Shrewsbury

Shrewsbury Town's one trip into English football's third tier came in 1978–79, and it took eight years of climbing to get there: promotion from the Fourth Division in 1959, then a wait until the title in the Third arrived. Two more Fourth Division championships followed, in 1959 and again in 1994, but the club's return to the Football League in 2004 came the hard way, through the Conference play-offs, beating Aldershot Town on penalties after slipping out of the League altogether.

The club took shape at a meeting in the Lion Hotel in Shrewsbury on 20 May 1886, called by men who had played for a local side named Castle Blues. An earlier club had used the Shrewsbury name in the 1860s and broken up around 1880, but it left no line running forward to the one formed at the Lion. Admission to the Football League came in 1950, more than sixty years after the club helped found the Shropshire & District League.

Cup runs have mostly ended in near misses. Shrewsbury reached the FA Cup semi-final twice, in 1978–79 and 1981–82, and the League Cup semi-final in 1960–61, without going further. The EFL Trophy final has been reached twice, losing to Rotherham United in 1996 and again in 2018, the same year a League One play-off final ended in defeat to Bolton Wanderers. Since 2007 the club has played at what was originally called New Meadow, now known as Greenhous Meadow, with room for 9,875 and a safe-standing section for 555 of them.

None of that carries the weight of the Shropshire derby against AFC Telford United, the fixture that has defined the club's local rivalries for longer than any other. More recently, matches against Wrexham, just over the Welsh border, have taken on a similar edge, giving Shrewsbury a second derby to go with the old one.