Kidderminster Harriers

Kidderminster Harriers reached the Football League twice by winning the same competition, and the first time it counted for nothing. In 1994 they took the Conference title only to be refused promotion because Aggborough failed the new fire-safety rules for the ground; the club rebuilt the stadium and did it again in 2000, this time going up into the old Third Division. An FA Trophy had already come in 1987, beaten in normal time and won in the replay against Burton Albion, and the club still holds the record for the Worcestershire Senior Cup, with 27 wins.

The name predates the football. Kidderminster Harriers began in 1877 as an athletics and rugby club, and only switched to association rules in the 1886/87 season — the year usually given as the club's founding. A merger with local rivals Kidderminster Olympic in 1890 produced a professional side that folded within a year for lack of money; what came back in its place, amateur and under the old Harriers name, is the club that has carried on since.

Jan Mølby arrived as player-manager in 1999, a former Liverpool and Denmark midfielder taking charge of a non-league club, and left with the Conference title the following year. Lee Hughes came through earlier, scoring 70 goals in 103 games before a move to Coventry City that brought the Harriers a then-record fee for a non-league club. The club dropped out of the Football League in 2005, spent most of two decades below it, and won promotion back through the National League North play-offs in 2023 with a 2-0 win over Brackley Town — only to go straight back down after a single season.

They are known as the Carpetmen, after the weaving trade that built Kidderminster, and play in the red-and-white halved shirt revived in 1986. Aggborough holds 6,444, in a town whose other football rivalries — with Worcester City, Stourbridge and Hereford — have outlasted most of what has happened on the pitch.