Three football fans will travel 7,000 miles from Argentina to see their favourite team play at Wembley.
Matías Foti, 25, started supporting League One side Bolton Wanderers after playing a video game when he was a teenager. He has followed their fortunes ever since and when the club takes on Plymouth Argyle in the EFL Trophy on Sunday he will see them live for the first time.
Matías will fly from his home city of Buenos Aires to London with pals Nicolas Álvarez, 25 and Federico Di Rocco, 31, who also love Bolton. It will be the first time any of them have left Argentina.
Matías said: “We haven’t got the words to explain how we feel. This is a big dream for us, maybe one of the best travel experiences of our lives. We’ve never gone out of our country so this is the first time outside and it’s the UK. Only our love for Bolton Wanderers can make us do it.”
Sports reporter Matías has set up a Spanish-speaking Bolton supporters club, with members from ten different South American countries. But he admitted it had not been easy watching the club slide from the Premier League into the third tier in recent years.
He said: “I was playing the FIFA video game with Nico. We chose a randomly selected team – and that team was Bolton. We only knew that Bolton was in the Premier League, but nothing more than that. So we started to search for more information and we fell in love with the club.”
He added: “We started to follow them at possibly the worst moment in the history of the club. But we still kept supporting them because our love is bigger than everything.”
In addition to seeing the Papa Johns Trophy Final, the trio will see Bolton play at Exeter City on Good Friday and Cambridge United at home on Easter Monday. They are also planning to tour the University of Bolton Stadium and meet fellow fans.
Matias added: “We are looking forward to meeting Bolton fans and giving them a big hug because we feel like a Boltonian, we feel like we were born there.”
A Spanish football fan was made team mascot after travelling to watch National League side Alfreton Town on his stag do. Cristobal Novo Gonzalvo, 34, from Barcelona, has been a fan of the Derbyshire side since playing them on a computer game.
And he was over the moon when the players picked him as their mascot when they played Darlington at Alfreton’s Impact Arena Stadium earlier this month.
After watching the 2-2 draw, Cristobal said: ”The game was very entertaining and I was honoured to be made a mascot for the day. It was a crazy thing to happen.”
Cristobal, who marries Elena Villar, 33, next month, said: “My future wife knows about me and my crazy problem with football and also Alfreton. I have already said we will go together to watch Alfreton next season so hopefully they will win.”
