We Travel: The Story Behind the T-Shirt

Some people support Wales from the sofa. Some people follow Wales.

You know which one you are.

The We Travel T-Shirt is not for supporters. It is for followers. The ones who have sat on early morning coaches to airports that barely exist. The ones who have navigated foreign train systems with a Red Wall flag in a bag and a match ticket they paid too much for. The ones who have stood in away ends in cities that nobody else would have bothered with, singing in Welsh, watching Wales, because that is what you do when Wales is your team.

This is the story behind the design.

What it means to follow Wales away

There is a distinction in football between supporting a team and following a team. Supporting is watching on television, checking the score, feeling good when they win and disappointed when they lose. Following is different. Following is booking the flight before you know if you can afford it. Following is explaining to your family why you are spending a weekend in Andorra. Following is the away end, the songs, the solidarity of a few hundred Welsh people in a stadium of tens of thousands who barely notice you are there.

Welsh football supporters have been doing this for decades.

The away trips in the lean years, the qualifying campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s, were not glamorous. Wales were going nowhere. There were no major tournaments on the horizon. The supporters who made those trips were going because Wales were playing and that was enough of a reason.

They went to places that do not feature in anyone's travel plans. San Marino, a microstate of 34,000 people with a football ground that holds fewer than 7,000. Andorra, a tiny principality in the Pyrenees where Wales nearly suffered one of the most embarrassing results in their qualifying history before a late Gareth Bale free kick saved them. Azerbaijan, where Welsh fans were advised by the Welsh Government not to travel during Euro 2020 because of coronavirus restrictions, and a few hundred went anyway.

The journey was never the problem. The journey was always the point.

The cities that made the Red Wall

When Wales qualified for Euro 2016 the away trips changed. Suddenly the Red Wall was not a few hundred people in a qualifier in Zenica. It was thousands of supporters in the cities of France, turning away ends red, making a noise the football world noticed.

Bordeaux. The opening group game against Slovakia, a 2-1 win, the first competitive win for Wales at a major tournament since 1958. Lens. The defeat to England, 2-1, decided by a Daniel Sturridge goal in stoppage time, in what became one of the most talked-about matches of the tournament. Toulouse. The win over Russia that sent Wales to the top of their group.

Then the last sixteen in Paris against Northern Ireland. The quarter-final in Lille against Belgium, then the second ranked team in the world. Hal Robson-Kanu. The Cruyff turn. Ashley Williams rising to head home a corner. Wales 3 Belgium 1.

The semi-final in Lyon against Portugal. Wales were eliminated. They went home. The supporters who had been in every one of those cities, who had sung through every minute of it, went home too.

Those cities are in the DNA of every Welsh football supporter who was there. Bordeaux. Lens. Toulouse. Paris. Lille. Lyon. Say those names to a Red Wall supporter and they do not think of wine or cathedrals or tourist attractions. They think of red shirts and Welsh songs and the summer that changed everything.

Then came Baku and Rome for Euro 2020. The Cardiff City Stadium for the World Cup qualifying playoff against Ukraine, a Gareth Bale free kick, and a noise that could be heard across the city.

Every trip adds to the story. Every away end becomes part of what it means to be a Welsh football supporter.

The ones who were always there

The Red Wall that filled those French cities in 2016 was built on something constructed over decades, by supporters who had far less to celebrate and travelled anyway.

The people who went to Tbilisi in 1994. The ones who sat in the old Ninian Park and watched Wales lose qualifiers they needed to win. The ones who travelled to Moscow in 2003 for the first leg of the Euro 2004 playoff, came home from a battling goalless draw believing Wales were finally going to make it, and then watched Vadim Evseev's goal in Cardiff knock them out.

Those supporters did not stop going. They came back for the next campaign, and the one after that. Their loyalty was not conditional on results. It was just loyalty.

When the new generation of Welsh football supporters arrived in 2016, the ones who were there before the Red Wall had a name looked at them and recognised something. Not resentment. Recognition. These are more of us. The wall gets bigger. The noise gets louder. Wales keeps going.

We travel is not a slogan. It is a description of something Welsh football supporters have always done, through the lean years and the good ones, through the long trips to San Marino and the quarter-finals in Lille. Wherever Wales go, the red shirts appear. That has always been true, and it always will be.

The design

The We Travel T-Shirt is number 08 in The Ones That Know. It is for the ones who have made the journey. The ones who know what an away end feels like when Wales are playing in it. The ones who have stood in cities across Europe in a red shirt, outnumbered but never outsung.

Some people support Wales from the sofa. Some people follow Wales.

You know which one you are.

Shop the We Travel T-Shirt

Every number in the collection carries a story like this one. Read the ones behind No.01 Cymru, No.02 Yma o Hyd, No.03 Y Ddraig Goch, No.04 The Red Wall, No.05 1958, No.06 1881, No.07 The XV, No.09 Home Wherever We Are and No.10 The Catalyst.

Diolch,
Mike