St Albans City

Clarence Park has held football since 1894, when the original St Albans F.C. first laid it out; that club folded in 1904, and four years later a new one took the name City and carried the ground forward with it.

The financial side of the club has not always matched the setting. In the early 2000s St Albans City came within three days of going under, and it took John Gibson's takeover to keep the Saints alive. Gibson steered them up to the Conference Premier by 2006, the promotion season that also carried George Boyd through the club on his way to Hull City, Burnley and Scotland caps. When Gibson's own business ran into trouble in 2011, Lawrence Levy and John McGowan took over, and relegation to the Southern League followed almost immediately.

Silverware has tended to come in the lower reaches of non-league football rather than at the top of it. The FA Trophy, won in 2009 against Ebbsfleet United, stands apart from a cabinet otherwise built from Isthmian League titles and, above all, the Herts Senior Cup, claimed seventeen times. Matches against Hemel Hempstead Town and Boreham Wood are still billed locally as the Hertfordshire Derby.

What St Albans City have never done is establish themselves in the Football League.