Stoke City

The League Cup arrived at Wembley in 1972, and it took a first-half strike from George Eastham to see off Chelsea 2-1. It remains the club's only major trophy, though not for lack of trying twice more at Wembley's near-misses — a 1964 League Cup final lost to Leicester City on aggregate, and a 2011 FA Cup final lost 1-0 to Manchester City. The lesser Football League Trophy went to Stoke twice, in 1992 and 2000, and the club has climbed out of the second tier three separate times, in 1933, 1963 and 1979.

None of that ever came with a top-flight title, and Stoke's ten seasons in the Premier League, from 2008 to 2018, were built more on staying up than chasing down the summit. The club traces itself to 1863, one of the twelve founder members of the Football League in 1888, and survived a 1908 bankruptcy that dropped it out of the league entirely before it returned in 1915. The name changed twice along the way — Stoke Ramblers shortened to Stoke, then lengthened to Stoke City once the town was granted city status in 1925.

The ground changed too, in 1997, when the club left Victoria Ground after well over a century there for what is now the bet365 Stadium, its capacity settled at 30,089 since a 2017 expansion.

No one at the club is spoken of quite like Gordon Banks. He kept goal for Stoke from 1967 to 1972, the peak of the Wembley run, a year removed from lifting the World Cup with England, and a statue of him stands at the ground now. Before him there was Stanley Matthews, knighted for his service to the game, who wore the shirt across two spells decades apart — from 1932 to 1947, and again from 1961 to 1965 — bookending a career few at the club have matched since.