I noted a tweet this morning comparing the Lincoln City of 2025/26, the League One winners, with Lincoln City achievements of old.
I’m not talking about going all the way back to 1952 or 1976. I’m not even talking about 1988. No, it’s all about the last decade, one which has seen us climb from 105th in the country, to 45th, and next season, even higher (hopefully not 44th, 43rd or 42nd). It’s been a remarkable journey, and while it is easy to say ‘this is the best,’ there should also be context.
I almost put my list on the tweet, but there is so much context that it is impossible to go from one to four without feeling a little misplaced. Let me explain.
2016/17 – National League Winners: Lincoln City
Is winning the fifth tier a big achievement? Yes, in that you have to finish top, but that’s how we go up these days anyway. It’s not in that you’re beating much smaller teams, and in fairness, our budget did put us top end anyway. There wasn’t a huge outperformance in terms of money, and the levels were very different.
Still, how could this not be one of the top achievements? Six years of not feeling like a real club. Six years of playing in the FA Cup in November, instead of waiting until January to come. Six years of players coming and going, of empty stadiums, of slivers of hope getting smaller from December.
Then along came a comet of hope, crashing into a club that a few good people had held together by their fingertips. From the opening day win at Woking (we never won at Woking), there were not just green shoots – we were popping up like hairy bitcress. Belief flooded in, drowning all of us pessimists.
Pair that with the FA Cup run, and you get a perfect storm. A club reborn inside, but also seen on the outside. If we just won the National League, we’d have been a footnote. Lincoln City are back, great. That would be it. When you throw in a Premier League scalp and an FA Cup quarter-final, you get exposure. We were doing good things, and we got a stage to present those good things to the world.
One year on from being hammered 4-1 at Dover, we were playing Arsenal in the FA Cup quarter-final. That isn’t revival, that’s coming back to life when lying on an operating table, those big shock things sending volts through your body. We sat up and immediately started swinging.
Is winning the National League with (for argument’s sake) a top-six budget, as a team with a long Football League history, the biggest of our achievements? Context matters, and while I’m not placing anything in order, for me, this season was, and always will be, one of the very best in our history.
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