Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.
I am mooching around Lincoln City’s official club shop on a Saturday morning, admiring the retro jackets and thinking about the discussions I’d have to have at home if I bought one, because that is where I have agreed to meet Liam Scully, the club’s CEO.
Outside it is gloriously sunny and cold – football weather by any measure. A number of community games are taking place on the 4G pitches next to Lincoln’s LNER stadium. It is still hours until kick off but the food stalls are starting to gear up and there are even a few Peterborough United supporters beginning to mill around. File them under: keen.
I am here because I wanted to spend a day, during a transfer window, shadowing people behind the scenes of a league football club as they spin plates while juggling jellies.
My guides for the day will be Liam, Lincoln’s director of football Jez George and first-team head coach Michael Skubala. These are the three people tasked by the club’s owners and the supporters with taking it forward.
Scully arrived at the stadium around 9am and, as he explains in his office, this is unsurprisingly a busy time of year. He explains that from the first week of December to the first week of February, you start sprinting and never really stop.
There are more matches and more noise around them. He reckons he’s spoken more to Jez over that time than anyone in his family. Every day, he says, is a “charge your phone three times” day.
Lincoln City are, broadly speaking, in a brilliant place. Until 2016, they had finished in the bottom half of the National League for five consecutive seasons and were drifting.
Then the Cowley brothers inspired the league rise and the FA Cup miracle, people like Liam and Jez joined and Lincoln stabilised themselves in the third tier. They are aiming for a third straight finish in League One’s top half. By any measure, it’s some effort for a club of this size.
Skubala’s squad is young (the fourth youngest in League One) and relatively small (only Shrewsbury Town have used fewer players). But it also overachieves and thus a football club, once saved by its supporters, now sits close to the heart of its city. Home attendances tripled over the course of eight years and have stayed there.
In few other places in England do 10 per cent of a town’s population watch the team in person on a Saturday. On this Saturday, when – spoiler alert – my visit is well-timed, the LNER welcomes more than 10,000 spectators inside for the second time this season.
But football clubs in provincial towns never exist without funks, ruts and dips. Overachievement is glorious, but it does tend to shift expectations and they rarely ever move back without an argument.
Last season Lincoln finished seventh, their second highest place since 1983. Prior to a 1-0 win at Northampton Town the week before I arrived, Lincoln endured a run of one win in 12 league games. There were, as mad as it seems, calls for Skubala and George to consider their positions.
This is all relevant because our day starts with a fan event. The John O’Gaunts Club is a supporter group comprising of those who worked tirelessly to fundraise and keep Lincoln City alive after the collapse of ITV Digital, which decimated revenues across football. They are the people who rallied most when their club needed them.
As a continued gesture of gratitude from those who now run the club on a day-to-day basis, three times a year this group is given an extended audience with Liam, Jez and the head coach. In a conference room roughly above the club shop, 17 of those supporters sit with expectant faces and questions across their lips.
Firstly, Skubala spends 30 minutes answering queries on team selection, the recent sticky run, training, squad depth and the forthcoming game that afternoon. It is impressive because it is brutally honest.
He says that his team haven’t created enough, haven’t finished efficiently when they have created, that he’s had to manage the confidence of the young players but that he believes the defensive unit is strong.
There are two questions that stick out, given what followed later. In answering the first, Skubala says that he thinks there will be times that afternoon when home supporters wince and gulp as Peterborough attack, but that on the balance he can use attacking set pieces and turnovers in possession in the final third to pick off the opponent. He says that Lincoln can dominate if they get that right.
Lincoln City 5-1 Peterborough United (Saturday 25 January)
- Game no.: 60/92
- Miles: 85
- Cumulative miles: 10,111
- Total goals seen: 174
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: I’ll remember calling Chris Cohen my hero in May 2055, let alone 2025
The second question: “Why have we not had more penalties?”. Skubala says that he doesn’t know, that the data doesn’t show any anomalies there and that Lincoln will probably get a penalty soon to alleviate that niche concern. It’s something that Liam points out to me later about Skubala: he won’t fudge an answer. If he doesn’t know, he’ll say so and then find out.
Having sat answering emails at the back of the room, a task interrupted by him organising some mugs for teas and coffees for the supporters present, Liam is next up. He wants to offer complete transparency into the financial health of Lincoln City and the challenges that face every League One club in what is an unprecedentedly competitive season.
Liam explains that Lincoln have always worked on a “rightful position plus four” model, where they aim to outperform their budgets in comparison to the rest of the division by four places. Last season, when finishing seventh, they smashed it.
