Three up three down makes sense for the National League, but can the EFL be persuaded?

Could it be that something that non-league football has been chasing for years is finally up for grabs? That would be down to the EFL, and there still aren’t any guarantees.

Another split article this afternoon, everybody. Here’s a piece on the three-up-three-down case that’s being presented to the EFL by the National League, and for paying subscribers below the cut a history of how we got to this position. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber if you can!

In one very particular way, League Two is a very strange division, in that it has four promotion places but only two relegation places. The historical reasons for this are long and stretch back to when the non-league game looked very different to today, but right now the chase is on for that elusive third promotion place from the top of the non-league game. The campaign for three up, three down with the National League has started again, and this time it’s not receiving an unsympathetic ear.

There’s been automatic promotion and relegation between the Football League—now the EFL—and the GM Vauxhall Conference—now the National League—since 1987, and broadly speaking it has been a success. In the Championship are Oxford United and Luton Town, both clubs relegated into the non-league game and who took a little while to get back.

There are, unsurprisingly, more of them in the lower two divisions. Four of the current top six in League One have played in the National League at some point, with two of them—Wycombe Wanderers and Stockport County—also having also played a division lower than that. Seventeen clubs in League Two are former non-league clubs in some way or another.

That history is the part of the reason why things are the way they are. In the first place there was only one promotion place, so that went to the champions only. A second one wasn’t granted to them until 2003, but it has long been felt that this still isn’t enough, and that a third promotion and relegation place should be added.

With this in mind, all 72 National League clubs—including the National League North and South—have written to the board of the EFL demanding an increase in the number of promotion and relegation places between the two leagues from next season to three as part of a new ‘3UP’ campaign, which is supported by the FSA.

It is to be presumed that the reason why this is considered before is that turkeys do not tend to vote for Christmas. Too many EFL clubs, certainly in League Two, may have sailed close to the wind near the bottom of the table and who may only have gotten away with it because there were others even worse, rather than anything they did to merit themselves. Others will recall when it did happen before to them and shudder at the thought of it being even easier to repeat than it was before.

The old argument, of course, was that dropping into the non-league game was shameful for the supporters of EFL clubs, that it was a downgrade in status for an entire town or city to drop to the fifth division. But is this still the case? If they hadn’t been persuaded before, the attention drawn to Wrexham during their titanic title race with Notts County might well have done. The quality is high enough. The infrastructure is big enough.

There’s an argument that the National League has been something else for years for a long time, that the cross-pollination of “league” and “non-league” football over the last four decades has led to what constitutes actual “non-league” football has changed and dropped lower down the ladder. Because when you’ve got five clubs with an average home attendance of over 3,000 and none under 1,000, is it even “non-league” football in anything like a meaningful sense any more?

Some might argue that football truly gets “non-league” in spirit is a level lower, in its North and South tributaries. It’s the highest level at which you can drink in sight of the pitch, and at which you can expect to be able to pay on the gate. It’s largely semi-professional. By comparison, the division above it feels more like a bridge between these two quite different worlds.

The official line in the past has often been that the National League has seen a lot of financial crisis over the years, and that greater stability in this division would need to be seen before it could be agreed. But this might be countered by pointing out that this spending is in part because there are only two promotion places.

With only the champions and the play-off winners going up—and there are six teams in the National League play-offs rather than the more conventional four—it is understandable, if still misguided, that clubs feel that they have to go big or go home. The National League has certainly seen more than its fair share of financial basket cases over the years, but the EFL is hardly spotless in this regard either.

And it says something about the state of modern football that it takes 800 words to get the fundamental point that it’s… fair. Greater mobility gives smaller clubs greater opportunity to grow and advance. It is absurd that there is a national division of 24 clubs with only two promotion places, and an automatic one for the champions only.

Below the National League, where regionalisation means a natural limit to the number of promotion places, but this doesn’t exist below this level. It’s long been known that the non-league game has wanted this for years. Logically, the only reason for this imbalance can be the previous intransigence of EFL clubs. It’s obviously time to end this contradiction.

The EFL could even go further and increase the numbers from three to four wherever a division has 24 clubs, but given the amount of power afforded to Championship clubs, how tight relegation fights at the bottom of that division can get and how much television and commercial is lost by clubs dropping from the second to the third tiers, maybe I’m getting a little over-ambitious there.

But in the meantime… it’s time. Verbal support for the idea from the EFL isn’t worth the air being exhaled unless it turns into something concrete. It would be hugely beneficial to the non-league game—especially if accompanied by a robust overhaul of the National League’s financial regulations—and… it would be fair. There’s nothing wrong with doing things because they’re fair.