Worksop Town

Worksop Town go into this campaign in the National League North, after finishing second in the Northern Premier League Premier Division in 2025. The rise has come quickly: relegated to the Northern Counties East League after a financial crisis in 2014, they won that division in 2019, took the Northern Premier League Division One East title in 2023, and climbed again two years later. For a club that spent much of the previous decade shuttling between rented grounds at Hucknall Town, Ilkeston Town and Retford United after losing their lease at Sandy Lane, playing in the sixth tier again marks how far the recovery has come.

The Tigers only returned to Sandy Lane, now known as the KC Sofas Stadium, as tenants in 2011, and the ground itself tells part of the story of a club that has rarely stayed settled: evicted from Central Avenue in 1989, they spent three years playing home matches at Gainsborough before finding a base of their own again in 1992.

How far back the club's history actually runs is not entirely settled. Worksop Town claim 1861 as their founding year, which would rank them among the oldest football clubs anywhere, though the historian Martin Westby has argued for 1873, tracing the earliest organised football in the town to a rugby match at Worksop Pestallozzian School rather than to the date long claimed by the club.

Herbert Chapman turned out for Worksop around the turn of the century. Their sharpest rivalry, though, belongs to the road rather than the record books: matches against Gainsborough Trinity, traditionally staged over Boxing Day or New Year, carry the weight of a local derby between two clubs that have long measured themselves against each other.