But the general point is this: it’s getting harder and harder because, in League One, you have to put in more money to stay where you are. It’s not just because Birmingham, Huddersfield and Wrexham are spending big money; it’s everyone. League One is becoming the new Championship, where the revenues increase by a small amount and the outgoing increase by more.
This season, Lincoln City believe that they rank in the bottom six according to their squad costs. Last season they were considerably higher and this season they are spending more. Not only that, it would take a significant increase in spending (and thus losses) to take them up two or three positions in that ranking.
Liam’s intention, as he stressed to supporters, is not to give a PR spin nor too complain. It is merely to inform them of the reality of the financial culture before an independent regulator. Know the reality, adapt to it and work smarter, and you can continue to overachieve. That is Lincoln City’s aim and it’s over to the director of football.
Jez starts with an explanation of why this season was always likely to be the start of a new mini-era here. In 2023-24, they had Joe Taylor on loan from Luton Town – he was signed by Huddersfield for £2.5m last week.
They had Alex Mitchell on loan from Millwall, who was superb but went back. They sold Lasse Sorensen to Huddersfield for around £400,000 because it made financial sense. They sold Lukas Jensen to Millwall because he had a year left on his deal.
George freely admits that Lincoln couldn’t compete with clubs in the same division (and not just at the top of it) for wages for certain targets. But they have built a young squad that they believe will cost the same next season, but be worth more. That’s the crux of all this: value vs cost.
After all questions have been answered, Jez nips away to take and make a couple of calls on players and Liam and I go for a walk around the pitch. There are people to welcome and shake hands with and a sponsors’ tour to greet. But Liam really wants to get to a certain place on the touchline.
During Covid-19, when this and so many other football stadiums stood hauntingly empty for so long, he would come here and stand staring at the empty stands.
Now he likes to come and stand on the same spot, just as supporters are being allowed in and the stadium begins to generate its own noise. He takes a moment, gets a little emotional and then gets on with the day.
In the lower reaches of the Football League, CEO is a grand title that hides an all-encompassing, multifunctional role. The idea of turning up, smiling to a few people and sitting down to watch the game is a fallacy.
Today there is a sponsor tour and a charity shirt is being worn that requires organisation. This week brought cold weather that required liaising with the ground staff. Liam’s name is on the club’s safety certificate and, as such, he says he spends much of the game looking out for anything out of the ordinary.
We have 15 precious minutes sat with Jez on the home bench, putting the football world to rights in the sunshine. Hearing them speak, it strikes that running a club is an impossible balance of short-term reassurement (winning games, planning for the next window, managing staff) and long-term ambition. Often the ideals of the two are mutually exclusive and so require meticulous balancing.
Added to that are the pressures that push from below and your bosses above. And this is all played out in the public eye at least once a week, with online discussion of your own competence only an ill-advised Google search away. I’ve been witnessing all this for three hours and I’m half-exhausted.
Back in the boardroom, I sit down with David Lowes, who became Lincoln City’s first Fan Engagement Director (FED) in July 2023. David’s role is essentially to be a middleman between club and supporters, but to bring those stakeholders as close to each other as possible.
Over the last year, much of his work has been in educating and conversing with supporters around the potential introduction of an independent regulator, but the broad aim is to ensure that Lincoln City fans are kept convinced that their club is appreciative of their needs.
Eleven months ago, they became one of the first clubs in England to introduce a golden share, giving the Community Trust a share that would give them the right to request a vote upon certain key issues such as a stadium move, club name, badge, team colours or name of the Stacey West Stand.
The point is not just to be a guardian of the club yourself, but to ensure that guardianship after your time. To state the obvious: this stuff matters.
An hour before kick-off, I’m taken for some lunch in one of the hospitality areas (sausage and mash, bonus Yorkshire pudding that earns an extra gold star). Liam has some people to meet and Jez is in match preparation mode and Michael with his players. I chat to supporters and discuss the team news. Plenty have their own ideas of who should be in the team, naturally.
Shortly before we go to our seats in the directors box, Jez offers an accidental insight into just how consuming football is for people in these positions and how fine the margins are. Millwall are playing Luton in the lunchtime kick off and goalkeeper Jensen – sold to them by Lincoln in the summer – is stretchered off.
“That’s bad news for Lukas and bad news for us,” he explains. “We’ll likely have to wait for the add-on clauses to be met.” George will ring Jensen to offer his commiserations and support.
My seat for the day is literally between Jez and Liam, allowing them to talk both to each other (and me eavesdrop) and to me about the game. I’m happy to concede to both of them that I’m almost as nervous as them. You have an image of how you want these pieces to work out perfectly and they tend to depend upon home wins.
