Once an integral part of the towns and cities they called home, dozens of the nation’s Football League grounds have disappeared over the past 30 or so years. All took with them a wealth of memories for generations of supporters.

But what happened next? The Athletic has travelled the country to find out, taking in an array of housing estates, retail parks and even the odd hospital along the way.

Kicking off our four-part series, running each Tuesday in August, is perhaps the most poignant of the lot, Bradford Park Avenue. Home to a League club for 62 years and county cricket for more than a century, Park Avenue sits forgotten and forlorn, with one of its few visitors in the past decade being an archaeological dig…

Looking up at a row of turnstiles that once led to a football ground where England played an international match, it is as if time has stood still.

Painted high on the wall is ‘5/-’, indicating an admission price of five shillings in old money. Another couple of bricked-up entrances can be found around the corner, along with a giant rusting iron gate topped with spikes to deter anyone trying to get in for free.

A gents’ toilet block can also clearly be seen towards the back of a banking where supporters last stood more than 50 years ago, while a stroll inside reveals two massively overgrown terraces and a crumbling perimeter wall staring out over the bumpy remains of a pitch once graced by greats such as Stanley Matthews and Len Shackleton.

Also buried amid the shrubbery that has been allowed to run wild are two floodlight pylon bases, plus a mountain of sporting memories. Welcome to Park Avenue, Bradford, the forgotten home of the former Football League club who went by the same name that is now the ghostly preserve of Mother Nature.

In an age when the demolition crews seem to move in almost the moment the gates close for the final time at great sporting cathedrals such as Highbury, Roker Park and White Hart Lane, this one-time sporting mecca really is a throwback.

Not only does the cricket ground where Yorkshire played for more than a century until 1996 remain, albeit in a semi-derelict state, but enough survives on the adjacent football side — the two sports shared a main stand, designed by leading architect Archibald Leitch — to leave supporters of a certain vintage misty-eyed.

Cricket at Bradford Park Avenue in the summer of 1949 (S&G/Getty Images)

Park Avenue was always regarded locally as superior to Valley Parade, the home of Bradford City — once of the Premier League and now of League Two. For a start, it had cover for 14,000 and a capacity of 37,000. The railway station and tram spur that could be found where the ornate Grand Mosque now stands just across Horton Park Avenue meant thousands of fans could also be ferried to and from the area in hardly any time at all.

Then there was the corner pavilion, nicknamed the ‘Dolls’ House’ by visitors. This charming two-storey building served a similar purpose to Fulham’s Craven Cottage, housing the football club’s dressing rooms and committee room with officials able to watch matches from an upstairs balcony.

This, though, could not save it as Bradford’s fortunes declined markedly as the Swinging Sixties morphed into the next decade.

Voted out of the League in 1970, the club stumbled on in the Northern Premier League for another four years before folding amid debts of £57,652 ($73,580 in today’s exchange rates). By then, the football ground had been sold to a property developer, with Avenue playing their final season across the city at Valley Parade.

Bradford Park Avenue, as seen in 1955 (George W. Hales/Getty Images)

A restrictive covenant that dictated the land could only be used for sport and recreation pursuits meant the football ground ended up being left to wither and die, even after the local council stepped in to purchase the site with grandiose plans to build a sports complex.

By 1980, Leitch’s ornate main stand had become so unsafe it had to be demolished. The news sparked a wave of nostalgia across the city, as hundreds of fans streamed to the old ground for one last look.

A pensioner was even helped onto the weed-infested Canterbury Avenue End and left, leaning unsteadily on a rusting crash barrier, to stare silently over what must have felt like an unkempt grave.

Tim Clapham, a supporter since 1963 and now the club historian, was among those making one last pilgrimage before the wrecking ball claimed not only the 4,000-seat main stand and its distinctive three gables, but also the Dolls House and the Horton Park End roof.

“Only the half-time scoreboard was left standing, with even the old social club sold to a local pig farmer,” Clapham says. “Such a sad time. So many turned up, hoping to take a keepsake, something to remember the ground by.

“Some wanted the ‘BFC’ letters etched on the middle gable of the stand, while others fancied the two coats of arms at either end. But, when they came down, these things were much bigger than they had looked. You’d have needed a truck to carry them away!”

