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Matt Badcock: The numbers don’t add up

Promotion can be career altering for clubs and players. Currently the numbers don’t add up. They didn’t nine years ago either. It’s time they did.

by
The Non-League Football Paper Team
23 November 2025

York City failed to win promotion with 96 points

Matt Badcock – The NLP’s Editor-At-Large

It’s nine years this week since the EFL broke off talks over a potential revamp of the English pyramid.
Among the ‘Whole Game Solution’ proposals was to reduce the Championship, League One and League Two to 20 teams before introducing a League Three and taking the overall count up to 80 clubs.
The idea was to reduce fixture congestion, cut-out the number midweek games and revamp the calendar for a winter break.
Including Premier League B teams or ‘non-English’ clubs to make the numbers up was ruled out, with the eight ‘newbies’ ultimately to be dra...

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