The Daily, 11th August 2023

Can non-league football cope without its temporary sprinkling of Hollywood largesse? Course it can. Here's a preview-ish.

Take down the bunting and pack it in a bag until Morgan Freeman and Danny DeVito buy into Solihull Moors. After the fireworks of last season, the National League returns to something like normal in 2023/24, and the biggest irony of this is that for all the drama of the two-horse race that last season’s title chase ended up being, this season’s title chase will likely be considerably broader and less predictable. The league in which anybody can beat anybody else could be back.

Across the non-league game, the mood has been extremely positive since crowds were allowed back into matches again. Attendances have soared and stable community links have been built, including a proliferation of new women’s teams. But the 2023/24 season begins with a slight feeling of trepidation in the air. The cost of living crisis is continuing to bite, and it feels entirely plausible that this season could see a slight tail-off in numbers. 

It is to be hoped that clubs haven’t grown too accustomed to greatly increased revenues, but there are few guarantees of sensible financial management at any level of football. Let’s hope for a season as blessedly free from financial crisis for non-league clubs as the last couple seem to have been, and that supporters aren’t prevented from watching their teams by the increasingly perpetual-feeling inclement financial conditions, though it should also be added that opening weekend attendance figures seemed okay.

But can the National League even really be counted as ‘non-league’ any more? Population growth alone means that it makes no sense to keep this sharp dividing line at 92 clubs. In 1987, the year in which re-election was scrapped and automatic promotion & relegation finally bridged the gap between ‘League’ and ‘non-league’, the population of England was 47.3m. It’s now 56m. That’s an increase of almost 20%. Small wonder practically the entirety of the fifth division is now full-time, when the market is there to support it, and it should also be borne in mind that 1987 was pretty close to the game’s absolute low point in this country, when it really did bottom out.

And the events of last season do raise the question of three-up-three-down between League Two and the National League. The short answer to this is that the current state of affairs is clearly inequitable. League Two has four promotion places. The most likely answer to the question of why this persists is self-preservation. It took a decade and half for the second place to be given, because turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, and if there was one thing about these new teams with strange names like Stevenage, Salford and Sutton, it was that once they got up, they tended not to go straight back down, leading to a build-up of former EFL detritus clogging up the National League, mostly unhappy at being “non-league”, sometimes for the first time in living memory.

Is League Three ever a possibility? A fourth EFL division would certainly turn down temperature inside the wages hothouse at this level of the game by smoothing the path of relegation, though the obvious counter to this is that another likely outcome would be for that heat to be transferred down a level, possibly to clubs even less insulated against the risks of gambling money on promotion. The losses aren’t as high in the National League as they are in that other well-known financial sanatorium, the EFL Championship, but the risks of over-extending are the same. The National League, has to its credit, been extremely proactive in ensuring that clubs reach their financial requirements.

But the ‘status’ of an EFL place does matter to towns. What would Scunthorpe be known for, were it not for its football club, their results read out on the television and radio every Saturday afternoon? Iron production? Having an extremely rude word contained with the town’s name? Much has been made of the hollowing out of industrial Britain since the 1980s. Football can’t repair that damage. That’s somebody else’s job. But it can offer a focus for local pride and a sense of community identity. And regardless, this isn’t a zero sum question. Scunthorpe is still known for its connections to steel. It does still have an extremely rude word contained in its name. It also still has United. But it used to have a Football League club. And that hurts.

Scunthorpe United are one of the two bonafide National League basket cases at the moment. Southend United are due back at the High Court in response to a winding up petition presented against them by HMRC over unpaid tax and NI on the 23rd August. There had been talk of a takeover, but there has been no solid news on this in three weeks now, and on the eve of the start of the new season the National League put down its criteria for them to start the new season: 

a. The Club HMRC debt is to be discharged in full by their next court date, 23 August 2023. It should be noted that this remains a requirement from the League even if the court hearing is further adjourned past the 23 August 2023.

b. In addition, having discharged all outstanding Football Creditors, and all HMRC debt by 23 August 2023, it will be a condition of the license to ensure all new or any Football Creditors debts or HMRC debt are cleared on time to the satisfaction of the League at any point during the 2023-2024 season.

