On Monday, I wrote about the decisions faced by the Football Association in terms of allocating clubs to the divisions of the non-League Pyramid and the fact that, as in 2024, there seemed to be a higher-than-average number of clubs withdrawing from the National League System. In Monday’s piece, The Quicksand Contagion, I highlighted that “there are least fifteen teams who have left or are leaving the non-League system”.
It turned out to be more.
Melton Town have decided to leave the National League System and play in the Leicestershire Senior League, two levels lower than their 2025-26 placing in the United Counties League Premier Division North. This looks like a rare ‘good news story’, at least in the longer term, as it seems that the plan is to play in a local league while massively enhancing the club’s facilities. In a statement, the club said:
“Over recent years the club has experienced significant growth across its junior and youth section and the committee believes it is the right time to prioritise investment into creating further opportunities for young players, coaches, volunteers and local families.”
“A key part of the club’s long term vision is the additional land made available through a long term arrangement with the local authority which will allow the club to significantly expand its facilities from investment and future opportunities…
“The proposed expansion will support the of multiple additional high-quality grass pitches dedicated to grassroots and youth football substantially increasing playing and training capacity across all age groups while adding to the already fantastic FIFA quality pro facilities and opportunities for local players and families.”
Elsewhere, the outlook was bleaker.
On Tuesday night, Stockport Town announced their withdrawal from the National League System, which hadn’t been predicted anywhere. I have seen speculation online that having previously been supported financially by the owner of Stockport County FC, the club’s Directors were concerned that a lateral transfer from the North West Counties League to the Midland League would push the club’s costs to a level they couldn’t meet.
Also apparently folding is a club Ashford Town (Middlesex) played only recently; British Airways. The Airmen were no longer formally connected to ‘the World’s favourite airline’ and had been told they would have to change their name at the end of this season. They were playing home matches at North Greenford United having groundshared for years because the club’s spiritual home at the Concorde Club never had the required facilities for a place in the Pyramid. What it did have was several immaculate grass pitches, which are now used for training by QPR. British Airways last game in Combined Counties Premier North was a 13-0 (thirteen) victory over Hilltop, which the club described as “a great way to end this chapter for the club. We now focus on next season and our new name to be confirmed”. The club hasn’t announced that new name, or even if a renamed club intends to continue at a lower level, so all we do know is that they are no longer part of the Pyramid.
Neither are Kings Park Rangers, who won their division at Step 6 and are folding just three years after their formation. This is a curious case; their Facebook page was celebrating players committing to the club for the 2026-27 season as recently as 4 May yet the club has now announced its closure.
The biggest fall from grace, though, is surely that of City of Liverpool. Two years ago, ‘the Purps’ were in a play-off Final and fighting for a place at Step 3. This week, they were formally demoted to Step 7 due to not having a suitable groundshare in place. In some ways, this has been a long time coming; I first wrote about their struggle to find a proper home back in February 2024. That piece ended with a note of warning: “City of Liverpool might find that without a permanent base they can’t survive”. The North West Counties League, to which the club was relegated a year ago, said this on its website:
City of Liverpool have been unable to agree a groundshare in time for the 2026-27 season and will therefore be placed in Step 7 for the forthcoming season. They were given an extension by The Football Association past the national deadline of 31st March to present a confirmed ground option as they were liaising with prospective landlords. They were subsequently unable to confirm a facility that matches the entry requirement into the National League System. Their new league will be announced at a later date when the Football Association announce the makeup of the Step 7 leagues.
According to a poster on the Non-League Matters Forum, City of Liverpool members have been told the club will play in the Liverpool Premier League next season. This would at least allow the club to play home games within the City Boundaries, which it has yet to do, but becoming one of several clubs playing on a 3G pitch with no spectator facilities, such as the Tiber Centre, would prevent promotion back to the North West Counties League, to which the club was admitted before it had even played a game, thanks to the club’s founders persuading the FA to admit the brand-new club to the Pyramid at Step 6, rather than starting in the local league to which they have been demoted.
