‘The Football Wanderer’: How Broncos Country welcomed one fan attempting to break a world record

[Miles]

DENVER — An hour before kickoff for Thursday’s game between the Broncos and the Kansas City Chiefs, Jacob Barnor weaved his way through the crowd at Empower Field at Mile High with thousands of other fans.


He had spent the afternoon tailgating with the Broncos faithful, was given a Broncos T-shirt and even won a raffle to claim a framed photo of Emmanuel Sanders.


But Barnor wasn’t clad in Broncos Country’s traditional orange and blue.


Instead, he wore a black T-shirt with a red map of the United States. A pair of sunglasses were tucked into his collar, but they didn’t obscure the block-writing that read: “The Football Wanderer. 32 games. 84 days. 1 world record.”


So far, Barnor has worn the shirt to 17 different NFL stadiums over the course of 43 days. He has packed it into his carry-on for each trip and will continue to do so as he travels across the U.S. and attempts to break the Guinness World Record for attending home games for all 32 NFL teams in the shortest amount of time.


“There was a lot of stadiums I had already wanted to go to, and every time [my friends] went to a new stadium, my list got longer and longer,” Barnor said. “I looked at it and was like, ‘It’d be cool if I were able to go through them all over the course of a lifetime.’”


A year ago, at his home in Leeds in northern England, Barnor began searching for people who had been to all 31 stadiums, and he came across the man who has the current world record.


“I looked at that and was like, ‘If I could do that, if the schedule allows it, I would love to do it,’” Barnor said.


In April, when the 2019 NFL schedule was announced, Barnor started running travel combinations for Thursday, Sunday and Monday night games. He figured he has to be at every Thursday night game, almost every Monday night and he had to pick a Sunday game that was close to wherever he was traveling for Monday’s game, so to minimize travel and room for error.


He realized he could break the previous record (86 days, 10 hours and 20-something minutes) by attending home games for every NFL team in 84 days and approximately three hours. After starting at Soldier Field on opening night, Barnor will finish at Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Thanksgiving.