Hanley Town

Before it was a football club it was a Sunday side out of a Stoke-on-Trent pub called the Trumpet, the men behind it deciding in 1966 to give the drinking team a proper name and a proper league. An earlier Hanley Town had already come and gone between 1882 and 1912, so the 1966 side was really starting again rather than starting.

What followed was not a straight climb. Relegation into junior football in 1994 pushed the club back down to where it had begun, and it took over two decades to work its way out: the North West Counties League Division One title in 2016 was the first real marker of the rebuild, and the Midland Football League Premier Division championship in 2021–22 sent them up to Northern Premier League Division One West, the highest the current club has reached.

Ricardo Fuller arrived in 2020 and scored in the club's first-ever run to the FA Cup second round. Ryan Shotton took over as player-manager in 2022, and it was under him that Tom Pope, another name well known on the Potteries non-league circuit, turned out for the Townies.

None of it means as much locally as the games against Newcastle Town, Kidsgrove Athletic and Leek Town. These are Potteries derbies in the strict sense, played out between clubs drawn from the same stretch of Staffordshire.