Initially, it didn’t seem to have a particularly beneficial effect. In August 1990, the club moved into its new home. The Huish, that sloping pitch, was to be demolished, and Yeovil Town were to move to a new stadium, Huish Park. Towards the end of their first season back in the Football Conference, Yeovil received the news that would come to change the club forever. There then followed a frustrating three years in the Premier Division of the Isthmian League, finishing as runners-up twice before finally getting promoted back in 1988.
Founder members of the Alliance Premier League, they underwent a decline in the early 1980s which ended in relegation in 1985. Representing a market town of 45,000 people near the Somerset-Dorset border, they had a heavily sloping pitch upon which they’d knocked First Division Sunderland out of the FA Cup in 1949, and an honorable record of occasionally applying to join the Football League without success whilst regularly performing with distinction in the Southern League. Until 2003, Yeovil Town were perhaps the quintissential non-league football club. With one automatic promotion place available and the National League play-offs now played between six teams, the difference between “League” and “non-league” still exists. Indeed, only one promotion and relegation place continued to be the case until 2003, when it was finally increased to two. The Premier League broke away in 1992, but the Football League chose at that point not to expand itself back to four divisions by simply incorporating The Football Conference. All relegations are presented as human interest stories on the television these days, but few are more so than that gap between the Football League and the National League. Talk that the Football League would have to go part-time proved to be overstated, though the financial predicament of many lower division clubs has significantly deteriorated, over the last thirty years. The National League is now mostly full-time. Stockport County, who two decades earlier had been playing – and beating – Manchester City in a league match, won the National League North title at the end of last season, for example. Football League stalwarts have dropped still further. Some, such, as Kidderminster Harriers and Barnet have come and gone. The introduction of automatic promotion and relegation between the Football League and the Football Conference was a venture into meritocracy that has had an interesting affect on the bottom of what is now known as League Two and the top of what is now known as the National League.
Every once in a while someone would get tripped up, but it didn’t happen often, and as often as not the club getting tripped up would find that something as banal as being in a relatively remote geographical location could be enough to end much sympathy from their fellow clubs. Prior to the 1987/88 season, the clubs that finished at the bottom of Division Four were insulated from any further downward trajectory by re-election, a process by which the other clubs had to vote them back in, along with giveing consideration to applications to join from non-league clubs. The British sure do love a class distinction. The professionals vs amateurs of the modern game. It’s been more than thirty years now, and still there is a distinction.
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