The Long Read: English Football's Top-Flight One-Hit Wonders

Six clubs have had one season and one season only in the top-flight of English football. Here are their stories.

This week, we have something a little different for you. Since the Football League expanded to two divisions in 1892, six clubs have had one season and one season only in the top flight, whether that be in the First Division of the Football League or in the Premier League. These are their stories, starting off in Derbyshire at the very end of the 19th century.

Glossop (1899-1900)

The town of Glossop sits on the north-eastern edge of the Peak District, considerably closer to Manchester than it is to Derby. Glossop North End formed in 1886. Chairman Sir Samuel Hill Wood, a cotton mill owner who'd inherited the company his father had built and who would go on to captain Derbyshire at cricket, put considerable money into the club and was key in their getting elected into the Second Division of the Football League in 1898.

Their election into the League was immediately vindicated, though. Hill-Wood's money had brought a group of talented players down to Glossop from Scotland, and at the first attempt the team were promoted into the First Division, in second place behind Manchester City. The club locked the ‘North End’ off the end of their name in order to avoid any confusion with Preston North End.

But Glossop's stay in the top flight was to be a miserable one. They managed just four wins all season and a final total of 18 points from 34 games, a full 10 points from safety. They scored the least goals in the division and they conceded the most.

Glossop remained a Second Division club for a further decade and a half, even reaching the quarter-finals of the FA Cup in 1909. But Samuel Hill-Wood's attentions were starting to shift elsewhere by this point. Entering politics, he became the Conservative MP for High Peak in 1910 by a narrow majority in the second general election of the year. And in 1914, he ended his association with Glossop FC.

Without his munificence, Glossop quickly started to struggle and finished at the bottom of the Second Division at the end of the 1914-15 season. Although League football was suspended for the war, the club were not re-elected into the League and have remained a non-league club ever since.

The smallest town ever to host top-flight football in England, Glossop have now reverted back to the name Glossop North End again, and currently play in the North West Counties League Premier Division. Samuel Hill-Wood, meanwhile, have bigger fish to fry. He closed the cotton mill in Glossop in 1921, but would remain the Conservative MP until 1929, when he stood down and became the chairman of Arsenal.

He resigned this position in 1936, but took it up again in 1945 until his death four years later. His son Dennis would go on to be the Arsenal chairman from 1962, and his grandson Peter would occupy the same position from 1982 until 2013. Peter Hill-Wood, who by this time had sold his entire shareholding in Arsenal, died in December 2018. By this time, the Hill-Woods were a very long way from Glossop indeed.

Leyton Orient (1962-63)

Leyton Orient found themselves stuck in the Third Division South between 1929 and 1956, before two promotions in six years suddenly, and not a little unexpectedly, thrust the club into the spotlight with a place in the First Division.

That 1962 promotion came in illustrious company too. Leyton Orient finished that season as runners-up to Liverpool, who by the end of the 1963-64 season would be the champions of England, but who at that time had been labouring in the Second Division since 1954.

On 28 April 1962, the last day of the season, Leyton Orient beat Bury 2-0 at Brisbane Road to clinch promotion, as Sunderland could only manage a draw from their game against Swansea Town. Both Orient goals were scored by Malcolm Graham. With an inferior goal average to Sunderland, they needed that slip-up to squeeze up themselves.

Managed by Johnny Carey, who'd been surprisingly sacked by Everton despite having taken them to fifth place in the First Division, the team was well organised but modest of talent. On the 18th of August 1962, Leyton Orient made their First Division debut with a match against Arsenal at Brisbane Road.

Arsenal won that match 2-1, but Orient actually had something of a decent late summer, albeit after a slow start of just a single point from their first four games. In September, they beat their new local rivals West Ham United 2-0, Matt Busby's Manchester United 1-0 and, probably most pleasingly for Carey, his former club Everton 3-0. Everton, for the record, would go on to win the First Division title that year by six points.

After winning 2-0 at Fulham at the end of September, however, Leyton Orient's First Division adventure spun suddenly and wildly out of control. They didn't win another game until the 15th of April, when they won 1-0 at Bolton Wanderers. By this time, the damage had already been done. The team was too far adrift at the bottom of the table to be able to pull it back. They did, however, get involved in a couple of notable end-of-season stories.

