Boreham Wood

Boreham Wood go into this campaign as League Cup holders in name, if not yet in league standing — the National League Cup arrived in 2025–26, and a season earlier the club had already won the National League play-offs outright, beating Maidstone United 1–0 to settle a question it had asked itself since falling short in the 2017–18 play-off final against Tranmere Rovers.

The club came together in 1948, when Boreham Wood Rovers merged with Royal Retournez in the Hertfordshire town of Borehamwood. The name has not changed since, though the league ladder underneath it kept moving — Mid-Herts League, then Parthenon, Spartan, Athenian, Isthmian, Southern, until promotion from Conference South in 2015 put the club in the National League for the first time.

Meadow Park has been home since 1963, built on what had been pasture and a rubbish tip after the old ground on Eldon Avenue was needed for film studio land. Arsène Wenger opened the West Stand in 2014, and the terrace added five years later was named North Bank after the old Highbury end — Arsenal's women's and academy sides now play at Meadow Park too, and the ground holds 4,500, of whom 1,700 can sit.

Luke Garrard never came through the Boreham Wood academy — he started at Tottenham — but he played for the club from 2010 to 2015 and then took over as manager, and it was under him that the National League breakthrough came, followed by a quarter-final play-off run in 2018 and, in 2022, an FA Cup fifth-round tie against Everton after wins over Championship and League One opposition. He left and returned to the dugout in 2024.

Money has not always been easy. In 2020 chairman Danny Hunter warned that playing without crowds during the pandemic had already cost the club more than £100,000, and no season tickets went on sale for 2020–21. St Albans City and Barnet supply the local derby, Hemel Hempstead Town the Hertfordshire one — none of the three has ever needed a nickname of its own.

Dave Hatchett still holds the appearance record at Boreham Wood: 714 games.