Hallam

Their ground at Sandygate hosted an inter-club match that Boxing Day, and it still stands as the oldest football ground in the world. Seven years later Hallam beat Norfolk to win the Youdan Cup, the first knockout football tournament ever staged, with founder John Charles Shaw leading the side he had captained since that first match.

The Countrymen, as they are known, spent 1933 to 1947 without a home after the landlord of the Plough Inn threw them off Sandygate over poor bar takings, a dispute that cost the club fifteen years of football before they returned to the same pitch. A crowd of over 13,000 packed into Hillsborough in 1952 to watch Hallam face Dulwich Hamlet.

Sandygate itself holds just 1,665, a fraction of what turned up that day at Hillsborough, and it sits barely a mile from Sheffield FC's own patch — the two clubs meet in what is billed as the Rules Derby, the oldest derby in the game, a fixture that owes less to bitterness than to the fact that football itself was still being worked out when both were founded.

Hallam have kept collecting honours at their own level rather than football's higher tiers: the Northern Counties East League title in 2022 and a play-off final won in 2025, the kind of silverware that keeps a club with this much history still turning up on a Saturday.