Arriving at university is entering a world of the unknown; a completely new city awaits, ready to be discovered. There is one guarantee – that the city will be home to a football club, and, if you are anything like me, coming to Cambridge and visiting their ground will be high on your to-do list.

The Abbey is a dilapidated ground, where no two stands look like they should fit together. The Newmarket Road End is a throwback to the long-forgotten days of terracing, and the sides are slightly too long for the pitch dimensions, leaving an awkward patch of unused grass at one end. It is, objectively, a strange-looking ground. Yet it is these idiosyncrasies which give it soul and character. It is perfect in its imperfections.

“Yet it is these idiosyncrasies which give it soul and character”

Cambridge, similarly, is not a pretty team to watch. Nor are many of their opponents in the third tier, where Pep Guardiola’s footballing revolution hasn’t quite taken hold yet. The squads of lower-league teams tend to change drastically each year, with star players inevitably finding themselves poached by bigger clubs. Fighting against their own finances to avoid relegation the past few years has taken its toll, and the U’s have sat firmly ensconced in the bottom three for the entire season so far.

Yet 6,000 loyal fans continue to turn out each week, and the reason behind it has nothing to do with the quality of football on show. It is not about the manager or the players, who may soon be distant memories in the long and weary lives of football fans. It is not just about winning games either, really. Just as important is the sense of community that comes with going to the football each week, and integral to this is the stage on which the game is played, the theatre in which the hopes and despairs of supporters unfold.

When you support a lower-league team, your ground is your identity, and as a QPR fan, Loftus Road is, for my money, the best ground in England. It is tight and cramped. The legroom is non-existent. Its corrugated blue roof gives an impression most favourably described as a shipping container, and the concourses barely give room to move. But, my word, is it a proper football ground. It is a ground right in the heart of its community, surrounded by terraced housing, a ground that you arrive at by walking through the same estate your parents have walked through for decades. It is a place where you can feel the whole ground moving when the R’s score and where your parent can tell you exactly what part of the ground they were in when Trevor Sinclair scored that bicycle kick 30 years ago (look it up – I promise it’s worth your time).

“In grounds, fans are the community; in arenas, they are the commodity”

There are memories in football grounds. And I emphasise grounds, not arenas or stadia, for therein lies an important difference. In grounds, fans are the community; in arenas, they are the commodity. The transition from grounds to stadiums is often overlooked and will rarely be criticised by pundits, who are too scared to rail against this rigid march of progress. Football in the modern world is a game of money, and it is a sad fact of life that stadiums will generate more of it. Money from tourists, who will always spend more than regulars in the club shop before the games. Money from hosting concerts, corporate events, and all the other schemes that owners will squeeze in at the expense of real fans.

But the inevitable trade-off is atmosphere, and for those watching, it is a shameful blight on the game. ‘Football in a library,’ fans sing, and soulless bowls are the primary catalyst for it. It is nearly impossible to generate noise when fans are so far from the pitch – just ask West Ham fans, who would almost unanimously vote for a return to Upton Park if they could, despite the sparkle of their new stadium. Up and down the country, teams are relocated away from the town centre to a retail park on the edge of town – looking at you, Reading, Swansea amongst others. Bowls inevitably sit half empty as teams slide down the tables because – shock – shiny new stadiums don’t guarantee success. Even when they stay full, they are infinitesimal compared to the grounds they have replaced. Leicester and Southampton are possibly the biggest perpetrators – their identikit stadiums are a world away from the old-school character of Filbert Street or the Dell.

Of course, grounds sometimes need renovating or replacing, but there is a misunderstanding when it comes to these new stadiums about what the fans really want from a football ground. We don’t go to football for a polished product, we go to football for our team. We go for that one moment, perhaps a couple of times a season if we’re lucky, when our team really does something special, and we live off that feeling until the next one comes around. Players change, but the ground is our home and, until greedy owners come and knock it down to turn it into apartment blocks, it always will be.

That, to me, is football. If there’s no history, no irresistible charm, if the ground isn’t shaking on its foundations when a goal goes in, I’m not interested. You can keep your padded seats and £8 pints.