Photographer Tony Davis is mostly known for his pictures of the Midlands rave scene in the early 1990s. But football was there long before any of that. He’d been on the terraces since the early 1970s, following his club, mixing with the same faces, week in week out. Pointing a camera at it was just him showing the world he already knew.

Between 1990 and 2005 he went to grounds all over the UK, from Celtic Park to The Old Den. This was before football turned into the slick product it is now. Stands were getting rebuilt, money was coming in, but a lot of the old feel was still hanging on — the clothes, the pubs, the walk to the ground, the groups of mates sticking together. You can see the shift starting, but you can also see what hadn’t gone yet.

The photographs in this gallery are from those years. They’re straight-up records of what Davis saw around him. No staging, no trying to prove a point. Just football people doing what they’ve always done, long before the game went global.