In his 2013 book The North (And Almost Everything In It), English journalist Paul Morley spends the first 30 pages trying to pin down exactly where we are talking about.
Without meaning to dumb down an excellent read, Morley basically suggests the north of England is a vibe in that “everyone knows, up to a point, what you are referring to when you say ‘the north’”.
He is probably right, but that does not stop the rest of us from arguing about where to draw the north/south border.
For some, it would run through the Cheshire Plain, the flat expanse south of Liverpool and Manchester. Others believe it starts a little further south, just over the Cheshire/Staffordshire border, in Stoke. Many southerners think the Watford Gap motorway service station — which is confusingly 60 miles north of Watford, a town just north west of London — is the true gateway to the frozen steppes beyond.
The uncertainty is hardly a surprise given how everyone has different criteria for what is ‘northern’. Is it your accent, the type of house you live in, how you vote, what you call the last meal of the day, your favourite soap opera?
And that is before we get into the thorny issues of where Scotland and Wales fit into this English dispute, or whether the Midlands should be viewed as an entirely separate place with its own borders, characteristics and customs.
But there is surely one thing we can all agree on: Oxford is in the south.
Yet last season, Oxford City were relegated from the National League (English football’s fifth tier) into the National League North, alongside Brackley Town and Needham Market, two other places on nobody’s list of northern football towns.
“It is weird for a lot of people when they hear we’re in the National League North,” says Mark Neal, the Oxford City supporter behind the Headington Hoop fansite and a committed groundhopper, before pointing out that this is not Oxford City’s first north/south rodeo.
“When we were promoted from the Southern League Premier in 2012 we had to head to the Conference North (the precursor to the National League North) for a few seasons as there were loads of southern teams already at step two.
“I appreciate that there’s a line drawn every season by relegations and promotions, and it’s generally around the Oxfordshire area, but opposition fans do joke about us being ‘soft southern bastards’. And having clubs from South Shields to Oxford City in the same regionalised league is a bit strange.”
Oxford City, gateway to the National League North (Catherine Ivill/Getty Images)
Step two, for those already confused, is the second step on the pyramid of amateur and semi-professional leagues that feed into the English Football League (EFL). It is also the highest tier of English football still regionalised, with the 48 teams split on a north/south basis. The idea is it reduces the burden of travel.
So far, so sensible. But what is interesting or concerning, depending on your view, is that football’s north/south border is already much further south than most of us would draw it, and it is increasingly shifting in that direction.
OK, you might say, this is just a case of football, the national game, reflecting long-term societal trends, like deindustrialisation in the north and the pull of London, the UK’s political and financial capital. And you would be right.
But something else is accelerating that shift southwards, something external. Once easy to miss and gradual, it is becoming obvious and inevitable.
With most clubs at least partly for sale, almost all of the time, and most buyers now coming from abroad, the fact that many of these shoppers do not want to stray too far from London’s Heathrow Airport is, after 136 years, accelerating football history.
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Before we continue, we are not going to rely on vibes to define what we are talking about here, as that will only spark rows in the comments section about the Midlands. No, we are going to talk to an expert about where the border should be drawn. In fact, we are going to talk to the expert.
“Well, it’s not a new idea,” says Danny Dorling, a professor of human geography at the University of Oxford and a former honorary president of the Society of Cartographers.
“Some of it goes back to William the Conqueror’s Harrying of the North — you can see the impact in the Domesday Book. So there has been a north/south divide in England for centuries, just as there have also been anomalies on both sides of the line for centuries. For example, thanks to full employment in the steel industry, life expectancy in Sheffield was higher than the national average throughout the 1970s.”
Dorling is explaining the background to arguably his most famous piece of mapwork, ‘the North-South dividing line’ — AKA, ‘the Dorling line’.
To cut a long story about a wiggly line short, Dorling’s divide, pictured below, is similar to the rule-of-the-thumb diagonal from the Severn estuary in the south west to The Wash in the east that many economists, geographers and pub bores have used to divide north and south for decades, but it is steeper and goes all the way to the mouth of the Humber, just south of Grimsby. Crucially, Dorling’s effort is based on official statistics on five measures: life expectancy, poverty, education, employment and wealth.
“What was different about our line was that it was the first time anyone had really based it on measurable data,” says Dorling, who did the research on it when he ran the human geography department at the University of Sheffield.
“So, when we looked at statistics for education, health, wealth, house prices and so on, we got a clear dividing line from the Severn to the Humber. I haven’t repeated the exercise recently but I suspect things haven’t changed that much.
“We did get some criticism, mainly because we got rid of the Midlands and included Wales and Scotland in the north, but the line is the line and there are clear differences depending on which side of it you are. Migration is probably the key driver now, with healthier and wealthier people moving south.”
Hold that thought.
To paraphrase Dorling, this is not a new idea — there has always been a north/south divide in English football.
Back in the mid-19th century, the tension was about what rules to use and whether players should be paid. Generally speaking, northern clubs were work teams that fielded working-class players, while southern clubs were affiliated with famous schools and featured young gentlemen who would not dream of doing something as uncouth as taking payment for playing a game.
