Forest Green

League Two has Forest Green Rovers fighting to stay clear of relegation trouble in the season after relegation from League One, a comedown from the spring of 2022 that still gets talked about at The New Lawn. Under Rob Edwards that year the club topped the entire fourth tier, a single season that took them higher than any before it, before the drop back down two years later.

The story starts long before that. A works team from the Stroud valleys wore the Rovers name in 1893, tried on Nailsworth AFC for a year, and only settled into Forest Green Rovers in 1898, once the local Thursday side had been folded in. A brief spell as Stroud F.C. followed in 1989, undone within a few years when the old name came back for good.

Non-League football filled most of the twentieth century for the club — district titles, county titles, a run through the Hellenic League — until an FA Vase win over Rainworth Miners Welfare in 1982 gave the club its first taste of a Wembley-sized occasion. The National League play-off final of 2017 did the rest, a 2-1 win over Tranmere Rovers that put the club in the Football League for the first time in its history.

The New Lawn has been home since 2006, a tight ground for 5,147 that leaves little room for anyone not paying attention, with roughly 2,000 of those seats under cover and the rest standing. Before it, the club played out of The Lawn Ground just up the road.

James Norwood is the name still attached to that promotion season, over 150 appearances in green before he moved on, and the man supporters point to when the 2017 final comes up in conversation. These days it's Robbie Savage in the dugout, a former Wales international now trying to find a way back up the table.