Firstly, their sixth and final league win of the season came against Liverpool, of all people. And secondly, their final match as a First Division club came with a 3-1 defeat at Manchester United, a result which kept United in the First Division and relegated Manchester City instead. They finished the season on 21 points, 12 points adrift of safety at the bottom of the table.

Leyton Orient's First Division season was not a complete flash in the pan. Carey had built on solid groundwork, but the club couldn't recapture that promotion spirit again and were further relegated in 1966, whereupon they lopped the Leyton off their name. The Leyton Orient name would be restored in 1987, following a campaign by the Leyton Orientear fanzine. The club would get promoted back into the Second Division in 1970 and stayed there for 12 years, but they would only get close once throughout that time, spending the majority of it as a mid-to-lower mid-table club.

Northampton Town (1965-66)

On New Year's Day 1960, Northampton Town were a Fourth Division football club. On New Year's Day 1970, Northampton Town were a Fourth Division football club. But what mattered was what happened in between. Northampton's 1960s were more about the journey than the destination, and the tour bus driver was manager Dave Bowen.

Bowen had been the captain of the Wales team at the 1958 World Cup finals, but he was already 32 years old by this point, and the following year accepted the job as player-manager of Northampton Town. Northampton had been part of the great influx of clubs into the Football League in 1921, but they had never played above the bottom division upon Bowen's appointment, having been placed into the Fourth Division upon the creation of that division in 1958.

Bowen's impact was immediate. At the end of his first season in charge, Northampton were promoted into the Third Division in third place in the table. Two seasons later, they were promoted again, this time as the champions of the Third Division, scoring 109 goals in the process.

After one season in mid-table in the Second Division, they started to pull clear of a large chasing pack. Northampton were promoted with a 4-1 win at Bury, ending the 1964-65 season as runners-up in the Second Division, behind Newcastle United.

But Northampton's promotion was really a case of too much too soon. The club had still had the infrastructure of a Fourth Division club, most clearly visible in the three-sided County Ground, whose pitch was shared with the local cricket club and was ill-equipped to deal with this step up. Only five of their entire squad had any prior experience at this level and there was no money to strengthen the squad.

They started the season by shipping five goals at Everton and it took them 13 games, only one short of a third of the season, before they finally won a league match, beating West Ham United 2-1 at the County Ground on the 23rd October. With that first win under their belts though, Northampton did start to slowly claw their way back into the First Division season.

Further wins against Aston Villa, Fulham and Blackpool followed. And from the middle of February, they went on a run of just one defeat in nine matches, which pulled them to just above the relegation places. The crunch match, however, came on the 23rd April 1966, the penultimate Saturday of the season, at home against Fulham, who sat just below them in the table.

A record attendance of 24,523 people turned out at the County Ground for this match, but at 2-1 up, a goal was controversially disallowed for Northampton, and Fulham went on to win the match 4-2. Northampton Town were relegated again, having finished the season with 33 points. Already strapped for cash, the club was forced to break up the 1966 team just to stay financially afloat.

A second relegation followed the following season, and Dave Bowen left the club. After a season of struggling in the Third Division, they completed a third relegation in four years in 1969, dropping back into the Fourth Division again. Dave Bowen also returned as manager that year, meaning that not only did Northampton Town end as 1960s in the same division that they had started it, but that they did so with the same manager in place. The club hasn't played in the top two divisions of English football again since 1967.

Carlisle United (1974-75)

The one serious attempt that Orient had to get into the First Division during their 12-year stay in the Second came in 1974. In the promotion places at the end of January, Orient collapsed following a 3-0 defeat against Carlisle United at the start of February, failing to win any of their next seven matches. When they drew their last three games of the season, Carlisle sneaked up on the blindside, with a 2-0 win against Aston Villa on the last day of the season squeezing them into third place in the table, behind runaway winners Middlesbrough and second-placed Luton Town.

The recently retired former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly described Carlisle's promotion as, “the greatest feat in the history of the game”, though his bias may have been influenced by the fact that he'd both played for and managed the club.

Like Northampton Town and their three-sided ground nine years earlier, there was a cricket-related novelty about Carlisle United in the form of Chris Balderstone, who had also been, for the previous couple of years, a first-class county cricket player for Leicestershire with a chance of making the England team, having prioritised football earlier in his career.

