Ninety-Plus-Thirteen
72 Days · Day 1 · League Two
How a Yorkshire club that almost died in 2003 clawed its way back to the English Football League — and why, for the next seventy-two days, the rest of us should pay attention.
It is 25 April 2026 at Spotland. The clock reads 90+13. York City have thrown ten outfield players into the Rochdale box because they have no other plan and no time left. Eight minutes earlier, a 95th-minute Rochdale goal had sent home supporters spilling onto the pitch and the National League title spinning out of York’s hands; the referee had been forced to stand on the centre circle, watch in hand, while stewards coaxed the celebrating Dale fans back to the terraces. And then, in the rebuilt chaos, Josh Stones bundled the ball over the line. Goal-line technology confirmed it. The 1,500 York supporters who had made the journey across the Pennines sang We are going up! The Minstermen had drawn 1–1. They were champions on a club-record 108 points. After ten years away, they were back in the English Football League.
But to understand why grown adults wept on the long bus home to North Yorkshire, you have to go back a lot further than that.
At a glance
Founded — 1922
Ground — LNER Community Stadium, 8,500 capacity (council-owned, shared with York RLFC Knights)
Nickname — The Minstermen
Manager — Stuart Maynard (appointed 28 August 2025)
25/26 finish — National League champions, 108 pts, 114 goals — both club records
26/27 league — EFL League Two
Ownership — 394 Sports (Uggla family) 51%, York City Supporters’ Society 25%, FB Sports 24%
A club built by its own funeral
York City Football Club has been alive for 104 years. It almost wasn’t.
The club was founded in 1922, elected to the Football League in 1929, and for the next seventy-five years it lived where most of England’s older provincial clubs live: in the third and fourth tiers, occasionally peeking upward, occasionally crashing down, always present. There were moments. The “Happy Wanderers” reached an FA Cup semi-final in 1954–55 as a Third Division side, drawing Newcastle United at Hillsborough before losing the replay. In 1983–84 they won the Fourth Division with 101 points, the first English club to break 100 in a three-points-for-a-win season. In September 1995, on a night that older neutrals will still tell you about with a low whistle, a third-tier York side walked into Old Trafford and beat a Manchester United team featuring Cantona, Scholes, Giggs and Gary Neville 3–0; they then went through 4–3 on aggregate and remain, in pub-quiz folklore, the team that did that to Alex Ferguson.
None of those nights are the defining moment.
The defining moment of York City is the winter of 2002 into the spring of 2003, when the club — under the chairmanship of Douglas Craig and then in the hands of motor-racing dreamer-turned-asset-stripper John Batchelor — was hours from extinction. Wages bounced. Sponsorship money was siphoned to a racing team. Bootham Crescent, the modest, beloved 1932 ground a short walk from the city centre, had been quietly transferred into a property company. Foreign press circled. Supporters formed the York City Supporters’ Society in February 2002, what most people just call the “Trust” and over the next thirteen months did the thing that English football, then as now, told them was impossible. They raised £600,000. They bought the club’s assets out of administration in March 2003. They saved York City because no one else was going to.
The club was relegated out of the Football League at the end of that same season. Saving it had not been enough to make it good. But it had been enough to make it theirs.
That ownership is still the strange, load-bearing fact at the bottom of everything you’ll read about this club for the next decade. Today, after the entrepreneur Glen Henderson and then Matthew and Julie-Anne Uggla (the Ugglas) took majority stakes via their company 394 Sports, in June 2023 but the Trust still holds 25%, plus pre-emption rights baked into the constitution. You can argue, and some on the terraces still do, that York is no longer a “fan-owned” club in the purist sense. But you cannot argue that the fans are not in the room.
The wilderness, the Wembley double, and the long way down again
What followed 2004 was an eight-year exile, and the kind of near-misses that hurt: a 2009 FA Trophy final defeat to Stevenage at Wembley, a 2010 play-off final loss to Oxford. Then, in May 2012, under Gary Mills, York returned to Wembley twice in eight days to beat Newport County 2–0 in the FA Trophy final, then beat Luton Town 2–1 in the Conference play-off final. It is still the most successful week in the club’s modern history.
