Bromsgrove Sporting

Redditch United, twelve miles down the road, is the fixture Bromsgrove Sporting fans mark on the calendar first; Alvechurch runs it close, and older heads at the Victoria Ground still bring up Kidderminster Harriers, a rivalry the club inherited rather than made itself. It inherited the ground too, and the lease on it, from Bromsgrove Rovers, whose collapse into administration in 2008 is the reason Sporting exists at all. A supporters' society had been ready to buy Rovers outright; when a different buyer took the club instead, the same group of fans built a new one from nothing in 2009. The red-and-white stripes and blue shorts were not a free choice but a deliberate echo of Rovers' own colours from before the Second World War, and the nickname, the Rouslers, was carried across in the same spirit.

The Victoria Ground holds 3,500, and it was fullest on 11 March 2017, when 3,349 turned out for an FA Vase semi-final against Cleethorpes Town — the peak of a season in which Sporting drew better crowds than any other club at that level of the pyramid and finished it unbeaten as Midland Football League Division One champions. Promotion followed the year after, then a Southern League play-off final in 2019 settled by extra time against Corby Town. A run to the FA Cup's fourth qualifying round in 2021-22, ended 3-0 by Grimsby Town in front of television cameras, remains the furthest the club has taken that competition.

Names have passed through since: Mark Bellingham scored 45 goals in 36 games for the club, long before his sons Jude and Jobe were known to anyone outside Worcestershire. That thread back to a boyhood ground is, in its way, where this story keeps returning — to a club built in a hurry, in 2009, so that Bromsgrove would not be left without one.