Eighteen years after starting a season on minus 17 points, Bournemouth played the first European match in their history and won it, 2-1 at Real Sociedad.

AFC Bournemouth, the club from the seaside town of that name on the south coast of England, won the first European match in its 127-year history on Thursday 17 September, beating Real Sociedad 2-1 at the Anoeta in San Sebastián, in the Basque Country of northern Spain, and in the away end a flag read From -17 to Europe, BBC Sport reported.

Justin Kluivert scored the club’s first goal in Europe after 11 minutes, turning in Adrien Truffert’s cross from the left, and the goal stood only after a video review overturned an offside flag, according to the Press Association’s report of the match. Nine minutes later Alex Scott played a ball over the top of the home defence and Rayan headed it into the far corner. Sergio Gómez pulled one back for Real Sociedad just before the hour, and the goalkeeper Djordje Petrovic made four saves that the Daily Mail’s reporter called world class to keep the lead.

There is a tradition at the Anoeta, kept since 2009, that a single firework is set off whenever the visiting team scores and two when the home side do, Sid Lowe wrote in the Guardian, so each of Bournemouth’s two goals was marked with one firework and Real Sociedad’s with two.

It’s a brilliant win in our first European game. It’s brilliant for the club and the 2,000 fans from Bournemouth.Marco Rose, Bournemouth’s manager, to TNT Sports

Minus 17

At half past three on Thursday 7 February 2008, after HM Revenue and Customs served a winding-up petition, the club, then in the third division, was placed in administration, five members of staff were made redundant and a ten-point deduction dropped it to the foot of League One, the Bournemouth Echo’s Neil Perrett wrote in a piece marking the tenth anniversary, and by May it had been relegated to League Two.

That August the Football League ruled that because the club had left administration without a company voluntary arrangement with its creditors it had not met the terms for leaving it, and on 8 August 2008 Bournemouth accepted a further 17-point deduction and agreed not to appeal, BBC Sport reported at the time, which meant the season in the fourth division began on minus 17 with the club’s 86 years in the Football League at stake.

Steve Fletcher, the club’s centre forward for most of two decades, told the Daily Mail in 2019 what that season was like from the inside. Bailiffs stripped the club shop of its stock, and staff took tiles off the roof so they could tell supporters the empty shelves were because of a leak. The gates of the training ground were padlocked, so the squad trained in public parks and started sessions by clearing the pitch of dog mess. After home games the players waited behind to be paid their wages out of that day’s ticket sales, and Eddie Howe, who had been made manager on New Year’s Eve at 31, the youngest in the league, paid for coaching equipment out of his own pocket.

25 April 2009

Survival came down to the second last game, at home to Grimsby Town in front of 9,008 people, BBC Sport reported from Dean Court that day. Grimsby led through a Nathan Jarman header, Liam Feeney levelled two minutes into the second half, and with ten minutes left a cross from the left dropped to Fletcher, 36, who had come back to the club from non-league Crawley in January. He chested it down and hit it with his right foot for his hundredth league goal for Bournemouth, took his shirt off and ran off down the touchline, and at the final whistle the crowd came onto the pitch.

All of the things I achieved will never replicate the feeling of when I scored that goal.Steve Fletcher, to the Bournemouth Echo, 2019

Since

Howe took the club up three times from there, and it has now been eleven years since Bournemouth first reached the Premier League, so there is a generation of supporters for whom the top division is normal, the BBC’s Sam Drury wrote on Thursday. Last season, under Andoni Iraola, they finished sixth and went the last 18 games unbeaten, which earned the Europa League place, and Iraola told Match of the Day after his final match in charge that he was close to tears. Marco Rose replaced him in the summer. Adam Smith, who made his debut for the club in League One, captained the side on Thursday.

Fletcher is now on the coaching staff, and when supporters asked him before kick-off how strange the evening felt, he told the fan channel Back of the Net that it was a nice weird. The chief executive, Jim Frevola, told the same channel in the Plaza de la Constitución the night before that seeing the supporters fill a foreign city for something they had probably never imagined in 127 years was startling. He had watched the squad train in the empty stadium that afternoon, he said, looking around like a child.

The first European match at Dean Court is against Sturm Graz in October, with AC Milan to follow.