Sutton United

Wayne Shaw spent most of a televised FA Cup tie on the bench, and it was there, eating a meat pasty in full view of the cameras, that he became the most talked-about substitute goalkeeper in the country. The Football Association later fined and suspended him over the stunt, and the story outlived the result — a reminder that Sutton United's biggest headlines have often come from the margins of the game rather than the score itself.

The club exists in its current form because two Sutton sides, Sutton Guild Rovers and Sutton Association — itself formerly Sutton St Barnabas — merged at a meeting in the Robin Hood Hotel on 5 March 1898. It has played at Gander Green Lane ever since, a ground that has changed its name more often than its location: Knights Community Stadium between 2017 and 2020, and VBS Community Stadium since a sponsorship deal with Vulcan Building Services took effect on 7 August 2021. It holds 7,032, of which 1,132 are seated.

Sutton spent most of the twentieth century as a fixture of non-league football, winning the Isthmian League five times between 1967 and 2011, before Paul Doswell took charge in 2008 and, across more than 500 matches, built the side that finally ended that pattern. The 2020–21 National League title sent Sutton into the Football League for the first time in their history; the following season they added the EFL Trophy. Earlier generations had their own way of making the point that the club could compete above its station — a 1989 FA Cup win over Coventry City, then a top-flight club, with goals from Tony Rains and Matthew Hanlan, or Paul Telfer's more than 550 appearances between 1977 and 1996.

Locally, the fixture that matters most is against Bromley, known as the 4G Derby after the road linking the two clubs, and reckoned among the sharpest rivalries outside the League.