The Daily, 4th August 2023
The attention circus rolls into town for League Two, this season.
Somewhere in the distance there is a noise, a low rumbling of wheels turning mixed with lion’s roars, elephants trumpeting, and the occasional burst of Land of my Fathers. The circus is about to roll into League Two, and there’s nothing that anybody can do about it.
The Top
The obvious place to start with all of this is at the top of the division below at the end of last season. Wrexham and Notts County gobbled up global attention with their National League title race, and with County having followed Wrexham back into the EFL through the play-offs, both will be expected to find themselves sat or near the top of this division again this time around.
So, how much are National League points worth in League Two this season, then? Wrexham picked up 110 of them last season. The club’s profile has never been higher, money is pouring into its coffers while renovation work on the stadium continues apace, the owners are still putting out charmingly humble social media messages cross-referencing their love for their adopted home, ticket availability is reaching Premier League levels. What could possibly go wrong?
The garden isn’t entirely rosy. A pres-season punctured lung seems likely to leave golden boy Paul Mullin out of the team for the start of it all. Mullin has now scored 64 in 84 in the league for Wrexham, and with 38 in 46 last season every game for which he is absent is a potential loss. But money, momentum and profile count for a lot, and a surface level view may make it difficult to not see them powering through to a second successive promotion.
But they shouldn’t necessarily expect to go without significant challenge at the top of the table and they may not be the best team in the division, either. Stockport County came within a penalty shootout of promotion last time around. Nick Powell has arrived from Stoke City, alongside Ibou Touray from Salford City and Louie Barry on a season-long loan from Aston Villa. Having strengthened and with a year’s experience under their belt, they look like a formidable challenge, and possibly player-for-player the best team in the division.
Of course, with a luxurious four promotion places available, three of them automatic, there’s plenty of room at the top of League Two, and these two are far from the only clubs that will consider themselves capable of jostling for position at the very top of the table. Notts County showed impressive resilience by recovering from the disappointment of missing out on automatic promotion to get up through the play-offs instead.
And it’s this County who have made the stand-out signing of the summer with the arrival of David McGoldrick. McGoldrick has more than 500 games worth of EFL and Premier League experience, as well as 14 appearances for the Republic of Ireland. He may now be 35 years of age, but he made 39 appearances in League One for Derby County last season and there’s no reason to believe that he won’t be a success at this level too. As per last season, the majority of attention will be elsewhere at the top of this division, and that ended up suiting Notts pretty well, and they will also be targeting a second successive promotion.
Talking of near misses, Bradford City continue to bristle over their extended stay at this level, with big crowds attracted by inexpensive season tickets demonstrating the potential of the club while the team continues to fall just a little short. Bradford were beaten by Carlisle in the play-off semi-finals last season, attracting more than 20,000 to Valley Parade for the first leg.
Bradford fall into the category of clubs whose biggest signing of the summer was the retention of someone already with the club. Andy Cook scored 28 goals in all competitions for them last season, and at this level of the game a forward in that sort of form is never guaranteed to stay beyond its end. That Cook was persuaded to stay says something about ambition not having been dimmed by four years in League Two. Mark Hughes remains the manager, though for how much longer that may remain the case should they not have a strong start.
So that’s five down, and none of them were relegated from League One at the end of last season. Accrington Stanley held their own in League One for three years before gravity caught up with them last season. This is a sensibly-run club who will be unlikely to lose their minds in the transfer market in the pursuit of those with bigger budgets, and who will likely look at those above them throwing money around with a wrinkling of the nose. Perhaps it would be better for them to sit out this nonsense, make sure that they don’t go full Scunthorpe—extremely unlikely under Andy Holt—and leave others to absorb the media attention and the onver-inflated wage budgets.
Forest Green Rovers were practically falling off the bottom of the League One table by the end of last season and the jury remains out on whether the decision to put a woman into the vacant manager’s job for a couple of weeks was a publicity stunt and no more or not. They are not expected to challenge near the top of the table this season.
I’ll come back to Morecambe.
The relegation of Milton Keynes a year after finishing in third place in the table was both unexpected and funny. They’re the best-placed of the four relegated teams to challenge, but as ever it’s unlikely that there will be much broader support behind them. Just drop the “Dons” from your name, lads. If this has to be a thing, and after two decades it would appear that it does, at least just do that. This hesitancy to build a new identity that distances them from triggering the muscle memory of, “oh yeah, that’s the club that essentially bought a place in the League” remains as baffling as ever. “No-one likes us, we don’t care” is one way to go through your life, but it seldom does you any good in the long-term.