Carlisle United are the only team on this list to have topped the First Division, as well. On the opening day of the 1974-75 season, they travelled to Stamford Bridge to play Chelsea. On the day of the opening of Chelsea's ruinously expensive East Stand, they won the match 3-1. The following Monday, they travelled to Middlesbrough and won 2-0, and the Saturday after that, a Balderstone penalty kick gave Carlisle a 1-0 win against Tottenham Hotspur and put them top of the First Division.

From there, of course, the only way was down, but Carlisle only really drifted down the table during the 1974-75 season. They only conceded more than three goals once all season, but they lost matches in big clumps, six in a row between the middle of October and the end of November, and then two wins and 11 defeats from 13 matches between Boxing Day and the end of March.

Carlisle's form did pick up again towards the end of the season, but again it was a matter of too little, too late. They only lost one of their last six matches of the season and that was away to Liverpool. It wasn't enough, though. Carlisle ended up at the bottom of the First Division, five points from safety, on 29 points in total.

Chris Balderstone's First Division season turned out to be his last with the club after 10 years. He made 376 appearances for them in total. The following season, he joined Doncaster Rovers, where he managed a singular achievement of playing both county cricket and league football in the same day.

Balderstone was playing in a county championship match for Leicestershire against Derbyshire at Chesterfield. When play stopped there in the evening, he drove the short distance to Belle Vue to play for Doncaster against Brentford, returning to the cricket the following morning to complete a century and take three wickets to help wrap up Leicestershire's first ever county championship title.

Carlisle United, meanwhile, were relegated again in 1977 and spent most of the next decade bouncing between the second and third tiers of English football before slipping into the Fourth Division for the first time since 1961 in 1987. The following season, they finished one place off the bottom of the Football League altogether.

Swindon Town (1993-94)

If there was a hint of snippiness about the song released to mark Swindon Town's play-off final appearance against Leicester City at the end of the 1992-93 season, then perhaps this was in some way understandable.

Three years earlier, the club had been denied promotion to the top flight after being found guilty of financial irregularities. With the benefit of hindsight however, we now know that it is likely that such under-the-counter dealings as were found to be going on at Swindon in 1990 were probably far more common at the time than the FA or the Football League would have wanted us to believe.

Under the managership of Glenn Hoddle, Swindon were around the promotion places from the newly formed First Division of the Football League for most of the 1992-93 season, without ever really seeming to attack the automatic promotion places. They ended their regular season in 5th place in the table, some 12 points behind 2nd place West Ham United. A 5-4 aggregate win against Tranmere Rovers in the semi-finals of the play-offs sent them back to Wembley.

When Eurosport published a list of what it considered to be the greatest 100 matches of all time in 2009, at number 94 on that list was the 1993 First Division playoff final between Leicester City and Swindon Town. Three goals in 11 minutes either side of half-time seemed to have Swindon coasting towards the Premier League.

But three goals in 12 minutes brought Leicester back right into the match, before a Paul Bodin penalty kick, scored with six minutes left to play, finally sent Swindon into the Premier League for the first time. For Leicester, it was the second year in a row that they'd lost at this stage of the season.

Shortly after the end of the season, however, the bombshell dropped. Manager Glenn Hoddle had joined Swindon three years earlier, and his stock as a young manager had grown over that period. When Chelsea made an offer for him to leave for Stamford Bridge, it wasn't that surprising that he accepted. The club appointed his replacement John Gorman and moved on.

Nine months later, Swindon Town were heading back to the Football League. They had not won a league game until their 16th match of the season and had ended the season relegated in bottom place with just five wins and having conceded exactly 100 goals from 42 matches.

Defensive profligacy and the loss of key personnel was Swindon's downfall. They tried to keep the ball down and play the attractive football that had earned them promotion in the first place. But John Gorman's lack of managerial experience at this level left them defensively disorganised, whilst a high rate of individual errors didn't help to keep the goals against tally down either. Goals 96-100 in the against tally all came on the last day of the season, when they were beaten 5-0 at home by Leeds United.

In addition to the loss of Glenn Hoddle, they had to deal without Colin Calderwood and Mick Hazard from their coaching staff, both of whom left for Tottenham Hotspur, and these were experienced shoes to fill. Swindon didn't win their first League match of the season until the 24th November, and only managed five League wins all season. Gorman was sacked in November 1994. Swindon Town were relegated for the second season in a row in May 1995.

