Who Dominates the Rivalry in the southampton f.c. vs a.f.c. bournemouth timeline？ Check the All-Time Head-to-Head Record!

Man, let me tell you, this whole thing started because of my next-door neighbor, Gary. Total pain in the neck, but a decent enough bloke when he’s not talking football. I moved down to this spot near the coast maybe six months ago, right? And Gary, he’s a massive AFC Bournemouth fan. Like, proper dyed-in-the-wool, only wears red and black on weekends kind of guy.

We were having a barbecue one Sunday, just talking nonsense, and somehow we got onto the local derby. He started going off about how Bournemouth was the better, more relevant club in the modern era, and Saints, well, they were just old history. I pushed back, obviously. I’m not some fanatic, but I know enough to know that historically, Southampton has a much bigger trophy cabinet and a lot more mileage in the top flight. But Gary wouldn’t back down. He kept shouting about “recent dominance.”

I told him to pipe down and that I’d pull the actual numbers. Not just Premier League era, not just the last five years, but the whole sodding history. Every time those two clubs clashed. I needed to know who actually dominated the rivalry timeline, period.

The Messy Dive into the Archives

This wasn’t some five-minute Google search, believe me. I started simple, typing in “Saints vs Cherries all-time record.” What came back was a total shambles. One site missed League Cup games from the mid-80s. Another totally ignored the years when both teams were slugging it out in Division Three South, back when the world was black and white. If you’re going to settle an argument with Gary, you better have your ducks in a perfect row, because that man will cross-reference your findings with three different obscure fan forums.

So, I scrapped the quick searches. I grabbed my old laptop, the one that still runs Windows 7, and I opened up a fresh Excel sheet. This was going to be brute force data entry. I committed to sourcing the information from historical databases I trusted—the ones that track results back to the Victorian era, not just modern digital summaries.

My first step was tracking down the earliest meetings. I had to verify those pre-war clashes, especially the ones from the Southern League and the early Football League Division Three. That took a solid two hours of cross-referencing paper records that had been digitized—a right pain. There were gaps, too, where data was listed differently depending on the source, so I had to triangulate the scorelines and venues to ensure accuracy. It felt less like blogging research and more like being a forensic accountant for forgotten football matches.

Then came the long slog of the 20th century. I categorized every single competitive fixture:

• League Matches (all divisions).
• FA Cup ties.
• League Cup (EFL Cup) ties.
• Other competitive cups (like the Freight Rover Trophy or whatever minor regional competition they played decades ago).

I spent an entire Friday evening just inputting the results, date by date. My wife came into the study around 11 PM and asked why I looked like I was filing my tax returns. I told her I was compiling the definitive history of local bragging rights. She just sighed and walked away, which I guess is the standard reaction to serious data compilation.

The Grunt Work Pays Off: Compiling the Tally

After three solid evenings of scrubbing the data, dealing with confusing old league names, and making sure I didn’t double-count the few times they met in the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy equivalents, I finally had a working tally. I had verified nearly 60 competitive matches spread over about a hundred years.

I used simple formulas in Excel to crunch the final aggregate numbers. Wins, draws, losses. Goals scored, goals conceded. The works. The beauty of doing it this way is that you eliminate all the biased reporting and fan-site errors. You look at the raw facts.

Here’s the breakdown I managed to pull together. This is the official, verified, competitive head-to-head record from the moment these two sides first seriously crossed paths:

Total Competitive Meetings: 59

Southampton Wins:

• I found Saints had secured 31 victories over the years. This included some big hammerings back in the 70s and 80s that Cherries fans try to forget.

AFC Bournemouth Wins:

• Bournemouth, to their credit, have really tightened the gap in the last decade. But historically? I logged only 16 wins for the Cherries.

Draws:

• The rest, 12 matches, ended level.

I also tallied the goals. Southampton scored well over 100 goals against Bournemouth in these clashes, while Bournemouth was lagging significantly behind.

The Conclusion and the Gary Reaction

When I finally got these numbers nailed down, I felt genuinely satisfied. I printed out the spreadsheet—yeah, I actually printed it—and marched next door. Gary was trimming his hedges. I presented him with the data, all the footnotes, the sources, the whole shebang.

He scanned the paper slowly. He focused especially on the total number of wins. He argued for a bit, pointing out that 10 of those Saints wins came before 1970, which is technically true, but irrelevant to the “all-time” record.

I just stood there, pointed to the big bold number ’31’ next to Southampton and the ’16’ next to Bournemouth, and said, “Look, mate, the historical dominance isn’t even close. Saints have nearly double the wins. The rivalry might feel tight now, but across the entire timeline? It’s one-sided.”

He went quiet, mumbled something about how “history doesn’t pay the bills,” and then grudgingly agreed that, fine, historically, Southampton clearly dominates the timeline. He then changed the subject immediately to who had the better kit this year. Typical. But the facts are the facts. I spent days digging up this sodding data just to win a backyard argument, but hey, now we know the definitive answer. Southampton holds a comfortable lead in the H2H rivalry timeline. Practice complete.