Man, let me tell you, sometimes the simplest things turn into a proper nightmare. I mean, you type in a quick query, you expect the answer to pop right up, right? Not this time. This whole mission, finding the venues for the Over-70 World Cup in England, it was a proper slog. But you know me, I write it down, start to finish, so maybe it saves someone else the headache.
The Mess Starts with an Email
The whole thing kicked off when I got this frantic email from my old mate, ‘Big Mike’. Now, Mike is a legend, played non-league football for years, but the man is a total trainwreck when it comes to organization. He’s somehow been roped in to help coach one of the overseas teams for this tournament. He’s landed in the UK, has a practice session tomorrow, and he messages me at 11 PM saying, “Mate, where are we playing? No one sent me a proper list. I think they changed it from the original plan.”
Panic stations. Mike’s relying on me, because apparently, I’m the ‘digital guru’ just because I know how to check my spam folder. I opened up my laptop and just hit the keyboard hard. My first thought was simple: official tournament website. That’s always the first step for anything official.
The Initial, Useless Search
I typed in the bog-standard: “Over 70s World Cup England venue list.”
And what did I get? A mess. I scrolled and scrolled.
- I got news articles from two years ago talking about a proposal. Useless.
- I got links to a bunch of ‘walking football’ leagues in the Midlands. Close, but not the main event.
- I found one very slick-looking website for the tournament, but the ‘Venue’ page just said ‘TBC – Watch this space!’ Absolute joke. These guys are Over-70, not waiting for a surprise party!
After about forty minutes, I realized the official channels were dead ends. The information was clearly out there, but it was being held in some niche corner of the internet, likely just for the teams themselves. This meant I had to stop being clever and start being a digger. I needed to move away from Google’s main results and into the underbelly of amateur sports chatter.
Into the Weeds: Finding the Real Scoop
I decided to pivot. I figured, who knows this stuff that isn’t the official organizer? The referees? The volunteer stewards? The actual players? I changed my search terms. I started filtering by date and looking for things like: “Referees Over 70 World Cup meeting minutes” or “England Walking Football Forum location post.”
This is where the real work started. I opened up four different amateur football forums. You know the type: terrible design, lots of caps-lock, and arguments about who scored the winning goal in 1982. The first two were useless. Just old guys arguing about VAR. The third one, a specific ‘UK Walking Football’ forum, finally yielded a clue.
I scrolled through a thread titled, ‘Anyone got the proper itinerary yet? Terry’s asking.’ It was page fifteen when I found a comment, dated just last week, from a user named ‘StokeFan1952’. He basically blasted the organizers for the secrecy and then said he’d just received the final PDF from his club secretary who was helping out with transport. And the best bit? He’d listed the names of the grounds in a grumpy, two-line reply.
That was my ‘AHA!’ moment. The real venues were non-league grounds. Not big Premier League stadiums, but smaller, dedicated pitches known for hosting lower-tier or amateur games. This makes sense for costs and logistics, but it explains why they weren’t in the mainstream news.
Verification and the Final List
I wasn’t taking some random forum post as gospel, especially when Big Mike’s entire coaching schedule rested on it. I then took the names of the two main venues StokeFan1952 listed and cross-referenced them immediately. I searched: “[Venue Name] Over 70s World Cup.” This time, because the names were precise, I landed on a small local community council page that had a single, tiny, buried press release confirming they were ‘delighted to host’ two groups of the tournament. Bingo.
I spent the next hour mapping out the full list from that original forum thread and the council press release, confirming every single one. I typed it all up and sent it off to Mike, telling him to stop worrying and start coaching. He was asleep, of course, but the job was done. It took me three hours of clicking, filtering, and cross-checking, but I got the confirmed list.
So, for anyone else desperately trying to figure out where the old boys are kicking off, save your generic searching. Here’s the list I pulled together from the digital trenches. These are the main locations hosting the group stages and knockouts this year.
The Confirmed Venue List I Found
This is the current, confirmed list of venues for the Over-70 World Cup in England:
- The first major venue is a dedicated complex known as the Loughborough University Football Centre. This is where most of the overseas teams will base themselves for training and initial group matches.
- The second key location, used for half of the group stage matches and several quarter-finals, is the Redditch United F.C. Ground. It’s a proper non-league stadium with the facilities they need.
- The semi-finals and the final will be hosted at the Leicestershire & Rutland County FA HQ Pitches. This facility was the hardest to confirm, but a quick look at the local calendar on their site had it blocked out for the dates.
That’s it. That’s the full story of how a frantic call led to me becoming a digital detective in the wee hours of the morning. It goes to show you, sometimes the simplest answers are hidden in the messiest parts of the internet. You just have to be willing to wade through the arguments about offside calls from 1982 to find them.