Cleethorpes Town

Tommy Watson had played for Grimsby Town before he set up a soccer school for local boys in 1998, and it is that school, not a boardroom project, that grew into the club now known as Cleethorpes Town. The name changed twice on the way — LSS Lucarly's by 2003, then Cleethorpes Town in 2008, when the badge was made to say the ground it stood on rather than the classroom it started in.

That ground work paid off through the Northern Counties East League, which the club won outright in 2014 and again, at Premier Division level, in 2017 — the same year they went all the way to an FA Vase final and came back from South Shields with runners-up medals instead of the cup. A year earlier they had already beaten Tadcaster Albion to lift the league's own Challenge Cup, and by 2019 Stamford AFC had been seen off in the Lincolnshire Senior Cup final. None of it was cheap: in February 2018 the club was docked twelve points for playing someone who should not have been on the pitch, a penalty that landed mid-season and had to be played through rather than around.

Grimsby Borough is the derby that matters most, played out under the "El Haddocko" name that only makes sense to people who already know Grimsby's fishing trade; Spalding United fills the rest of the rivalry on the fixture list. Promotion to the Northern Premier League Division One East in 2025 pushed the club a rung higher than it had ever stood, and a run to the FA Cup's second qualifying round in 2023–24 gave the Linden Club a night or two above its usual level. What Cleethorpes Town has not done yet is turn any of that into a step into the National League System's higher, better-known tiers — the Owls remain, for now, a very good side in a league most fans outside Lincolnshire have never had reason to watch.