“It was like a balloon had been punctured,” says Kevin Smith. “It was all suddenly very subdued.” Last weekend he was sitting in the stands watching his beloved York City when the bad news filtered in from 200 miles away in Essex. Rochdale had scored the winner in the 99th minute at Braintree Town, putting York’s promotion hopes on hold.
That late, devastating goal has set up something extraordinary this Saturday lunchtime (April 25): a winner-takes-all clash between two of the best teams in English non-league football. In a fixture 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 around 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 counterbalance to the national state of doom and gloom.
Rochdale’s home stadium, Spotland, will be packed. Their opponents immediately sold their entire allocation of 1,600 tickets out. Thousands of those who missed out will be watching on a big screen in York. A draw would be good enough for York to be promoted. Rochdale need a win but have home advantage. All this makes things very well prepared indeed.
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At every level, English football attendances are reaching heights not seen since the aftermath of the Second World War. This despite a stagnant economy and a population that is increasingly socially isolated and addicted to screens. It’s worth asking why.
At the top of the English “pyramid”, where Manchester City are chasing Arsenal in a fascinating title race, the reasons are obvious. The Premier League is booming by any metric, with sold-out stadiums every week and huge global audiences generating mountains of TV money, leaving continental rivals in their wake.
You can expect this to choke the clubs down the pyramid. Rochdale is less than an hour from 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 destroying them.
The top flight attracts the best players in the world, meaning that bright English talent is being filtered further and further down. Players who might have played in the second or third category 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 stable pitches have also helped raise standards.
Perhaps more important than the quality of football, the non-league game is relatively cheap, local and easy. Rather than navigating complex ticketing systems to spend hundreds of pounds on segregated seats, a family can generally wander down and pay a relatively modest sum, often in the company of friends and neighbours.
At even lower levels, in the regional non-league divisions, many teams are getting thousands of paying customers each week. This simply does not happen in any other country, with the exception of Germany. In other proud footballing nations such as France, Spain and Italy, the equivalent of York-Rochdale would be completely obscure.
It’s not easy to list the many things in modern Britain that have flourished and flourished since the pandemic, but football has, bringing excitement and fascination to countries that haven’t seen much of either in recent years. English football is thriving despite, or perhaps because of, the incredible success of the Premier League, and the sport is bringing joy to countries that could do with few.
For neutrals and Brits in general, Saturday’s game is exciting and a cause for great optimism. Of course, only the result matters to those who are emotionally invested in the club, such as Kevin Smith, a York City fan of 55 years. “It’s going to be a very sticky situation,” he says. “Football fans always fear the worst.”
(Further reading: Leah Williamson: “We didn’t grow up as boys in Arsenal’s academy”)
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