The reunion didn’t last. Four seasons later, York were relegated again in 2015–16. They were relegated again the year after that, dropping into the National League North, the sixth tier for the first time since the 1920s. By any reasonable measure, the club that had been saved by its own fans in 2003 had spent the next decade and a half being unsaved by football.
The Bootham Crescent lease had already been sold off in the background. In February 2021, after years of ground-shares and stadium fights, York moved to the LNER Community Stadium, an 8,500-seat ground in Huntington on the edge of the city, owned by the council, shared with the rugby league side, embedded inside a wider leisure-and-NHS complex of cinema and bowling and a library. Some supporters still grieve Bootham Crescent. Most know that this is the trade they had to make.
What’s actually going on right now
Stuart Maynard was appointed manager on 28 August 2025, after the club parted with Adam Hinshelwood. It was, on paper, an odd hire. Maynard had been sacked by Notts County the previous May after a play-off semi-final loss to AFC Wimbledon, and before that he’d worked miracles at Wealdstone in the National League. He was also a manager with a clear philosophy and the kind of stomach for last-minute football that, in the event, turned out to be exactly what York needed.
The 2025–26 season was not a careful, points-management title. York scored 114 goals. They crossed 100 points. They went into the final day at Spotland needing only a draw and then conspired, in the way of all York City sides, to need 103rd-minute heroics to actually get it. Josh Stones, the man whose name will be sung at the LNER Community Stadium for as long as the LNER Community Stadium has supporters in it, told reporters afterwards: “The maddest ever. Crazy. I think when they scored, that’s what they’ve done all season... I can’t put it into words. I’m so happy. We deserve it as a group, the staff, the fans. I love the club and that meant everything.”
The hard read on what comes next is sobering. League Two is unforgiving to newly-promoted clubs, particularly fan-influenced ones operating on tight budgets against parachute-payment sides. The promotion itself was so dramatic and the points-to-promotion ratio so brutal, given Rochdale also crossed 100 that York and Rochdale issued a joint statement before the final game calling for a third automatic promotion place from the National League. That debate will follow York into the EFL, and is worth following.
The softer read is the only one that matters in late June. They are back.
The fans, the ground, the noise
What’s unusual about York’s support is how scattered it is. A recent club survey reported that more than 60% of respondents lived outside the YO postcode, with supporters in more than 70 countries. The club’s officially-recognised supporter groups read like a map of the diaspora: York City South, Harrogate Minstermen, East Riding Minstermen, Cliffe Minstermen, Malton and Norton Reds. This is not a club that lives only in its own city but it has a long-distance fanbase, partly out of exile from a long-distance relegation history, partly because York is the kind of place people leave for jobs and then never quite let go of.
The traditional rivalry register is, to be honest, quieter than you’d think. Hull City are the geographically nearest professional side and the relationship has historically been one-sided; Scarborough Athletic, the obvious old enemy, don’t currently exist in the same division. What York have instead is an internal fierceness in the form of the Trust meetings, the annual fan vote in the club constitution, the long-running fanzines like Terrace Talk and Y Front that have chronicled the club for decades when the official channels couldn’t or wouldn’t. The 1,500 supporters at Spotland on 25 April were not a “passionate fanbase” the way every club’s marketing department says theirs is. They were the people whose grandparents had stood in the Pop Stand at Bootham Crescent in 1955, whose parents had bailed the club out in 2003, who had themselves driven across half of northern England in the rain to watch League Two football and then, gradually, much worse than that. And they were singing We are going up.
That is what York City is.
Where to find them
Official site: yorkcityfootballclub.co.uk
X / Twitter: @YorkCityFC
Instagram: @yorkcityfc
Facebook: York City FC
YouTube: @yorkcityfcofficial
LinkedIn: York City Football Club
Subreddit: r/YorkCity — small but the matchday threads are where it happens
Supporters’ Trust: York City Supporters’ Society — 25% owners; their AGMs are public, their accounts are published, their board minutes are a quietly useful read for anyone interested in what democratic English football actually looks like in practice
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: Rochdale. Two clubs promoted from the National League. Two stories about almost dying and not. One of them celebrated at Spotland. The other one didn’t. If you want this in your inbox, subscribe.