Some clubs just have it. That thing where the story writes itself year after year and you find yourself having to remind people, no, this is real, this happened. Lincoln City is one of those clubs.
The last nine years have been something else, none of the many online sportsbooks that accept visa couldn’t predict Lincoln’s rapid rise from the National League to the EFL Championship with one of the lowest budgets in League One.
Still, Lincoln’s success isn’t a coincidence, it’s the price of a well-structured project that had been able to stay on its feet even on its lowest points. And all struggles have been worth it.
February 2017: Turf Moor
The quarterfinal against Arsenal is difficult to forget, but without the Burnley game none of it would have been possible. Danny Cowley’s side were still in the National League, non-league football, and had already knocked out Oldham, Ipswich and Brighton to get to the fifth round of the FA Cup.
And then Sean Raggett happened. 89th minute, Turf Moor, a corner that nobody expected to produce anything, and Raggett got there first and buried it past Tom Heaton. For a moment nobody quite believed it. Premier League Burnley who would go on to qualify for Europa League football that same year had been defeated by a struggling National League side.
The first club from outside the Football League to reach the FA Cup quarterfinals in 103 years. Arsenal would go on to beat Lincoln with ease at the Emirates just a couple of weeks later, but Lincoln’s story can’t be taken out of the history books.
99 Points Later
The cup run gets all the credit from that 2016/17 season, which is understandable. What gets forgotten is that the same team, at the same time, won the National League with 99 points.
Six years. That is how long Lincoln had been outside the Football League before that title. The return came not through a play-off penalty shootout or a last-day drama, but with a points total that basically settled the argument in March. Returning to the Football League as champions rather than squeezing through the play-offs said everything about the level the Cowley brothers had reached at Sincil Bank.
The pressing, the organisation, the goals from everywhere in the squad. It was a system. And systems that produce 99 points do not happen by accident.
Wembley: Lincoln’s Playground
In 2018 Lincoln won the EFL Trophy at Wembley, beating Shrewsbury. First major silverware in years. There are photos from that afternoon that tell the story better than words can, supporters who had spent years watching Lincoln at the wrong end of the National League table, suddenly at Wembley with a trophy in front of them.
A year later the League Two title arrived, back-to-back EFL promotions, something no club had managed since 2005. From non-league to League One in 24 months. There was a point during that stretch where it started feeling completely normal, which in hindsight was probably the strangest thing about the whole period.
103 Points to End the 65-Year Drought
Nobody predicted what would happen in the 2025/26 season, but it is real: Lincoln have won League One with an impressive 103 points. Meaning that the Imps are back in the EFL Championship for the first time since 1961. Sixty-five years. A lot of people inside Sincil Bank that season had been going to games for thirty, forty years without ever seeing the club at this level. April the 6th, 2026 changed it all.
The 103-point total by the end of the season was not a flattering number. The Imps were better than everyone else in League One for basically the entire campaign, led the division for long stretches and finished it having lost so rarely it barely registered. A record points tally, the first time in the Championship in over six decades, and a club that had been playing National League football less than a decade earlier now preparing for Sheffield United and Burnley and the rest on a regular Saturday afternoon.
Go back ten years and try explaining to a Lincoln City supporter watching the Imps struggle in the National League that the same team that’s fighting to avoid relegation in the fifth tier is now one step away from Premier League football after a historic league run.
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