Ranking Success: Where Does League One Title Win Rate In Recent Lincoln City Success?

2025/26 League One Winners

This season is perhaps the best in terms of football achievement. We were the furthest down the budget table than in any of those other campaigns, and the teams we’ve had to hold off have spent so much more than anything we’ve seen in the past. This was more akin to the FA Cup run in 2016/17 than the league, because the further we got into the competition, the bigger the spending the rivals seemed to be (if you like, Stevenage are Sutton United in this analogy). Early doors, we’re in a cohort of teams around our budget, but as the season winds down, we’re in huge stadiums like Cardiff, and we’re still winning.

Impossible is just an opinion, but if you asked me if we’d win the league earlier this season, I’d say impossible. Ask me if Danny Cowley’s Lincoln could beat a rotated Burnley side, and I’d say there was a chance.

The other comparison runs deeper. We’ve won Division Four before, in 1976. We’ve won the fifth tier before, in 1988. Those seasons were brilliant, but were they so unique that they turned the page of the Imps’ story and found no comparison, no equal, no season we could say ‘yes, but we did that in..’. I’ll be told 1952 and promotion to the old Second Division, and in terms of levels sure, that’s comparable. In terms of the game, that was more than 70 years ago, and it’s almost impossible (opinion) to put the two side by side.

Is this season the greatest in Lincoln City’s history? Like 2016/17, 1975/76 and 1987/88, it is up there for reasons very different to the others. I would argue it is the greatest Football League achievement the club has ever had, when adding the context of history, the changing face of the game and the work needed to make a football team a success in 2026 as opposed to 1952, or indeed the seventies and eighties.

I wouldn’t steal joy from the other achievements by saying this is definitely the best, there are too many nuances to discuss before we can do that, but it is interesting the evolution of success when compared to expectation and achievement.

Up the Imps.