Talking of buying your way into things, Salford City are about to start their fifth season in League Two and last season saw them reach the play-offs for the first time, where they lost on penalty kicks to Stockport in the semi-finals. A repeat of last season is certainly plenty possible, but it’s likely to get congested near the top of the table.
The Middle
Just as happened in League One last season, the bottom half of the table was far more congested than the top half. If anything it was even more extreme, with 12th placed Tranmere Rovers finishing 15 points above 23rd place and 17 points from 7th. Tranmere’s season was effectively over by the time winter turned to spring last season with some comfortable mid-table slumber, and there’s little to suggest that they won’t repeat themselves this time around.
There may be a little more ambition going on at Gillingham, who are under new American ownership. They started last season dreadfully, and there is a striking line between the team’s performances before its takeover and afterwards. Former Wales midfielder Jonny Williams and Scott Malone have added extra experience to a team that had already recovered from their poor start, and in Neil Harris they have a strong manager for this level, as well. Gillingham seem like a better bet to upset the top of the table and they certainly have momentum behind them, but there’s a lot of competition and this may be a year too soon for them.
Last season’s chase for the play-offs saw the teams from fourth down to eighth separated by four points, with one missing out. The team that did so was Mansfield Town, to Salford by one goal on goal difference. This is Mansfield’s eleventh consecutive season in League Two, but they’ve only made the play-offs twice in that time. Again, were it not for the promotion of a pair of powerhouses from below you’d expect them, now managed by Nigel Clough, to be able to push harder. Last season they were affected by injuries, but they still got as close to the play-offs as it’s possible to be without getting there. Only the smallest incremental improvement would be enough to nudge them into the play-offs, but again, this time around the competition will be even stiffer.
Of all the teams who finished in the top half of League Two last season, you probably fear for Barrow the most, this time around. The economics of football strongly suggest that they are the team most likely to fall away as the hubris train rolls into town, and it’s true to say that they were exceptional in finishing as high as 9th in the first place. But losing Josh Gordon, Patrick Brough and Josh Kay hasn’t helped and they would likely be happy enough with a mid-table finish.
The same could be said for Grimsby Town and Swindon Town. Grimsby’s return to the EFL last season ended with 11th place in the table and a run in the FA Cup which saw them beat five teams from higher divisions—Southampton from the Premier League, Luton Town from the Championship and Plymouth, Cambridge and Burton from League One—before losing to Brighton in the quarter-finals.
Swindon had a slightly disappointing season last time, a new manager in the form of Michael Flynn, and another rebuild going on. They remain play-off contenders, but the middle of the table looks like a more likely position for them, as well. Crewe Alexandra finished 13th last season, but having lost a couple of key players during the summer may find it difficult to get so high again.
The make-up of the division this season certainly doesn’t seem to be stifling optimism a little further down. Doncaster Rovers have had a dismal couple of seasons, with relegation from League One followed by finishing an extremely underwhelming 18th in League Two, but former manager Grant McCann is back and with him having got the team to within a penalty shootout from Wembley in the League One play-offs in 2019 there is optimism that the good times may be set to return. Jamie Sterry and Joe Ironside are particularly eye-catching signings, but again the play-offs may be as high as they can manage this time around.
The Bottom
*Basket case siren goes off*
In the battle to avoid arguably English football’s most belittling relegation—how fitting it should be that English football has such a clear dividing class line between clubs as ‘league’ and ‘non-league’—will as ever be a combination of those being run badly, those who have drifted into a scrap for which they may or may not be well-prepared to fight, and those whose resources limit them to the lower reaches of this division.
Into the latter of these categories may fall Sutton United, the scale of whose achievement of getting into the EFL in the first place has never really received the full credit it deserved. That they got here and held their own in the first place is noteworthy, but Sutton’s growth has come with costs. Attendances have grown, but an average last season of 3,300 still puts them in League Two’s bottom six and this means that finances are necessarily limited, even though this is a well-run club.
They need to cram an extra thousand seats into Gander Green Lane to satisfy ground-grading rules by the end of this season, and have lost key players. Sutton are unlikely to improve on this season and have to consider League survival their first priority. Walsall have considerably greater resources, but last season ended disappointingly slowly and the likelihood of improvement on finishing 14th doesn’t seem particularly high there, either.
Others may be similarly satisfied should they not be glancing nervously over their own shoulders as the season enters its closing stretch. Harrogate Town had the lowest average home attendances of any of the top 92 last season, with just 2,239 turning out on average for their home matches. Harrogate’s three seasons in the EFL so far have ended with them finishing 17th, 19th and 19th, and it is tempting to wonder whether them being here in the first place is something of an act of gravity-defiance. Budgets are limited, but improvements have been made. Harrogate may yet even improve on their previous finishes, this season.
