An Argument in Orange
72 Days · Day 4 · League Two
Salford City lost a Wembley final on 25 May 2026. The story of how they got there, and why it still hurts.
It was already over by the second goal. The afternoon was hot, the kind of late-May Wembley sunshine that drags the legs out of a side who have spent the previous nine months mostly winning. Salford City were 2–0 down to Notts County in the League Two play-off final, and then Jodi Jones curled in the third and the Salford end stopped singing. Up in the blue plastic of the executive seats, David Beckham stood with his hands in his pockets. Behind him somewhere, Gary Neville was still. The cameras did not quite know where to point.
Nine days later, the club sacked the manager.
This is Salford City: a club that does not know its own ceiling, and a city that has spent the last twelve years arguing about who that club is.
At a glance
Founded: 1940 (as Salford Central)
Ground: Peninsula Stadium (Moor Lane), capacity 5,108
Nickname: The Ammies
Manager: Vacant (Karl Robinson sacked 2 June 2026)
25/26 finish: 4th in League Two; lost play-off final 3–0 to Notts County
26/27 league: League Two
The long way up
Salford City were founded in 1940 as Salford Central, a name that suggests trams and tea flasks, which is roughly the level the club operated at for the next half-century. They became Salford Amateurs in the 1960s (hence the nickname, the Ammies), settled at Moor Lane in 1978, and spent the back half of the twentieth century drifting through the muddier reaches of the North West non-league pyramid. There was a 1970s near-extinction story that older supporters still tell, kept alive by a few stubborn volunteers and a raffle. There was a 2008–09 escape from relegation in the eighth tier that became known as the Great Escape. There were no national headlines for any of it.
Then, in March 2014, five men walked into the club’s offices and the story changed.
Gary Neville, Phil Neville, Paul Scholes, Ryan Giggs and Nicky Butt, backed by the Singaporean businessman Peter Lim, took over through a vehicle called Project 92 Limited. David Beckham would join the consortium afterwards. The BBC arrived with cameras and made Class of ‘92: Out of Their League, which is the kind of documentary that turns part-time footballers into national figures whether they want to be or not. The shirts were changed from tangerine and black to red and white, a colour nobody quite forgave them for choosing. Fans in the Moor Lane end chanted “We are Tangerine”. The accusations started early, and they have never quite stopped.
The football, though, was extraordinary. Under the volatile, beloved managerial pairing of Anthony Johnson and Bernard Morley, Salford won four promotions in five seasons. The eighth tier in 2014; the National League by 2018; the EFL by 2019. On 11 May of that year, they walked out at Wembley in the National League play-off final against AFC Fylde, and goals from Emmanuel Dieseruvwe, Carl Piergianni and Ibou Touray sealed a 3–0 win and a Football League place for the first time in the club’s history. A year later they won the EFL Trophy, beating Portsmouth on penalties in March 2021 in a Wembley emptied by the pandemic. It was a first major trophy, won in front of nobody, in a stadium that should have been full of people who had spent their whole adult lives watching this club play in front of two hundred.
And then the climbing stopped.
Where they are now
League Two has been good to Salford, and it has been honest with them. Seven seasons in the fourth tier, no promotion, four managers, one Wembley near-miss. Karl Robinson took the job in January 2024 and did what nobody else had managed: he gave the place stability. The 2025–26 side finished fourth on 81 points, beat Grimsby Town in the play-off semi-final with a Kallum Cesay extra-time winner that drove Robinson down the touchline and into the referee’s notebook, and then arrived at Wembley a single point off automatic promotion and full of belief.
They lost, 3–0, to a Notts County side who looked like they wanted it more in the heat. The Guardian’s report said Salford had melted away in the sunshine. Robinson, in the post-match, told the camera that the fans had been a better representation of the club than the players. Within nine days, he was gone.
There is something else happening alongside the football. In May 2025, Beckham and Neville completed a takeover of the rest of the Class of ‘92’s shares. Peter Lim out; Lord Mervyn Davies and the American businessman Declan Kelly in. Around the same time, supporters were asked to vote on the club’s colours. 77.1% chose to bring back the orange and black that the takeover had scrubbed out a decade earlier. From the 2026–27 season the home shirt will be tangerine again. As supporter Richard Kedzior put it, quoted in FourFourTwo, it was a return to “the colour we were always associated with”, restoring a “unique identity” the club had spent the previous ten years arguing about.
This is the version of Salford City you’ll be looking at in 26/27: orange shirts, no manager yet, the same five-thousand-seat ground, the same ambition that this is supposed to be the year League One stops being a place other clubs go.
The fans, the ground, the rivals
The Peninsula Stadium is on Moor Lane in Kersal, a residential pocket of north Salford that looks like nowhere a Football League ground has any business being. The stands are modular, the pitch is famously narrow, and on a winter Tuesday the noise comes off the single-tier terraces and hangs in the floodlights. The walk-out music is “Dirty Old Town“, written by the Salford-born Ewan MacColl and lifted into the national consciousness by The Pogues. It is one of the only matchday anthems in English football that doubles as a piece of civic identification.
The supporter base has been remade since 2014. Some are lifers from the Salford Amateurs days, the people who kept the lights on through the 1970s and the Great Escape. Some are Manchester United fans who walked away from Old Trafford prices and found Kersal more affordable. Some are younger fans who first heard about the club in a YouTube video. They do not always agree with each other, and they especially do not always agree with the owners. In October 2025, two men in hoodies ran onto the pitch at the Oldham match with a flag reading “GARY NEVILLE IS A TRAITOR”, a protest about something other than football. Three men were charged. Neville was not in the ground.
Charlotte Tattersall, a local photographer from Lower Kersal who started shooting Salford games as a college hobby and now works part-time for the club, told The Set Pieces: “The growth of the club has affected us massively. It’s definitely affected me as it’s meant that I’m able to do a job that I love and have more of an important role at the club, which wouldn’t have happened without the takeover.”
The rivalries are still settling. Geography puts Oldham Athletic, Stockport County, Rochdale and Bolton Wanderers in the conversation, though those clubs do not always reciprocate the heat. The deepest ideological argument is with FC United of Manchester, the fan-owned club born from protests against the Glazer takeover of Manchester United; their non-league meetings carried the kind of unspoken weight that no Football League fixture has yet matched. For now, the most useful thing to know is that Salford do not have a single great enemy. They have, instead, a small collection of clubs who would quite like to beat them, and a lot of neutrals who would also quite like to beat them, and they have learned to play in that weather.
Where to find them
Official site: salfordcityfc.co.uk
X / Twitter: @SalfordCityFC
Instagram: @salfordcityfc
Facebook: Salford City FC
TikTok: @salfordcityfc
YouTube: Salford City Football Club (worth it alone for the This Is Salford documentary series)
Subreddit: r/SalfordCityFC
Fan forum: Red Ammies Fans Forum (old-school ProBoards, the long-term faithful)
Independent writing: Beyond the 90 on Substack
Local news: SalfordNow
72 Days is a daily countdown to the EFL 2026/27 season, one club a day, all 72 of them, starting in League Two and working up. Tomorrow: Barnet, back in the EFL after seven years away. If you want it in your inbox, subscribe.