As Bradford mourned for a second time the loss of a venue that had hosted not only an England versus Ireland international in 1909 but also what remains the fastest-ever Football League goal (four seconds, Jim Fryatt against Tranmere Rovers in 1964), cricket at least survived.

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That was until 1996, when Yorkshire County Cricket Club opted to focus primarily on Headingley as their home with a small number of games every season also played in Scarborough. Others to lose their status as out-grounds were Middlesbrough, Harrogate and Hull, where part of the MKM Stadium now sits on the old Circle cricket ground as the dual home of Hull City and rugby league club Hull FC.

Park Avenue had become a shell of its former self long before that final County Championship match against Leicestershire in 1996.

(Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)

Just what anyone able to remember Park Avenue in its heyday would make of the old place in 2024 is anyone’s guess. The cricket square has, in recent years, been brought back to first-class standard, allowing Yorkshire’s second XI to return and play the odd match.

But the surroundings are in a sorry state. Where the grand-looking pavilion once stood until the late 1980s is now just a wasteland and where Fred Trueman, Ray Illingworth et al would plot the downfall of visiting batsmen now sits 10-foot bushes. Time is a formidable opponent when sports arenas are left to rot.

Just in front sit a few dilapidated rows of seats, a good number vandalised and all doing battle with the weeds gradually creeping through the concrete steps. It’s a similar story elsewhere, with fenced-off sections of crumbling terraces interspersed with banks of vegetation.

The only bright spot is a mural depicting England spin bowler — and local hero — Adil Rashid that was painted to mark the launch of the Hundred competition in 2021. Even that, though, is fading to add to the rundown feel of a ground once regarded as the jewel in Yorkshire’s cricketing crown.

(Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)

What remains of the old football ground is no less depressing, even allowing for how its abandoned state allowed an archaeological dig in 2015 that unearthed all manner of fascinating artefacts.

The haul, captured for posterity by the Breaking Ground art project, included boot studs, coins, marbles, goal hooks and even a nappy pin. The latter, it transpired, related to the elastic on goalkeeper Chick Farr’s shorts snapping during one match, forcing the trainer to perform an emergency repair. Farr never lived the episode down, regularly finding himself showered by pins when standing between the posts.

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Hopes of Bradford ever returning to their spiritual home ended when a cricket school (now a gym) was built on half of the old football pitch in 1988. A new Park Avenue club was formed in the same year and their home for almost three decades has been Horsfall Stadium, an athletics venue that sits a couple of miles away from this old ground.

(Richard Sutcliffe/The Athletic)

On the cricket side, however, grand plans were unveiled just a few years ago to bring Yorkshire back to their old stomping ground via an ambitious £5.5million revamp.

Stage one saw a state-of-the-art changing facility, outdoor nets and a score-hut open in 2017, with England and Yorkshire team-mates Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow and Rashid among those cutting the ribbon. The nets, built between what was the halfway line and roughly the penalty area of what remained of Avenue’s old pitch, were converted to an indoor facility last year.

The rest of the original scheme — a community pavilion with changing rooms that were to be located to the side of where the original stood, a restaurant catering for 250 diners, 1,000 seats for spectators and security fencing — never materialised. As a result, the mooted return of county cricket to the city of Bradford never became reality. Instead, York joined Leeds and Scarborough on the roster of Yorkshire’s home grounds.

That may be the final nail in the coffin for any hopes of bringing professional sport back to this corner of Bradford. Now, all that’s left behind is the ghostly presence of the past to go with the abandoned turnstiles and terraces that, for the past five decades, have been home to just the worms and the weeds.

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(Top photo: Richard Sutcliffe, Tim Clapham)

Cole Hocker of the United States scored one of the biggest upsets in Olympic running Tuesday night, outrunning Jakob Ingebrigtsen and outkicking Josh Kerr, and everyone else, down the stretch to win the men’s 1500-meter to turn what was supposed to be a two-man battle into the surprise of the Games.

With a massive kick in the final 30 meters, Hocker — born in Indianapolis, and reared at the University of Oregon, the heart and guts of American distance running since the days of Steve Prefontaine — finished in an Olympic record 3:27.65, just under a quarter of a second ahead of Kerr, the reigning world champion.

Yared Nuguse, Hocker’s teammate, outkicked Ingebrigtsen for the bronze as the defending Olympic champion faded to fourth after setting the pace for the first 1300 meters.

