20 Best Lincoln City Signings of the EFL Era (Part 2)

We’re into the top ten of our best Lincoln City permanent signings of the EFL era, and this is where leaving players out becomes particularly difficult.

Part one introduced the players ranked 20 to 11, with plenty of scope for debate before we’d even reached the business end of the list. Those were all signings who gave us something worth remembering, but the names that follow have an even stronger claim to a place among the best we’ve brought to the club since 2017.

To make it a little more challenging, current squad members must have been at the club for more than 18 months to qualify, ruling out Deji Elerewe, Ivan Varfolomeev and Sonny Bradley.

Putting these ten in order means weighing up very different contributions. How do you compare someone who helped deliver promotion with a player whose sale funded the next stage of our progress, or a free signing who became indispensable over several seasons? That’s the judgement behind our final countdown, as we work from tenth place to the signing we’ve put above them all.

10 – Regan Poole

By the time Regan Poole arrived at Lincoln, his career had already taken him from Newport County to Manchester United and on to MK Dons. It was from the Dons that we signed him for an undisclosed fee in January 2021, and he went on to win both our supporters’ and players’ Player of the Season awards in 2021/22. He left at the end of his contract in summer 2023 and joined Portsmouth, making his senior Wales debut later that year and becoming part of Pompey’s League One title-winning squad.

There is an argument that Regan Poole and Paudie O’Connor could be interchangeable on this list. Both were leaders, both captained us, both won Player of the Season, and both gave everything before leaving to pursue a higher level of football. However, Regan edges it for me because he excelled in what was arguably a weaker Lincoln City side, particularly during that difficult 2021/22 season, when he was our only player to make more than 40 league appearances. There was an outlay for Regan that we didn’t have with Paudie, but we got consistency, commitment and somebody whose standards never seemed to slip, even when those around him were struggling. He wanted Championship football and international recognition, and he has since achieved both, overcoming serious injury along the way.

That doesn’t diminish what Paudie gave us, but Regan’s performances through some challenging times, coupled with what he has gone on to achieve, put him that bit higher in my thinking.