Barnsley (1997-98)

The miners' strike and its aftermath carried a long tail in towns like Barnsley. Even if the coal mines had to close, and there's a strong environmental argument which says that they did, the government's actions throughout this period often seemed ideological rather than practical, proof of which could be seen in the fact that so many of these towns were left to fend for themselves in the years after the end of the strike. 30,000 jobs were lost in Barnsley in 10 years. Regardless of the politics, successive governments let them down on a basic human level.

By the mid-1990s, Barnsley needed a tonic. Its football club had been sitting in the second level for more than a decade when Viv Anderson left as manager to take up the assistant manager's job at Middlesbrough. His replacement was Danny Wilson, formerly of nearby Sheffield Wednesday, who had been Anderson's assistant. He had no managerial experience of his own, but had impressed as assistant to Anderson, who he'd left Sheffield Wednesday with to go to Oakwell two years earlier.

In Wilson's first season in charge, Barnsley finished in 6th place, but they missed out on what would ordinarily have been a play-off place because the Premier League was reducing from 22 to 20 clubs. The following year, they finished in mid-table, but in 1996-97, everything changed. Alongside highly experienced players such as Neil Thompson, Paul Wilkinson and Neil Redfearn. Wilson spent what little money he had wisely, bringing in such players as Trinidad and Tobago international Clint Marcelle.

As the 1996-97 season progressed, Bolton Wanderers pulled further and further clear at the top of the table, but Barnsley did the same to the chasing pack, with Wolverhampton Wanderers, Ipswich Town and Sheffield United falling away bit by bit, as Barnsley kept their noses in front.

Going into their penultimate game of the season against Bradford City at Oakwell, they needed a win to guarantee automatic promotion. Paul Wilkinson gave them the lead, and then, with 10 minutes to play, Marcelle made it 2-0 and Barnsley were promoted into the Premier League.

They were, of course, overwhelming favourites to go straight back down the following season. Two wins from their first four matches looks like a reasonable start, but already doubts were starting to mount over whether Barnsley had much hope of staying up. They shipped six goals at Chelsea in their second away game of the season, and in October conceded five at Arsenal and seven at Manchester United in consecutive away matches.

There were, however, occasional glimmers of light, most notably with a 1-0 win against Liverpool at Anfield, with the goal coming from Ashley Ward, and a run to the quarter-finals of the FA Cup, which took in beating both Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur.

In the Premier League, Barnsley were doing their utmost and just about staying in touch. Until, that is, their match against Liverpool on the last Saturday of March 1998, when a knockabout refereeing performance from referee Gary Willard resulted in three Barnsley players being sent off and a late Liverpool winner. This defeat seemed to send the team into a psychological tailspin. Barnsley picked up just four more Premier League points from their final eight matches of the season.

Barnsley did get to the play-offs for a place in the Premier League again in 1999, but were beaten by Ipswich Town, and Danny Wilson left that summer for Sheffield Wednesday. He would return in December 2013, but this time around he only lasted until February 2015, before being sacked after a bad run of results. Such is the life of the modern football manager.

***

Each of the six clubs that have had one season in the top flight have their own but the theme that does seem to run across all of them is that none of these clubs seem well prepared to find themselves where they did. This isn't necessarily a criticism. Some were on an upward trajectory, which resulted in them crashing headlong into the Peter Principle. It's been more than two decades since a club had a one-off season like this, too, the biggest gap since the huge one between Glossop in 1899 and Leyton Orient in 1962.

Perhaps one season wonders are a product of social mobility within football. When Glossop had their season in the sun, there were only two divisions to the Football League, and the period during which it was most prevalent began shortly after the creation of Division Four.

Correlation, however, doesn't always equal causation, and each of these six stories makes more sense when viewed through the perspective of the club itself, rather than the game in an overall sense. And the culture of the game may have changed in recent times, but it is notable that none of these six clubs, not even those playing in the increasingly trigger-happy 1990s, sacked their manager during their top-flight time.

Most of the clubs featured here were cash-strapped in comparison with their contemporaries, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to believe that these clubs already knew how difficult their managers' tasks would be before a single ball was kicked at the start of the season.

And for the supporters of the clubs concerned, the clubs that got there lived very long in the memory. At the time that they got promoted, those fans may have allowed themselves a moment to dream of even greater glories to come. And that's probably the most important thing of all, because if you can't hold out hope in that moment, then when can you?