Harrogate Town

Twice in three years, Harrogate Town went up. The first came in 2018, when a play-off win lifted the club out of National League North. The second, in 2020, sent them into the English Football League for the first time in their history, and that same year they lifted the FA Trophy, its final delayed to May 2021. Six divisions below the EFL was where Simon Weaver found the club when he took over as manager in 2009, and it was under him that the climb happened, one promotion built on the next until Harrogate had gone further than the club had ever gone.

Before that run, survival came first. Bill Fotherby, a former chairman, put his own money into keeping the club going and handed control to the Weaver family in 2011, a decision that set the direction Simon Weaver's side would later follow onto the pitch. Warren Burrell was one of the players Weaver brought in that year, and he stayed for the whole of it, reaching 447 appearances by November 2025, a tally he shares with Paul Williamson as the club's joint-record appearance maker. Josh Falkingham captained the side up into the League and has since moved into coaching the academy.

The club traces itself back to 1914, when it was formed as Harrogate A.F.C. and joined the Northern Football League, though the First World War pushed its first matches back and the original club folded in 1932. A successor, Harrogate Hotspurs, formed in 1935 and took the Harrogate Town name after the Second World War, the name the club has carried since. Bradford City provide the closest rivalry, the two sides meeting in what is known locally as the Yorkshire derby.

Harrogate play in black and yellow, colours that gave rise to the nickname The Sulphurites, a reference to the sulphur springs the town is known for. Home games are at Wetherby Road, where 5,000 fit in, 2,000 of them seated, under whatever sponsor's name the ground currently carries.