For Ingebrigtsen, it was another major disappointment, given his star power and outspoken nature. He has never been shy about his confidence in his abilities.

Ingebrigtsen, the last announced for the race, held up a single index figure and stared at the camera for all 80,000 fans to see on the giant video boards above the purple track. He should have held up four on a night when he lost his third consecutive championship 1500, including the 2022 and 2023 races at the World Athletics Championships.

On a perfect night for racing, the skies clear, the air still and dry and borderline cool, this was supposed to be the ultimate showdown between the imperious Ingebrigtsen and Kerr, the brash Scot who has had Ingebrigtsen’s number for years.

And that is how the race unfolded until the final turn. Ingebrigtsen, the fastest man in the field, went right to the front and set a blistering pace, 1:51.3 for the first 800. The strategy was laced with both guts and fear. He was courageous enough to try to do one of the hardest things in running, win a race from the front, wire-to-wire.

But the move was borne from the fear of knowing that other runners could finish faster than he could, that his only hope was to bury Kerr and the rest of the field far enough behind him so that they would run out of track before they would be able to catch him.

With 200 meters left, he heard the crowd noise rise to head-splitting levels. His head swiveled to the right, and he saw Kerr closing in. By the time they got to the final straightaway, Kerr was well on his way to passing him by.

WOW. 😱

A STUNNING upset in the men’s 1500m as AMERICAN COLE HOCKER takes gold! #ParisOlympics pic.twitter.com/wlq81lbvSO

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— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) August 6, 2024

But then so was Hocker, the former Oregon Duck flashing the speed that he has shown before, but never at this level or this pace.

He’d been tucked in the middle of the pack for the last 600 meters, not too close to the leaders but not too far off either, and when it was time to go, he went and went fast enough for both the Olympic and American records in one of the signature events of the Games.

“I kind of told myself that I’m in this race too,” Hocker said. “If they let me fly under the radar, then so be it. I think that might’ve just been the best.”

Kerr had the up-close view of Hocker’s triumph. The Scot had run a personal best and set the national record, and had little to be disappointed about. But he had no idea what unfolded behind him.

He looked at the scoreboard and saw Ingebrigtsen fell to fourth. A huge smile broke out across his face. He looked over at Hocker and Nuguse and started clapping at them like they were old mates.

Neil Gourley, Kerr’s teammate in Great Britain, ran for Hocker’s coach, Ben Thomas, for 10 years and has trained with Hocker. He said he wasn’t surprised at all by the result.

“If Cole is there and he has anything left in the last 150 meters, he’s dangerous,” he said. “Anyone who saw what he did in the U.S., nationals wouldn’t be surprised.”

And yet, how could you not be?

This was the race all running nerds had circled on their Olympic schedules, but not because of Hocker. In a sport where respect and politeness generally rule the day, at least in public, Ingebrigsten and Kerr veered toward trash talk.

There was a certain Scandinavian charm to Ingebrigtsen when he came on the scene five years ago, a middle-distance champion from a country where people generally win Olympic medals wearing skis rather than running spikes. He was the youngest of three running brothers.

Oldest brother Henrik finished fifth in the 1500 meters at the 2012 Olympics. Middle brother Filip won the bronze medal in the 1500 at the 2017 World Championships. Their father, Gjert, kept them on a tight leash while he trained them, warning off girlfriends, which worked until it didn’t.

The family allowed Norwegian television cameras to follow them for a documentary, which featured their rather monastic existence.

“Team Ingebrigtsen” became a huge hit and made the brothers famous, especially Jakob, whose profile skyrocketed when he won the gold medal in the 1500 at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Imagine “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” but with Norwegian distance runners and you get the idea.

Ingebrigsten would also win golds in the 5,000 at the world championships in 2022 and 2023. But somewhere along the way, his charm began to wear thin, especially in the northern region of Great Britain, Scotland to be specific, with members of the Edinburgh Athletic Club.

Somewhere along the way though, Ingebrigtsen’s confident charm morphed into something bordering on imperious disdain for the competition, none of which he backed away from even as he began losing races to those aforementioned members of the Edinburgh Athletics Club.

Ingebrigtsen has proven excellent at running but somewhat graceless in both victory and defeat, especially the latter. Perhaps his words get lost in translation, but in May of 2022, when asked if he was disappointed that the competition wasn’t pushing him, he said, “You can’t be disappointed with people not being better.”

