Building an away-day data feed: scraping travel, pubs, and away-end info without getting blocked

I plan most away days the same way. I check the fixture, skim a ground guide, then I start juggling tabs for trains, parking, pubs, and ticket news. To The 92 helps because it reads like someone who went and wrote it up, with the sort of seat and view notes you only get on the day.

If you do a lot of grounds, the repeat work adds up. You can build a simple data feed that pulls the boring bits into one place, then you keep the human bit for your own notes and photos. This piece shows how to scrape the right pages, stay stable, and avoid the usual blocks.

Start with the matchday questions, not the tech

A good away-day feed answers three things fast. How do I get there, where do I go near the ground, and what should I expect in the away end. That mirrors how most To The 92 guides read, with travel, local spots, then the match view.

For the 92 grounds across the Premier League and the EFL, you can keep one record per club and one per ground. The club count stays fixed at 92, but the details shift each week. Kick-off times move, rail works hit, and car parks change rules.

Pick data that changes often and costs you time. Train times, last train home, road works, pub hours, and away allocation notes all fit. Save the stable stuff, like postcode and stand name, once.

Scrape like a fan, not like a bot

Most matchday sources sit behind basic bot checks. They watch for odd headers, fast hits, and repeat calls from one IP. You beat most of that with slow pace, real browser headers, and a cache.

Build two runs. Run a weekly sweep that refreshes each ground page and your key travel pages. Run a matchday sweep that only checks games you plan to attend, then grabs live items like rail alerts.

Keep your scraper polite. Set a clear user agent, wait between calls, and stop when a site sends errors. If you hit hard blocks, you will need IP spread for the calls, even for small loads, and a free proxy server.

Pick the proxy type based on risk. Use data centre IPs for low risk pages like club news. Use home style IPs for pages that guard prices and stock, like rail fares.

Make it robust with a “view source” mindset

A lot of fan sites and club sites change layouts with no notice. Your scraper should target stable parts, like IDs, labels, and small text blocks. Avoid long CSS paths that break on one redesign.

When you scrape travel and pub pages, watch for JavaScript loads. If the text sits in the HTML, use a fast HTTP client. If the page builds the data in the browser, use a headless tool and keep it scoped to the one page.

Turn messy pages into groundhopper-ready fields

Raw scrape data looks like a bag of text. Your feed needs neat fields you can scan on a phone at 10am in a new town. Normalise times to UK local time, store phone numbers in one format, and strip stray line breaks.

Use change logs. If a pub shuts, you want to know when you last saw it open. If a rail route flips due to works, you want the old route saved for context.

Do not chase perfect truth. Treat your feed as a prompt for your own first-hand note, like the best ground guides do. On the day, add what you saw, what the queue felt like, and which turnstile actually moved.

Keep it legal, safe, and fair

Read each site’s rules before you scrape. If a page blocks bots in its robots file, respect that. If a site rate limits you, back off and cache more.

Avoid personal data. You do not need names, user comments, or social posts to plan an away day. Stick to public venue facts, travel status text, and club statements.

Keep ticket pages out of your pipeline. Ticket systems often sit behind accounts and anti-bot checks for good reason. You can still track public away-end guides, entry rules, and bag size notes, without touching sales flows.

If you run this for a business, log your fetch times and keep audit notes. Those logs help you prove you acted in good faith. They also help you find which source caused a block.

What you gain: one screen before you leave the house

When your feed works, you stop doing the same searches each trip. You open one page and see your ground, your route, your backup pub, and your away-end reminder. Then you do the fun part, which To The 92 nails, the walk up, the photos, and the story you bring back.