From the Archive: The Contradictory & Counter-Intuitive Oxford United

Oxford United are headed back to the Championship, so this evening's archive piece for paid subscribers tells the story of an often contradictory football club.

Being the blank slate that it is, professional football can be infuriatingly counterintuitive, at times. The best don’t always achieve the most and the good guys don’t always win. And sometimes, a sequence of events can be triggered by a decision that looked crazy from the outset, but somehow forced itself to make sense when taken from a step of remove. In some cases, however, even that degree of sense from a distance is invisible, and there can, perhaps, be no better example of that than the sudden ascent of Oxford United in the middle of the 1980s.

There was a time when Headington United wasn’t even the most senior football club in the city of Oxford. That honour belonged to Oxford City, but as the 1950s wore on, City remained pegged to an amateur game that was set to enter a precipitous decline that would lead to its near extinction.

Headington United, meanwhile, were ambitious. When the Southern League expanded to two divisions in 1949, the club was accepted for a place and turned professional. Eleven years later, it changed its name to the altogether more inclusive Oxford United. And two years after this, following the mid-season collapse of Accrington Stanley, the club was elected into the Football League in their place.