Another club in a similar boat are Newport County, who finished last season in 15th place in the table but who are necessarily limited by budget and lost a couple of key players in the form of Cam Norman and Priestley Farquharson at the start of the summer. But manager Graham Coughlan is pretty popular having lifted them from the cusp of a relegation fight to the lower end of the mid-table.
Colchester United finished one place above the two relegated clubs, but new manager Ben Garner took Swindon into the League Two play-offs at the end of the 2021/22 season and seemed to improve the mood around the club a little when he took over in March. But Colchester have now been in their new stadium for 15 years, now. When they moved in there, they’d just been relegated from the Championship after two seasons. Perhaps, we might have rationalised at the time, this would be the progress that Colchester would make, settling as a yo-yo club between the second and third tiers and looking at the possibility of growing over time.
This has not happened. The last 15 years of Colchester United have been years of glacial decline from the Championship to too close for comfort at the foot of League Two. As supporters contemplate another season of trekking miles out of town for another season in which League Two survival is the main priority, they may be justified in considering that, no matter how ramshackle Layer Road may have been, the benefits of leaving have been mixed, to put it mildly.
There was no-one present when Wimbledon got back home to Plough Lane in November 2021 and it took until the start of the following season for the fans to be allowed into the stadium built by the club owned by its fans for the first time. The two seasons since then have been pretty disastrous. The 2021/22 season saw them one place off the bottom of League One with just 37 points from their 46 games and last season brought no improvement whatsoever. They finished the season in 21st place, two positions and just five points above the relegation places.
As such, Wimbledon need a season of stability, one in which the spectre of relegation isn’t looming the distance somewhere. Manager Johnnie Jackson isn’t universally popular as manager and summer transfer business has been modest, but as we’ll see, even if things are little better than last season—and there’s nothing to suggest they will be—there are almost certainly two teams worse than them in League Two this season. Step forward my nominations for League Two Basket Cases of the Year.
It is difficult to see past Morecambe and Crawley Town as the favourites to end this season in the League Two relegation places. For Morecambe this would be a second successive relegation, with dropping from League One having been the first in their 103-year history. There are causes for optimism. Manager Derek Adams got the team battling valiantly last season, and even though they couldn’t survive the cut they were relegated with their pride very much intact.
But the intrigue over their ownership issues remains unresolved. The, ahem, soft drinks ‘magnate’ who offered to buy the club still doesn’t seem to have overcome the EFL’s Owners & Directors Test, and this uncertainty coupled with likely lower attendances following relegation means that it’s likely that the club will start the new season under something of a cloud. This season could end with a new owner stepping in and transforming the club. Or it could end with the club owned by a red flag factory. 22nd will do, this season,
And then there’s Crawley Town. Last season, crypto-bro co-chairmen Preston Johnson and Eben Smith made a lot of noise before the start of the season, only to see farcical scenes play out, three managers, and Smith turning out in the dugout for a match against Stevenage, which resulted in a dog’s abuse from the crowd and subsequent radio silence from an ownership which it has rather felt has been sulking since then. As recently as this week, a fan was complaining about receiving a life ban for reposting a picture of this season’s kit which had been tweeted by a player. Keep that charm offensive going, lads.
The latest patsy victim incumbent in the manager’s position is Scott Lindsey, one of the few good decisions the club has made over the last year or so. Lindsey did enough to keep them up and seems like a decent enough sort, but so long as the owners of the clubs continue to fight like cats in a bag while it all gets leaked onto social media it will continue to feel like chaos, if it hasn’t already arrived, is just around the corner.
If there’s one thing that Crawley Town need for the new season, it’s for attention to focus on the team. Unfortunately, the owners seem, whether intentionally or otherwise, incapable of keeping the attention away from themselves, and it seems pretty clear that if Crawley do survive a drop back into the non-league game this season, it will be in spite of the ownership rather than because of anything productive or pro-active they they’ve done. This summer they’ve ensured no sponsorship for the team’s shirts or stadim, so it is to be hoped that the finances can be insulated by the vast amount of money that their NFT shirt shifted last year. The timing of the publication of company accounts means that we won’t even see how much money the club itself made from that little endeavour until September 2024.
There’ll be media attention at the top of the League Two table this season. At the bottom, there might just be a media circus unless the crypto owners either give this up as a bad job and concede that they don’t know what they’re doing, or hand the reins of the club over to those who do. Crawley supporters are more than used to financial weirdness. It’s been going on since before they were in the EFL. But to give their club the best chance of that EFL status continuing, that weirdness needs to end, and there are no guarantees whatsoever that this is going to happen. It promises to be another long winter in West Sussex.