Pretty much everyone in Harrogate knows where Gareth Southgate goes for coffee. Somewhere less refined, less discreet, less, well, Harrogate, this sort of information might be regarded as an open secret. In this corner of North Yorkshire, it is closer to common knowledge, the sort of thing that it would be a little gauche to discuss.
The former England manager, now a freshly minted Knight of the Realm, is a familiar sight at the cafe in question, a bustling, sunlit spot not far from the town’s famous Royal Baths. (The Athletic could name the place: the owner, Tim, is a warm, amiable man who knows his way around a cortado. He deserves the free advertising. But breaking the unofficial omerta would not be very Harrogate, so we won’t.)
His other regulars disagree, just a little, on how often Southgate visits. Micah Richards, the ex-England international turned barrel-chested television personality, puts it at “every other day”. Danny Mills, the former Leeds and Manchester City defender, thinks that might be a bit of an exaggeration. Both, though, accept that Southgate’s presence and their own is sufficiently familiar to be unremarkable.
“I can have a coffee with Sir Gareth, which is what he has told me I have to call him now, and the most that will happen is someone will walk past and put their hand up to say hello,” Mills said. “Tourists might make more of a thing of it, but generally, people just aren’t that bothered.”
Harrogate is 16 miles from Leeds, sufficiently close that this weekend’s meeting of Harrogate Town and Leeds United in the FA Cup officially counts as a derby. But while that is true in the strictest geographical sense, it is a touch more complicated in many others.
The two places may share a little resentment — as Harrogate Town’s chief executive, Sarah Barry, put it, Leeds has always regarded Harrogate as “posh”, a characterisation the town, as a rule, has been perfectly happy to lean into — but there is no rivalry, least of all a sporting one.
Harrogate has always looked to the big city down the road for its football: the clubs played a pre-season friendly last summer, but this is the first time they have ever met competitively. Harrogate is traditional Leeds territory, not just for fans but for players, too. Leeds is where the football happens, but Harrogate has always been where the footballers live.
Harrogate and Leeds met in a friendly last summer (Richard Sellers/PA Images via Getty Images)
In recent years, Southgate — who lives a few miles outside of town in a sprawling home that is both fittingly rural and on a dog-walking route sufficiently well-trodden that a surprising number of people have opinions on what he has done to his garden — has become by some distance the most famous resident, having moved here while playing for Middlesbrough, an hour or so further north.
There are many others, though. Daniel Farke, the Leeds manager, lives in the centre of town; several of his squad are dotted around its surrounding villages. So, too, are many of their predecessors, players who landed here during their careers and could not think of any reason to leave.
Mills first arrived in Harrogate when he signed for Leeds in 1999; he has spent his “entire adult life” here and cannot conceive of a time when he will not consider it home. David Prutton — once of Leeds, Nottingham Forest and Southampton, and now a host for UK television broadcaster Sky Sports — has been a resident since 2007. Danny Rose and Matthew Kilgallon are fixtures at the local padel club; Michael Dawson, who grew up a little further north, in Northallerton, frequently makes up their foursome.
They are here, of course, for all the reasons that make Harrogate an “aspirational place to live”, as Prutton said. The schools and the transport connections are good. It is low-key during the day but lively enough in the evening: Richards picked out William and Victoria, Gianni’s Brio and La Feria — “like a Nando’s, but with a wine list” — as favourite haunts for the town’s footballing fraternity.
Betty’s is a Harrogate institution (Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)
Richards had never actually been to Harrogate when he decided to live here; having grown up in Leeds, he knew it only by reputation. “I drove through it once,” he said. “I stopped for a coffee. I went to the Pump Rooms. And I thought: ‘This is nice’.” To him, it felt natural, obvious. That is Harrogate: the place where you go when you’ve done well for yourself in Leeds.
But for Richards, as for Southgate and Mills and all of the others, the real charm of the town is a discretion that borders on aloofness. “Nobody is impressed by the fact you play football,” said Mills. “There are a lot of self-made people here, people who run their own businesses. They’re not interested if you drive a nice car because there’s a pretty good chance they’ve got a nicer one.”
Prutton characterises it as a sort of “invisible shield. You drive through it on the way back in and all of a sudden, people just don’t care,” he said. That ambivalence is not a sensation available to players in a big, bustling city; it is not realistic in a town where life revolves around the local club. More than anything else, the thing that has always made Harrogate a town for footballers is the feeling that it has never really been a town for football.
The first Harrogate Town shirt Jordan Ford bought his son, Daniel, was far too big for him. Daniel was two or three at the time; the smallest one the club sold was designed for seven-year-olds. “I basically used to wrap him up in it,” Jordan said. Even with the most artful tucking, the oversized jersey tended to catch people’s attention. “People would stop me in the middle of Harrogate and ask what team it was,” he said.
Harrogate is not, it is true, the sort of place defined by football. There are plenty of similar-sized towns, all around England, who only reliably intrude on the national consciousness when the name of their football team is read out on a Saturday afternoon: Walsall, Mansfield, Burton.
Harrogate is not one of them. Harrogate is the home of Yorkshire Tea and Taylor’s, the brewers, and the linen tablecloth elegance of Betty’s. It has its baths and its spring water and the Great Yorkshire Show.
Sheep wait to be judged in the Great Yorkshire Show in Harrogate (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)
Politically, it diverges from Leeds, a city traditionally dominated by the left-leaning Labour Party. Harrogate is more right-leaning, swinging in recent years between the Conservatives — its convention centre has regularly hosted their’ party conference, as well as once staging the Eurovision Song Contest — and the Liberal Democrats.
