Wycombe

The story the club still tells starts in a pub called the Steam Engine, where a group of young men from High Wycombe's furniture workshops gathered in 1887 and decided to form a football team. They kept the trade close: for decades the club's nickname, The Chairboys, referred to nothing more than the chairs they made and the people who bought tickets to watch them play on Saturdays.

Wycombe Wanderers took their name, most likely, from Wanderers F.C., the London side that won the first FA Cup in 1872 — a borrowed name for a club with no ground of its own yet to wander from. It never changed. Adams Park became that home, and it still holds the team, listed at 9,558 seats, though the council-imposed limit and later renovation work have pushed the working figure closer to ten thousand on matchdays.

For most of the twentieth century Wycombe's trophies came from outside the Football League altogether — an FA Amateur Cup in 1931, Isthmian League titles through the 1950s to the 1980s — before the club turned professional and pushed higher. Two FA Trophy wins either side of 1992 arrived alongside the Conference title that finally lifted them into the League in 1993. Matt Bloomfield played through much of what followed, more than 600 appearances across two decades before he moved into coaching, and Adebayo Akinfenwa became the forward supporters still measure others against, his 54 goals standing as the club record.

The furthest the club has gone came in 2020, when a Wembley play-off final against Oxford United was settled by a Joe Jacobsen penalty and sent Wycombe into the Championship for the first time — a level the Chairboys, formed by furniture workers who wanted a game on a Saturday, had never before reached.