Plymouth Argyle will be back in the EFL Championship next season for the first time since 2010, but they’ve had a fall and rise since then.
Sometimes the numbers just don’t add up. In recent years, League One has become the railway junction of English football, the point at which the ambitions of clubs who’ve fallen on hard times in higher divisions run head-first into those who’ve risen from below, where names with grand histories such as Ipswich Town, Sheffield Wednesday, Derby County, Bolton Wanderers and Charlton Athletic face off against Forest Green Rovers, Accrington Stanley, Fleetwood Town, Burton Albion and Morecambe, clubs who have scrapped their way up from the non-league game.
Plymouth Argyle sit between these two extremes. Plymouth haven’t played non-league football since they became part of the influx of southern clubs into the Football League in 1920, but neither have they ever sampled the delights of top-flight football. The city remains the biggest in England never to have had a team in the top division. Indeed, the entire county of Devon has never been represented at this level. But the possibility of that run coming to an end is now a step closer again after Argyle won promotion to the Championship, just a year after a huge disappointment.
Plymouth had led the League One table for a few weeks during the autumn of 2021 and were still hanging on to a play-off place by the very last round of fixtures. But on the last day of the season, having been in the top six since February, they crashed, beaten 5-0 at home by MK Dons and pipped to the final play-off place at the last by Wycombe Wanderers. It was the sort of result that has the potential to be psychologically devastating for a football club, an otherwise successful season undone at the last.
But Plymouth bounced back, and a 1-0 win against Burton Albion at Home Park on Saturday was enough to see them return to the Championship for the first time in 13 years with a game to spare. This run to the top of the table came very much against the odds. Of the other nine clubs in the division’s top ten, eight have previously played Premier League football. Overcoming the disappointment of the end of last season and getting promotion ahead of Ipswich, Sheffield Wednesday and Derby County is no mean feat.
Like so many other clubs at this level of the game, Plymouth Argyle have had their share of financial issues over the years, but following their last relegation from the…
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