Worthing

Worthing sits on the Sussex coast, the kind of seaside town whose football club has outlasted the buildings it played in. Worthing Football Club started life in February 1886 as Worthing Association Football Club, losing its first match 1-3 at Lansing College before settling into home games on Broadwater Green. The club moved to Beach House Park in 1889, then to the Sports Ground in 1901 — the site that, after building work began in 1931, would become the current ground at Woodside Road. The old Sports Ground closed for good in 1937. The name shed its "Association" around the turn of the century, a change that separated the football club from a rugby side of the same name that had folded in 1894. Along the way Worthing swallowed two neighbours, Worthing Athletic in 1900 and Worthing Rovers in 1905.

The nickname The Rebels dates to 1920, when the club broke away from the West Sussex League. Red and white have been the colours since.

Woodside Road has grown in pieces rather than all at once: the South Stand holds 560 seated, the West Stand around 750, and a new North Stand, built in 2023-24, added 1,800 standing places. The record attendance stands at 4,002.

Adam Hinshelwood, who played for Brighton and Wycombe before taking charge at Woodside Road across two spells, is the manager most associated with the club's rise — it was under him that Worthing reached the National League. The Isthmian League Premier Division title in 2021-22 marked the step that made that possible, and this year the club went further still, winning the National League South to reach the National League for the first time. The Sussex Senior Challenge Cup has come back to Woodside Road more often than any other prize, most recently in 2022-23 — the twenty-second time Worthing have won it since 1893.