto “Always Advance, Never Retreat” adorns a wall in the boardroom.
Personal memories of survival
Fletcher was influential in Bournemouth making it this far. His winning goal at home against Grimsby on the penultimate day of the 2008-09 season ensured Bournemouth would not fall into non-league, the club having begun the season on -17 points after failing to exit administration. He subsequently worked in recruitment, as first-team coach to Howe, Gary O’Neil and Scott Parker, and then as a player liaison officer.
“I’ve still got kit man and groundsman to go,” he says, laughing.
Captain Adam Smith, 35, is into his 15th season at the club, including a loan in League One in 2010-11, and remembers training at Canford school before the move to the current state-of-the-art facility 18 months ago.
“I would never have believed you; I’d just think it’s bonkers,” Smith says of Europe feeling plausible when he signed from Tottenham as a teenager. “I was delighted for them, but for selfish reasons you want to be involved in teams like that, competing in Europe. Everyone’s raring to go and wanting to showcase their talents, and hopefully we can go far. We always cause the big teams in the Premier League problems and I don’t think it should be any different in Europe.”
Until this season David Brooks was used to midweek European matches, watching his Wales teammate Brennan Johnson lift the Europa League and Conference League in successive seasons with Tottenham and Crystal Palace respectively, and another, Neco Williams, excel in the Europa League for Nottingham Forest.
Stadium upgrades and future fixtures
The Madrid friendly coincided with Bournemouth opening a stand named after Ted MacDougall, another much-loved striker. The pressure to ensure the stadium was ready for that landmark fixture echoes this summer, when Bournemouth had to upgrade their ground to meet Uefa regulations.
Their first home game is against Sturm Graz next month; the week after, Milan — whose red-and-black stripes inspired Bournemouth’s kit at the start of the 70s — come to town.
“Just to mutter the words Milan, AC Milan, in the same sentence as AFC Bournemouth, in a competitive fixture, is crazy,” Fletcher says. “I think of Maldini, Baresi, Van Basten, Gullit.”
The stand at the other end of the ground has been named after Fletcher since 2010. Viktoria Plzen and Hapoel Be’er Sheva will visit in December and January.
“There will probably be people coming to our European games in their 80s and 90s who will have watched the club from year dot,” Fletcher says. “For us to be mixing it with some of the giants of European football is magical. It’s beyond anybody’s wildest dreams, and we still have to pinch ourselves. But at the same time, we have to enjoy it, embrace it.”