After City of Liverpool’s plummet from play-off finalists to finishing bottom of the Northern Premier League West Division a massive 35 points from safety, a group of club members sought to take on the challenge of running it. My understanding is that this group, which called itself “Purps4Change” was elected into management positions at the 2025 Annual General Meeting, only for the outgoing Directors to refuse to conduct any sort of handover, meaning that the new Board would have no clarity over the financial health of the Community Benefit Society they were legally responsible for and would have to ‘learn on the job’. Purps4Change walked away and control of City of Liverpool FC reverted to the previous board who, having overseen relegation from Step 4 with 15 points, then guided the Purps straight through Step 5, securing just 17 points from 46 games, in which they conceded 187 goals.
While City of Liverpool were accumulating heavy defeats, a new club was being set up locally. FC Community of Liverpool has already established a Women’s Team which has finished second in Division One of the Liverpool Women’s League playing out of Admiral Park in Liverpool 8. FC Community have announced that their Men’s Team will play in the Liverpool Premier League next season, with their home games being played on Friday nights at Marine FC. That would mean that – if placed into the top tier of the Liverpool Premier League – FC Community would be eligible for promotion into the National League System City of Liverpool were demoted out of.
Should the two clubs find themselves in the same division next season, the matches between them ought to be… interesting. Then again, it is possible that City of Liverpool will cease to exist. They are coming to the end of their current financial year, but have not filed accounts with the Financial Conduct Authority for either of the previous two. The FCA has issued the club with a Cancellation Notice which, if enacted, would revoke its status as a Community Benefit Society and mean that, in its current legal form, the club would cease to exist. Ironically, now the club is not in the Pyramid, FCA enforcement action of this kind would be less of a blow than it would have been, as at Step 7 it would be easier to regroup and reform the club. Whether there is any appetite amongst City’s remaining volunteers and fans to do that and potentially go into battle with FC Community remains to be seen.
Down South, a club who suffered relegation from Step 6 on the pitch is closing after two decades. FC Romania was set up as a club for the Romanian community in the South-East of England and worked its way up from grassroots football to as high as Step 4. However, the club’s fortunes declined, particularly post-COVID and in February they were told their long-term groundshare at Cheshunt FC, which had been in place for 14 years, would not be renewed. Like City of Liverpool, FC Romania were excluded from Step 6 because they didn’t have security of tenure at a suitable ground and have ceased operations “as a result of the impossibility of securing a stable location for official matches and for the continued operation of the club”.
There is a common theme here; most of the clubs discussed above lacked their own ground. Stockport Town were based at Stockport Sports Village which is now being managed by Stockport County and will eventually become the base for County’s Academy, Women’s Teams and Education Programme so, while it wasn’t a groundshare in the conventional sense, Town would very much have been the junior partner had they played on.
This is a Catch-22 situation. To play in the National League System, clubs need a ‘proper’ ground, with floodlights, stands and such. Trying to build such a ground from scratch is almost impossible these days, thanks to high costs, planning regulations and NIMBYism. So new clubs (or well-established clubs looking to progress, as British Airways were) are forced to share with whomever will have them. That makes it hard to build a fanbase and almost impossible to generate ‘secondary spend’ because the host club usually keeps money taken over the bar.
An increased level of groundsharing also makes fixture planning harder, particularly if the shared pitch is grass. British Airways were based at North Greenford United whose grass pitch was unplayable for months. The Airmen played their final 13 League matches – 34% of their season – in just 45 days between 14 March and 28 April. Ten of those fixtures were ‘home’ games. The highest attendances the club drew during that sequence were 85 against their landlords and 73 against Ashford Town (Middlesex), who were going for (and won) the title. Just 42 people watched the swansong, the thrashing of Hilltop.
I don’t know whether the answer is smaller divisions, a flatter Pyramid, restrictions on ground-sharing, changes to ground grading or some combination of some or all of these. What I do know is that the unique ecosystem of football clubs in England is more fragile than it has ever been.
One argument is that clubs need to become businesses which operate all week, rather than just on home matchdays. The most obvious way of doing this is to put an artificial pitch down and hire it out. My own club got a 3G pitch 12 months ago, which is proving transformative yet delays in its construction nearly killed the club completely.
But, as I wrote in 2024, 3G pitches are not a panacea. The initial costs are significant, they need looking after just as grass pitches do and not every club can have one because having too many in a locality destroys the business model.
I’ve been wondering for two years whether the non-League Pyramid is built on quicksand but the reality is it sits on something even more unstable; waterlogged grass.