Takeley

Second in the Essex Senior League Premier Division was not the trophy Takeley wanted, but the play-off final gave them one anyway: a 2–0 win over Woodford Town on 3 May 2025 in front of 1,003 people at Station Road, a club-record crowd, sent them up to the Isthmian League North Division and out of the world of Essex county football they had occupied since joining the Essex Olympian League in 1978.

That climb had taken decades to build. Division One of the Olympian League fell to them twice, in 1987–88 and 2001–02, and promotion to the Essex Senior League followed in 2007–08, the same season they lifted the Essex Premier Cup. Founded in 1900 in the Essex village of Takeley, the club had for years been dated to 1903 until a local reporter turned up a newspaper report from November 1900 proving the team was already playing that autumn.

Joint-managers Alex Martin and Kieran Amos were in charge for the promotion campaign; a decade earlier, Steve Castle, who had played for Leyton Orient, had a spell running the side. Station Road, known locally as the Full Vision Stadium, holds around 2,000, with a main stand for about a hundred and a smaller one for just over fifty, and it is there that the derby with Stansted FC is played out. The 'Takeley Blue Army' follows a side that has never settled on a nickname of its own, unlike Sawbridgeworth Town's 'Robins' down the road.

Step 4 football is new territory, and the FA Cup has yet to offer more than three trips to the Preliminary Round. No player has gone from Takeley into the Football League.