That didn’t go over well, and Jake Wightman made him eat his verbiage two months later when he ran away from Ingebrigtsen in the 1500 final at the 2022 World Athletics Championships in Eugene, Ore. Ingebrigtsen quickly began telling people he hadn’t been at 100 percent. Wightman was “a lesser athlete.”

Last year, Kerr, 26, another Scot and former collegiate star at the University of New Mexico, started beating Ingebrigtsen.

He beat him at the 2023 World Athletics Championships in Budapest, where once more the Norwegian claimed to not have been at his best, and then this year at the Prefontaine Classic. He has referred to Kerr as “the next guy”, as in, the runner who can win when he isn’t fully fit.

He made no such claims, Tuesday night, at least not in English.

Asked if he regretted his decision to blaze out to the lead, he said yes and no.

“Of course, it’s a tactical error that I am not able to reduce my pace the first 800,” he said. “Just a little too hard.”

He said that with 650 meters to go, he could sense that Kerr and the others were pushing the pace faster, testing to see how much he had left. He said he tried to respond but ran out of gas — 1500 meters had proven “just 100 meters too much.”

“I ruined it for myself by going way too hard,” he said.

Not for Hocker, who is just 23 years old and part of a triumvirate of young American milers that had one of the country’s best races at the distance in Olympic history, with Nuguse, the 25-year-old child of Ethiopian immigrants who was born in Kentucky and attended Notre Dame, coming in third, and Hobbs Kessler, a 21-year-old from Ann Arbor, finishing fifth.

Kessler described Ingebrigtsen as the pinnacle of fitness. “It just shows how hard it is to run from the front,” he said.

Wasn’t that the truth Tuesday night, especially with an angry Scot and two Americans looking to make their mark giving chase?

“Both me and Cole knew coming in we could win on the right day,” Nuguse said. “A really cool moment.”

For him and for Hocker.

“That’s an unbelievable feeling,” Hocker said. “I just felt like I was getting carried by the stadium and God. My body just kind of did it for me. My mind was all there and I saw that finish line.”

Required reading

(Photo: Michael Steele / Getty Images)

PARIS — Manila Esposito, the bronze medalist on the balance beam, stared like a deer in the headlights in a packed post-meet press conference. As she started to speak, her voice barely audible, Simone Biles reached over and adjusted Esposito’s microphone, nodding at the Italian gymnast that she was good to go. Later, after the moderator posed a question to Alice D’Amato, Esposito’s teammate, it took D’Amato a moment to respond. The moderator started to prompt her, when Biles gently reminded the moderator that the translation into the earpieces takes a little time to process.

Every now and again there comes a reminder: Simone Biles is 27 years old. This is not her first rodeo. She knows a thing or two about microphones and translations, succeeding and even a little bit about failing. Biles started competing internationally more than a decade ago, as a braces-wearing 16-year-old. She wasn’t old enough to drive. She wasn’t old enough to drink when she went to Rio in 2016.

Now she’s married but, like a new bride who is asked when she wants to start a family upon exiting the ceremony, Biles has been asked, even before she finished competition in Paris, how she feels about Los Angeles. She initially answered with a nonanswer. It would be lovely to compete on her home turf, she admitted, but she also acknowledged that age is not merely a number. “I’m old,” she said with a laugh.

Later she expressed her exasperation on X. “You guys really gotta stop asking athletes what’s next after they win a medal at the Olympics,” she tweeted, adding, “Let us soak up the moment we’ve worked our whole lives for.”

It is the crux of it, really, but in Biles’ case, it’s messaging that needs to be flipped. It is everyone else that needs to do the appreciating, instead of greedily wondering if we might get to enjoy more. This is what happens, of course. We get spoiled, and then desperate, desperate to not let go of a thing we probably took for granted. Biles is a constant, a near-sure thing in sports. Neither age nor injury, abuse or mental health demons, have defeated her. She comes back every time, and so we are left to fret: What if this is it?

It very well could be. Her coach, Cecile Landi, is leaving to become the head coach at the University of Georgia. Her husband and Biles’ co-coach, Laurent, will follow in a year’s time after their daughter graduates from college. It seems like the ideal transition. She has nothing left to prove, but then again, that’s the tease. This stopped being about proving anything three years ago.