I need not have worried. Lincoln take an early lead when a free kick is headed back across goal and Dom Jefferies slides home via a deflection or two. Jez turns to me: “That’s the 17th goal they have conceded from a set piece this year”.
Twenty minutes later, another set-piece goal but this time nobody is at fault. I remember watching Tom Bayliss play for Coventry City at Burton Albion years ago and him being comfortably the best player on the pitch. His free-kick from 25 yards is gorgeous and causes award-winningly understated celebrations either side of me, fist pumps used to convey all the emotion stored within.
At half-time, I’m allowed into the boardroom for a debrief, a cup of tea and the honour of listening to Barry Fry, Peterborough United’s uber-avuncular director of football, chat in his own distinct lilt. “Camaan, game of two halves,” Fry shouts as he walks back out, leaving everyone laughing.
After 55 minutes, Skubala’s earlier answer makes me chuckle. The head coach who didn’t think Lincoln were getting too few penalties watches his team get a penalty. Freddie Draper, a striker who some supporters may have liked to see left out for new signing James Collins, scores and the place goes wild.
Draper is a 20-year-old academy graduate who is a constant pest for Peterborough’s central defenders with his hold-up play and physical strength.
There is a brief flurry of nerves when Peterborough pull one back and the game becomes too open – Jez mutters the word “basketball” with some irritation – but Lincoln score from another set piece and then Collins is introduced for his debut.
At 34, he’s not a typical Lincoln City signing but they believe he will be a short-term influence on the team and have a longer-term impact on the younger forwards.
Collins has been on the pitch for 15 minutes when he receives a through ball from Jovon Makama, another 20-year-old academy graduate striker. With me, the two people next to me and everyone in the ground expecting Collins to strike the ball with power to the far corner, he instead slows down his follow through and digs under the ball dinking it over the sliding goalkeeper. It is a stunning finish.
During the first half, chatting to Liam, he tells me that there are only really two emotions watching the team play: sadness that they haven’t won or relief that they have.
But as the St Andrew’s Stand bounces and serenades the head coach and his players, and as the Peterborough United contingent leave their half of the box empty even before full-time, I can tell that he was wrong: everybody is happy.
At full-time, we walk down the steps of the stand and along the front of the pitch to get back into the offices. Along the way, supporters say well done to Liam and tell him what he already knows, that it has been a great afternoon.
When running a football club, you make the most of days like these. The mood can turn like the weather and this walk was more lonely when Lincoln weren’t winning.
Lincoln City have scored five goals in the league for the first time since last March, when they were in the middle of their astonishing storm up League One to the edge of the play-offs. They have scored as many on this Saturday afternoon as in their previous eight league games combined.
Those supporters who were griping about the slide and potential relegation trouble are excitedly pointing out that the play-offs are only four points away. How things change.
I put that same glib sentence to Liam in the boardroom after the game; Jez is taking more phone calls next door. I also say to him that running a football club, to a relative outsider, seems like avoiding making promises that you can’t keep to thousands of different people who are desperately seeking them.
“You’re probably right,” Liam says. “I think I can only promise one thing in football: disappointment. That’ll always get you in the end.”
It’s the sort of conclusion that would seem downbeat and defeatist after a heavy away loss hundreds of miles from home. But in the afterglow of the most handsome win of the season, hours after asking a group of loyal supporters to keep the faith and trust them, it has an upbeat tone. Disappointment will always come in sport. But not today.
I have one final stop before leaving the LNER shortly after 6pm, leaving my hosts to carry on their work into the evening. Down the corridor from the CEO’s office is the coach’s room. It is where Skubala and his team prepare and debrief on a matchday.
After full-time, there is a tradition whereby opposition coaches come in and sit with each other, perhaps share a drink, and discuss what has just unfolded. It doesn’t happen after every game, but is special when it does, as if the code of honour of football coaching is being upheld.
I do not wish to pry upon something private, but I really do want to get into that room for one reason.
Lincoln City’s assistant head coach is Chris Cohen, one of my football idols for his comebacks from serious injuries and his loyalty to Nottingham Forest when we deserved nothing of the sort. I mentioned my adoration to Liam earlier, and he’s sorted it out.
It’s probably because I’m missing Forest like mad this season, them enjoying their best campaign of my lifetime while I’m out on the road, but meeting Cohen makes me far too nervous. I blurt out to a full room of his colleagues “This man is my hero” and, predictably they all laugh with and at me.
“Don’t be silly,” Cohen says. “Pull up a seat. We’re just getting started…”
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
