“It was like a balloon got punctured,” says Kevin Smith. “It was all suddenly very subdued.” Last weekend he was sitting in the stands watching his beloved York City when bad news filtered through from 200 miles away in Essex. Rochdale had scored a 99th-minute winner at Braintree Town, putting York’s promotion hopes on ice.
That late, devastating goal has set up something remarkable this Saturday lunchtime (25 April): a winner-takes-all clash between the two best teams in English non-league football. By a quirk of the fixture list, York travel to Rochdale in what is being billed as the biggest game in the history of the National League, the fifth tier of English football.
The game is attracting media interest all over the world, not just because of the stakes of the match itself, but because football in England at every level is in remarkable health, a counter-weight to a national mood of doom and gloom.
Rochdale’s home stadium of Spotland will be packed. Their opponents immediately sold all their allocation of 1,600 away tickets. Thousands of those who missed out will be watching on a big screen back in York. A draw would be good enough for York to get promoted. Rochdale need a win but have home advantage. All of which makes things very finely poised indeed.
At every level, English football attendances are hitting heights not seen since the aftermath of the Second World War. This is despite a stagnant economy and a population that is increasingly socially isolated and screen-addicted. It is worth asking why.
At the top of the English “pyramid,” where Manchester City are hunting down Arsenal in an enthralling title race, the reasons are obvious. The Premier League is thriving by every metric, with sold out stadiums every week and huge global audiences generating mountains of TV cash, leaving continental rivals trailing in their wake.
You might expect this to choke clubs lower down the pyramid. Rochdale is less than an hour from the two Manchester clubs that are both in the top ten richest teams in the world. But the opposite seems to be happening. Counter-intuitively, the success of the Premier League seems to be boosting the lower leagues rather than crushing them.
The top flight attracts the best players in the world, meaning bright English talent is filtering further and further down. Players who might have played in the second or third division a few years ago are now in the fourth or fifth. Bad for them, but good for fans who want to watch good football. Advances such as better sports science, and more durable pitches, have helped raise standards too.
Perhaps more importantly than the quality of the football, the non-league game is relatively cheap, local and easy. Rather than navigating complex ticket systems to spend hundreds of pounds on seats which are separated from each other, a family can generally wander down and pay a comparatively modest sum, often in the company of friends and neighbours.
At even lower levels, in regional non-league divisions, plenty of teams are getting thousands of paying customers through the gates each week. This simply does not happen in any other country, with the possible exception of Germany. In other proud footballing countries like France, Spain and Italy, the equivalent of York vs Rochdale would be utterly obscure.
It is not easy to list many things in modern Britain that have boomed and thrived since the pandemic, but football has, bringing excitement and glamour to places that have not seen much of either in recent years. English football is thriving despite, or perhaps because of, the Premier League’s runaway success, and the sport is bringing joy to places that could do with some.
For neutrals and Brits generally, Saturday’s game is thrilling, and a cause for great optimism. Of course, only the result matters to those who are emotionally invested in the club, like Kevin Smith, a York City fan of 55 years. “It’s going to be a very nailbiting situation,” he says. “Football fans always fear the worst.”
[Further reading: Leah Williamson: “We haven’t been brought up like boys in the Arsenal academy”]
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Subscribe here to comment1-1 with the York equaliser in the dying seconds of extra time to allow York to grab promotion. If it had been a film script everyone would have regarded it as completely implausible.