Across much of the north of England, it is a byword for a specific type of affluence, a place perfectly captured by the Leeds-born author Ben Machell. Its glamour makes it, just occasionally, the butt of a (reasonably) affectionate joke.
But that is not the same as saying it is not a football town. “You always hear that,” said Ford. “But it is. There’s always been lots of junior football. If you drive down the Stray, the big park in the centre, you see teams playing or kids being coached all the time.” Harrogate Town’s data backs up that assertion: the club estimates that around 4,000 children in the area currently play organised football, which amounts to roughly a third of the pupils in the town’s schools.
The reputation took root, Ford believes, because Harrogate did not have — had never had, in fact — a league team. “It was unusual because the size of the place (Harrogate’s population was listed as around 162,000 in the most recent census in 2021) means it’s definitely big enough to support one,” he said.
There were two stalwart non-League clubs — Harrogate Town and Harrogate Railway — but they were niche pastimes, largely the preserve of an older generation. “When I started going, 14 years ago, Harrogate Town were getting crowds of a few hundred,” Ford said. “They maybe had a few dozen season-ticket holders.”
Harrogate’s crowds have grown hugely in the last decade (Richard Sellers/PA Images via Getty Images)
Instead, people directed their loyalties elsewhere. Leeds have long been considered the local team. The giants of the Premier League have constituencies, too, of course, while Ford was likely not alone in plumping for a team to which he felt a family connection: he grew up with a season ticket at Blackburn, 90 minutes away on the other side of the Pennines.
He started going to watch Harrogate Town, his local club, when he could no longer justify making that journey every couple of weeks. It was, effectively, a convenient — and considerably cheaper — way of getting his fix of live football. At roughly the same time, the club was being bought by the property developer Irving Weaver, father of the team’s manager, Simon.
The Weavers had unusually lofty, and uncharacteristically public, ambitions. They wanted to bring league football to Harrogate for the first time in the town’s history. As a result, they hoped, they would make sure that the team were no longer strangers.
Somehow, Sarah Barry said, the biggest fixture in Harrogate’s history has crept up on them. She and her colleagues have spent the past month or so, ever since the draw for the FA Cup third round was made, organising the fine details of the team’s first-ever competitive visit to Elland Road while trying to navigate League Two’s hectic festive schedule. That the game is here, now, almost took them by surprise.
The scale of the tie is, for Harrogate, unprecedented. The club was initially allocated around 2,500 tickets — just under their 2,700 average attendance in League Two this season. Those seats sold out rapidly. Barry is grateful for the help Leeds have offered in supplying more. “They’ve been brilliant to deal with,” she said. Harrogate’s travelling support will number around 4,000 — it is, needless to say, a club record — and every one of the 517 seats on the supporters’ coaches is taken.
Barry attributes that not just to the success the club has had in increasing its footprint in the town, but to the fact that the culmination of all the Weavers’ ambitions — promotion to the Football League in 2020 — occurred in the middle of the pandemic. “I wasn’t here then,” she said. “But the fans and the club did not get that day out, that Wembley moment. For a lot of people, this is the equivalent. This is the one.”
Harrogate’s Dean Cornelius celebrates scoring in the FA Cup second-round win over Gainsborough Trinity in November (George Wood/Getty Images)
She knows from personal experience that not everyone who takes their place among Harrogate’s crowd on Saturday will necessarily be an ardent Harrogate fan. The club has given tickets to a number of local junior teams, with some of the coaches having been asked to remind their young charges that they maybe should not wear Leeds colours for the game.
The loyalties of her household, she admitted, might otherwise have been split along similar lines: its loyalties lay with Leeds right up until the point, three years ago, when she started working for Harrogate. “I know plenty of people who are genuinely torn,” she said. “Ardent Leeds fans who have moved to the area and started supporting Harrogate, too. Who do you want to win?”
She, and the rest of the club, do not have any problem with that. It might be a little awkward this weekend, but she is adamant it is “OK” to support both clubs. “Most of the time we are chalk and cheese,” she said. “We operate on totally different scales.”
Indeed, it is central to Harrogate’s growth. Crowds at the Exercise Stadium — all the locals still call it Wetherby Road — are five times bigger now than they were a decade ago and many regulars, Barry knows, may support other teams as well.
“We realise that we can’t convert lifelong Leeds fans, or fans of other clubs,” she said. “If we can be everyone’s second team, though, the team that you come to watch when your side isn’t playing, so be it.” To make that as easy as possible, she said, the club do what they can to ensure their games do not coincide with Leeds’ fixtures, in particular.
Harrogate’s club shop is a busier place these days (Richard Sellers/PA Images via Getty Images)
The focus, though, is on capturing the affections of the next generation. The club places particular emphasis on fostering a “family” atmosphere, offering various discounts on tickets, reaching out to younger fans on social media, and engaging with schools. “It’s our job to find a connection, whatever that connection might be,” Barry said. “We are accessible. You can get a ticket. You can come and see a game. We are starting to see that first generation of fans come through.”
Ford’s son, Daniel, is a case in point. He now has a Harrogate shirt that fits him properly and nobody stops him in the middle of town to ask him what team he supports. “People are more likely to see me in a Harrogate polo shirt and start talking about players,” Ford said. “If you ask Daniel who he supports, he doesn’t say Harrogate and someone else. He just says Harrogate.”
That is precisely what the club has been working towards over the past 15 years: to turn Harrogate from a town for footballers into a town for football. “You want to be famous for something,” said Barry. “Harrogate is famous for water, and for tea, and for Fat Rascals. It will take time, but there’s no reason it can’t be famous for football as well.”
(Top photos: Getty Images)
