100 Owners: Brian York & Arthur Eastham, Cambridge City

The sale of Milton Road was one of non-league football's lengthier and more scandalous sagas.

It has been said that there was a time when the more likely of the two senior football clubs in Cambridge to find a way into the Football League would have been Cambridge City rather than Cambridge United. Having already turned down an invitation to join the Football League in 1936, at the end of the 1962/63 season City won the Southern League championship by finishing three points ahead of United.

They had the crowds – regularly  averaging in excess of 3,000 for home matches – and they had now acquired, it seemed, the ambition that had been missing when the Football League made its offer to the club three decades earlier. This form, however, proved temporary and they were relegated from the Southern League Premier Division in 1968. 

Two years later, meanwhile, Cambridge United were elected into the Football League in place of Bradford Park Avenue. In the years following this it was United that attracted the crowds as they rose as high as the second tier of English football, while City continued to scratch a living, their crowds decimated by a combination of a relative lack of success in comparison with its neighbours and a more general decline in attendances in non-league football.