Stockton Town

A step of non-league football's ladder above where most of the town had ever seen it play, the club went down 1–0 to Thatcham Town in the FA Vase final, and the run there mattered more than the scoreline.

The club began in 1979 as Hartburn Juniors, a five-a-side outfit put together by Derrick Small in Middlesbrough, and did not become Stockton Town until 2003, when it renamed itself to speak for a wider stretch of the borough — Stockton itself, Billingham, Thornaby, Middlesbrough. A senior men's side followed only in 2009–10, and from there the rise ran almost without pause: entry into the Wearside League in 2010, four league titles in a row between 2012–13 and 2015–16, promotion out of the Northern League Division Two in 2016–17, then the Vase final. The 2019–20 season added its own oddity — the club was thirteen points clear at the top of the Northern League Division One when the pandemic ended the campaign, the result was later voided, and it took a merged reckoning of that season and the next to confirm the promotion anyway. Another leap came in 2024, when winning the play-offs took Stockton into the Northern Premier League Premier Division.

The nickname, the Anchors, comes from the anchor on Stockton's coat of arms, a reference to the shipbuilding that once ran along the Tees.

Tyrone O'Neill's path ran the other way and back again: out of Stockton Town's youth ranks and into Middlesbrough's academy, a Championship debut for Middlesbrough in 2019, and a return to Stockton Town in 2022.