Burton Albion

Nigel Clough spent six years on the pitch at Burton Albion and then nine more in the dugout, and it was under him that a club used to Northern Premier League football went up through the Conference and into the Football League for the first time. He returned for a second spell as manager in 2015 and took the Brewers into the Championship the following year, a level the club had never reached before.

For most of its life Burton Albion had nothing to do with the League ladder at all. Founded on 6 July 1950, the club spent nearly six decades in the Birmingham & District League, the Southern League, the Northern Premier League and the Conference, picking up honours that mattered mostly to non-league football: the Southern League Cup in 1963–64, the Northern Premier League Challenge Cup in 1982–83, the Northern Premier League title itself in 2001–02. None of it carried the club into the professional pyramid. That changed in 2008–09, when Burton won the Conference Premier and turned fully professional, and again in 2014–15, when a League Two title took them a division higher still.

The years since have brought two play-off final defeats — to Fleetwood Town in 2013–14 and to Brentford in 2015–16 — and a run to the EFL Cup semi-final in 2018–19, still the club's best showing in that competition. In the FA Cup the third round has been as far as they have gone, reached in 2005–06, 2010–11 and again this coming season. Two rivalries sharpened along the way: with Derby County, where Clough had managed on both sides of the fixture, in what is known locally as the A38 Derby after the road linking the two towns, and with Port Vale, the Staffordshire neighbours across the county.

Home games are played at the Pirelli Stadium, built in 2005 to replace Eton Park and holding just under 7,000 people in the black and yellow of a club still known, from its brewing town, as the Brewers.