Chasetown

Chasetown play in the Northern Premier League, a level that has never really contained them: the club has spent much of the last two decades bouncing off the ceiling of English non-league football rather than settling into it. The 2025 Staffordshire Senior Cup, their first, sits alongside a fifth Walsall Senior Cup gathered in 2026.

The Scholars Ground got an artificial pitch and a new stand in 2023, a rebuild that matters more here than at most clubs given where the money to run this place has always come from — Burntwood, not a city, and a badge that still carries the old school-affiliation naming, Chase Terrace Old Scholars Youth Club, before it became Chasetown FC in 1972.

Nothing the club has done since compares to the 2007–08 FA Cup. Then a Midland Football Alliance side, Chasetown beat Team Bath and Blyth Spartans in qualifying, held League One's Port Vale to a goalless draw and won the replay, then saw off Stafford Rangers to reach the Third Round Proper — the lowest-ranked club in the competition's history to do so. Cardiff City won 3–1 at The Scholars Ground in front of 2,420, still the closest this ground has come to a big occasion until the 2022 play-off final defeat to Belper Town drew a club-record crowd of 2,500.

Kyle Perry spent a single season here, 2007–08, before Port Vale signed him, then Mansfield Town and Lincoln City after that — one of the club's few paths into the professional game. The rivalry that means most is local rather than historic: Hednesford Town, ten minutes down the road.

2,420 is still the number this club is measured against.