Should the above, set out in a or b not be satisfied, the Club will be subject to an immediate and automatic 10 points deduction. This is in addition to any other action deemed appropriate by the League when considering any new debt.

The League has made it clear to the Club the importance that not only the current debt is settled but the Club operates in a manner that ensures they operate sustainably moving forward.

So, to be clear, that debt has to be paid in full by the 23rd August regardless of whether they defer the actual winding up petition again at the court, and the minimum sanction for a failure to do so will be a 10-point deduction. Nevertheless, they beat Oldham 4-0. It will be cold comfort to Oldham supporters with any sort of moral compass to know that there remains a possibility that this result could yet get wiped completely from the record. 

Meanwhile, Scunthorpe are now in the National League North and remain the subject to a tug-of-war between the club’s former owner and their current one which leaves Scunthorpe at a very real risk of becoming homeless. They have a team–Southend barely have one, limited to a squad of sixteen and under transfer embargo–but might not have anywhere to play. Such are the stupid intricacies of money and its relationship with football. 

Yet on the opening weekend of the season, both Southend and Scunthorpe won. If anything, it was a perfect example of just how little the fortunes of a team can have in common with the health of a club. The common link between these two clubs is that there came a point at which the ground came to be thought of as something other than a football ground.

And that’s common, be it a comfortable pension for its owner, a redevelopment opportunity, a piece of land, or a wholly owned subsidiary of a wholly separate company to the club itself. At Southend, a near quarter-century long attempt to get a new stadium with lots of lucrative housing and other redevelopment still amounts to nothing more than hot air, while at Scunthorpe it feels as though both sides are to play some form of 3D chess without either really fully understanding the rules.

Southend’s 4-0 win against Oldham Athletic on the opening day of the season was all the more impressive because Oldham started the day as one of the favourites to win the National League. Southend were flattered a little by a late flurry of goals, but  you know. Sixteen players. Transfer embargo. All that. 

That heads dropped so quickly will be concerning to Oldham when the summer had seen a flurry of optimism on the part of supporters in the weeks building up to the start of the season. The good news for them is that with a 46-game season and six-play-off places, the National League is one of the most forgiving leagues around, in some respects.

But in others, it is substantially less so. The pre-season favourites Chesterfield, who finished third place last season, started their season in front of a home crowd of 7,656, but struggled to a 4-3 win against Dorking Wanderers and needed a winning goal scored three minutes into stoppage-time at the end to secure that. Woking, who finished fourth (with a not-inconsiderable 82 points), could only muster a 0-0 draw from a trip to newly-promoted Kidderminster Harriers.

Last season’s two relegated clubs come with very different levels of experience of the National League. Hartlepool United were last relegated from the EFL and took two years to get back up. They lost their opening match away to the National League’s true yo-yo club Barnet 3-2. Rochdale practically tumbled out of the League after a stay of 102 years. How will they adapt to their new surroundings? Things didn’t exactly start encouragingly, with a 1-0 home defeat at the hands of last year’s National League South champions, Ebbsfleet United. 

In the National League South, the league season started on the same weekend with two new former EFL clubs among their ranks, both relegated at the end of last season. Torquay United and Yeovil Town have both had issues over their ownership over recent years, with both also having had plans of varying degrees of bakedness involving ‘land’. 

And if the opening weekend did say anything about the trajectories of these two clubs, it wasn’t encouraging. Yeovil lost 1-0 away to Hemel Hempstead Town, who finished 15th in the division last season, and while Torquay did at least pick up a point from their opening game, but this was away to Dover Athletic, who started the season at the bottom of the betting table, behind such luminaries as Aveley, Taunton Town and Chippenham Town. 

There will be a cluster of clubs at the top of this division who will each consider themselves capable of a title bid or failing that, having a reasonable shot at one of those six play-off places. Maidstone United were the champions two years ago but were relegated straight back in bottom place. Chelmsford City, St Albans City, Worthing, Braintree Town and Dartford all lost in the play-offs last season. Farnborough and Eastbourne Borough have strengthened. Torquay and Yeovil started the season as favourites to win the division, but neither gave much indication of why this should necessarily be the case in their opening fixtures. 

