Essays on Watford and the modern game.

Occupation Road is the service road that runs behind the Graham Taylor Stand at Vicarage Road — unglamorous, essential, and the way everything actually gets in and out of the ground. This site works the same way. It is one supporter writing seriously about one club, using the club’s own numbers: statutory accounts, transfer records, wage bills, the things football mostly talks around.

The road was renamed Yellow Brick Road in 2023, after a supporters’ campaign in Elton John’s honour; everyone still calls it Occupation Road. The name has a second sense. An occupation road is a term of art: the private way kept for whoever occupies land that a public work has cut in two. Owner and occupier are not the same party, and football forgets this routinely.

The essays are long and arrive once or twice a month, in a planned series across the season. The notes are shorter and arrive when something warrants one. Everything draws on a research corpus assembled from primary sources, and every figure is cited back to where it came from.

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