Then, done in by the twisties in Tokyo, Biles did the painful digging to excavate the root of her mental-health struggles. She admitted to abuse at the hands of Larry Nassar and courageously questioned USA Gymnastics’ role in it before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She questioned her own “why,” a scary proposition for all of us, confronting really what we want and what we’re all about. She then had the courage to admit she’d lost her direction, that she’d exchanged her love for gymnastics for answering a bell. More courageously, Biles went and fixed it, taking a year off from a sport in which time is already unforgiving.

“To do the work, the personal work to be here and to perform, it’s amazing,” Laurent Landi said. “It just shows how tough the mind is, and that if you heal it properly, you can be very, very successful.”

She is hardly fading. Biles spent the entire week here dealing with a nagging calf injury, originally injured before trials and tweaked here, during qualifications. Doctors wrapped her leg for the entirety of the competition, and while Biles downplayed the seriousness of it — “Y’all are nosy,” she jokingly chastised reporters when asked — Landi admitted it’s been a matter of managing the pain, not eliminating it. Medication, treatment, ice, the usual lineup, all to ensure that it “held up,” much different than healed. “It was bothering her, of course,” he said. “Was it impacting her performances? I don’t think so.”

Landi smirked then, as if to say, “You tell me.” Four medals, three of them gold, more than all but 22 countries competing in Paris to date.

The final day, of course, was meant to be a coronation, a victory lap and an au revoir. Instead it revealed Biles’ humanity. She was tired. She’s competed in four of the five days possible here. And she was mentally drained. The pursuit of righting the Tokyo ship weighed heavily on her. The event finals felt weird, too. Instead of playing music while the gymnasts performed, Bercy Arena turned into a church, complete with would-be church ladies tsk-tsking people who dared to react when the gymnasts nailed a skill on beam.

“We asked several times if we could have some music or background noise,” Biles said. “So I’m not really sure what happened there.”

These are not excuses; they are realities. The beam turned into the Hunger Games, medals awarded to those who didn’t fall off. Three women, including Sunisa Lee, fell before Biles and two others had serious balance checks. Yet when Biles missed a landing on her back layout step out and fell, the arena gasped. Later, after the competition ended and Biles officially failed to medal, a mom in line at the Bercy Arena concessions stand bemoaned to her young daughter, “I feel so bad for Simone.” Her daughter, eyes wide, replied, “She fell,” as if she’d just watched DaVinci paint outside of the lines or Beethoven miss a chord.

In her defense, the girl couldn’t have been any older than 8, and in her lifetime, Biles has been Olympic perfection. Until this beam final, Biles had competed in nine different Olympic events in her career, including team, all-around and event finals. She’d medaled in each and every one, earning gold in seven.

Then her very humanity had the audacity to strike again. Two hours after her beam foible, Biles returned for the floor exercise, an event she’s never lost in either the Olympics or worlds. She landed awkwardly during warmups, appearing to tweak that same calf injury. Tended to briefly, Biles nonetheless went out and landed her first tumbling pass, restoring order to the universe. But on the second and the fourth, Biles twice stepped out of bounds, costing her precious tenths of a point, just enough to slot her second to Brazil’s Rebeca Andrade.

It should be noted — she messed up two moves named after her, that no one else even tries. This is Biles’ definition of failure.

Her definition of success? If you ask Biles, it’s not in the medals, her power. It’s in the very thing that showed itself on the last day of competition: her realness. She is proud of what she’s accomplished, but she’s more proud of who she’s become and the people she believes — accurately — she’s helped.

“Putting your mental health first, and taking time for yourself, whether you’re in sports or not, it’s about longevity,” she said. “Longevity in sports, specifically, but also just for a better, healthier lifestyle.”

Not far from where Biles competed, a woman walked down a Parisian sidewalk, following behind her friendly Australian shetland sheepdog. Indulging dog lovers in need of a fix, she stopped to chat. She is French, but in Paris to enjoy the Olympics and upon learning her new dog friends were from the U.S. said immediately how much she enjoyed the “American gymnast.” She had watched Biles’ documentary on Netflix and commended her for opening the dialogue on mental health.

“I am not an athlete,” she said, adding that she was nonetheless grateful that Biles made it OK to “talk about” your personal struggles. “I appreciate that.”

If this is the end, we should all appreciate Simone Biles.

(Top photo of Simone Biles with her gold medal from the vault competition: Tom Weller / VOIGT / GettyImages)