Torquay

Torquay United beat Leeds United 4–0 in a fourth-round replay in January 1955, a scoreline that still stands as the high point of a club that has spent most of its life outside the game's top divisions. Plainmoor was packed for it; the run itself ended in the Fourth Round, but nobody at the ground that night cared about what came after.

Torquay United formed in 1899, put together by a group of school-leavers under Sergeant-Major Edward Tomney, and it took until 1927 for the club to be elected to the Football League. That same year brought the first serious silverware, the Southern League Western Section title, and a first league championship followed in 1960 with the Fourth Division crown. The yellow shirts arrived later than the club itself — Torquay switched to gold and blue in 1954, a colour scheme meant to read as sun, sand and sea, the resort town's own advertising worn on a football shirt.

League status has not stayed put. The Gulls dropped out of the Football League in 2008 and again in 2014, and the response both times was to go straight back up through the non-league game — winning the Conference Premier play-offs in 2009, then the National League South title in 2019. In April 2024 the club went into administration over debts owed to HMRC and was pulled clear by the Bryn Consortium through a Company Voluntary Arrangement, the latest turn in a history that keeps finding new ways to test the supporters.

Robin Stubbs scored 133 goals in 263 appearances across two spells at the club, from 1963 to 1970 and again from 1973 to 1976, and Plainmoor still calls him the Prince of Plainmoor.