Isle of Man

Lee Dixon, once of Manchester United and an England international, now spends his time as Director of Football at a club that plays nine tiers below the Premier League, on an island with a population smaller than a mid-sized English town.

The Ravens, as they're known, needed only a season to make the point. Sean Doyle scored 41 goals in that first campaign, and the club backed it up with a second-place finish in Division One South of the North West Counties League and a play-off win over New Mills that sent them up. The same season brought the Challenge Cup as well, a double that no one at the club has since repeated.

There is no other Manx side at this level to measure themselves against, so the rivalry that matters is with Guernsey, another island club a Channel away. They call it the Crown Dependency Derby and play each other annually for the Skipton Cup, a fixture that carries more weight than league position ever could between two clubs separated by the Irish Sea rather than a few miles of road.

Since that first title-winning year, the table has been less kind: ninth in the Premier Division in 2023–24, fifteenth the season after. The club still leans on Manx-born players and recruits from non-league football rather than any academy production line, and the step back up to where 2022 promised has not yet come.