Scunthorpe United started their National League North season with a 2-1 win at Tamworth, and they are clear favourites to win that division on the strength of the team built over the summer alone, with a cluster of clubs below them between whom it seems difficult to draw much distinction. Chester, King’s Lynn, Darlington, Brackley, South Shields, Hereford, Boston Utd, Spennymoor, Scarborough Athletic. Again, the expansion of those play-off places to six opens the whole of the top half of the division and potentially a little further beyond to the tantalising possibility of a place in those play-offs, even if the number of actual promotion places remains the same. 

Below this in the Isthmian League Premier Division, there seems little to choose between joint-favourites Hornchurch and Billericay Town, so we might expect this division to have a little Essex spice, this season; at least an improvement on the cocaine and Relentless energy drinks years of Glenn Tamplin’s ownership of Billericay. But they don’t seem so far clear from the rest of the pack as to be uncatchable and a Wrexham-Notts-County-esque two horse race in which both streak clear doesn’t seem particularly likely. 

In the Premier Division of the Northern Premier League the team to watch will be Macclesfield, who reformed after the collapse of Macclesfield Town in 2020 and who seem in a hurry to get back to their former level. In their two seasons they’ve won 57 league matches and lost just eight while running away to two league titles in a row. With crowds rising to over 4,000, they won the Northern Premier League Division One West (we’re at the point at which division names start to become a little unwieldy, and I’m not even including sponsorship names here) title by fourteen points last season. 

In their slipstream are Bury, two divisions lower in the North West Counties League but reunited at Gigg Lane and with 5,451 people having turned out there to see them beat Glossop North End in their first match of the season. At the time of writing they’ve won their three subsequent matches as well, including their first FA Cup match since 2018. It seems difficult to believe that, with Bury AFC having finished 4th in that division last season, with the huge advantages that come from the reunification of these two clubs, they won’t continue their upward progress. 

To accommodate the pyramid structure, the Southern League has two top divisions nowadays, and the Central division resembles a rest home for fallen Alliance Premier League sides of the 1980s. Telford United! Redditch United! Leamington! Kettering Town! Bromsgrove! Nuneaton Borough! Some of them aren’t quite the same club. Bromsgrove are Sporting rather than Rovers. Telford are now an AFC. Leamington’s association with Automotive Products is now largely limited to their nickname, The Brakes. But if you’d been idly wondering whatever happened to a reasonably-sized non-league club from forty years ago, this division appears to be the back of the sofa. 

The same can’t be said for the Southern division, though it does contain both Swindon Supermarine and Plymouth Parkway, two clubs with excellent names, but who both conceded seven goals on the opening day of the season. And yes, yes it may be a little early for ‘Supermarine implodes’ jokes, but honestly, when am I going to get this opportunity again?

The same might also be said for Plymouth Parkway, who lost their opening match of the season 7-0 at Hungerford Town. Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Sympathy, for the record, for the clubs in that division who have the sort of journeys that regional football is supposed to preclude. Parkway have several trips of more than 200 miles to the outskirts of London, to play the likes of Hayes & Ted Lasso’s Training Ground United, Harrow Borough and Hendon.

There’s so much more to say, but I’ve barely scratched the surface at 2,500 words in. There’s a good reason why for many years arguably the defining publication of the non-league game has remained the annual Non-League Directory, a tome with many of the properties of a small house-brick and which still weighs in at 900 pages, enough heft to prop open a wooden door, if required.

And perhaps, just perhaps, this sort of ‘who will finish where’ preview is missing the point of non-league football, a little. It’s not that results don’t matter or anything like that. It’s more that the very nature of the non-league game makes long-term prediction less relevant, the lower down you go. The stakes aren’t as high. It matters less. And that’s a very good thing, when you consider the varying shades of puce that those who take it all a tad too personally turn at points throughout the season. Morgan and Danny just don’t need that, at their time of life.