For the first decade or so of the FA Cup, which started in 1871, the south ruled, but when Blackburn Olympic became the first northern team to win the world’s oldest football competition in 1883, it sparked a century of northern achievement. Only five editions of the competition were won by teams from south of the Dorling line between 1883 and the outbreak of World War Two in 1939.
The north’s dominance of league football was just as ingrained. When the Football League was launched in 1888, its 12 founding members were all from the northwest and the Midlands (but north of the line). The first ‘southern teams’ — Lincoln City and Woolwich Arsenal, as the latter were known back then — did not join until a second division was added in 1893.
The two divisions had grown to 40 clubs by the outbreak of World War One in 1914 but only seven of them were southern, and no team from below the line won Division One until Arsenal managed it in 1930.
To keep travel costs down when league football resumed after World War Two in 1945, the two divisions were split into north and south groups. Of the 22 teams that played in the Football League South’s only season, nine were northern.
The following season saw the top two divisions become nationwide competitions again but two new regional divisions were added: Division Three North and Division Three South. Of the 88 clubs in total, two-thirds were from north of Dorling’s divide, with five northern clubs in Division Three South. One was Port Vale, who (fun fact alert) are the only EFL club not named after an actual location, but are very much from the north. They are based in Stoke.
Port Vale, in Stoke, in the north, played in the south (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
The regionalised third tier lasted until 1958, when the north and south divisions were replaced with the four-tier national structure that survived until 1992, when clubs in the top tier broke away to form the Premier League and keep more of the game’s burgeoning TV income for themselves. But the gradual shift southwards continued, as the 35 per cent of clubs that came from below the line in 1946, became 36 per cent in 1958 and 40 per cent in 1992.
Today, that number is 43 per cent, as famous northern names such as Bury, Hartlepool and Oldham have been replaced in the EFL by the likes of Bromley, Crawley and Stevenage, two teams from the London suburbs and one from a post-war new town built to house displaced Londoners. And if we include the National League, the game’s now-almost-completely-professional fifth tier, we are approaching equilibrium, with 54 of the 116 clubs (47 per cent) from south of the Dorling line.
Which brings us back to the National League North, as it is there that we can best see this shift is not stopping. Oxford City are just the most southerly of six teams in the division from below the divide, while the northernmost club in the National League South is St Albans City, a 20-minute rail trip from central London.
So, apart from the better job prospects, infrastructure and weather, what is going on here?
“It’s all about London, really,” says Laurie Pinto, a veteran of football’s mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry and founder of Pinto Capital. “Its transport links, its contribution to the country’s GDP, the talent pool, the capital factor… and most of these overseas investors have been to London before, particularly the ones who made their money in private equity, as London is a global financial centre.
“It can be really difficult to get people interested in clubs outside the south east. But I get it — how many Brits can confidently point to Sheffield on a map?
“There’s a great club for sale in the northwest at the moment. Decent ground, good fanbase, nice history and super cheap. I’ve sent two overseas groups up there for a look and they met the owner. But they just thought it was too far away — they sounded more excited about the golf course they played.”
Charlie Methven started his working life as a journalist before becoming a PR man and then a football executive. He is now chief executive and co-owner at Charlton Athletic but was previously part of the ownership group at Sunderland.
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“We thought we’d been so clever by investing in Sunderland,” explains Methven. “We thought they were one of the biggest teams in the country, with a huge stadium, loyal fanbase, a great academy. What’s not to like?
“But we really struggled to get potential investors or sponsors to come, particularly from overseas. They would fly into London and then say they didn’t want to get on another flight. Or they would complain about the hotels and restaurants.
“We don’t have those issues at Charlton. Potential partners can stay in their favourite hotel, eat in their favourite restaurant, go shopping, catch a show. It’s just much easier.”
Charlton benefits from being in London (Andrew Redington/Getty Images)
Raphael Gellar is the co-founder of Forward Sports Group, a “boutique football consultancy” that works with players, clubs and investors. In recent seasons, he has helped Bromley and Lincoln City find investment from overseas.
“Yes, there has been an increase in foreign investment in southern clubs,” Gellar tells The Athletic. “You can see this trend from the sixth tier all the way up to the Premier League.
“It really depends on what the investor is looking for. Of course, many people are drawn to London because of its rich football history. In London alone, there are 12 teams in the top four tiers — that’s an incredible amount of professional clubs in one city. Some investors really want to be part of that bigger club.”
The lure of London is not only a problem for teams on the wrong side of the Dorling line, as Plymouth Argyle’s U.S.-based owner Simon Hallett has discovered.
“We’re actually at an advanced stage in talks with one party but we’ve talked to so many people who have said they are interested and like what we do — it must be nearly 18 months now of looking actively without coming to a deal,” says Hallett, whose team is based in southwest England, 200 miles from London.
“But then you have deals like the one at MK Dons (a team based in Milton Keynes, 50 miles from London, who were recently bought by a Kuwaiti consortium) that seem to come out of nowhere. I’m sure it was more complicated than that but other clubs do seem to have done it more easily than us. London and the south east, or easy access to Heathrow, do seem to be attractive and that’s a problem.”
Gellar, however, does not believe it is London or nowhere. “Some buyers are more drawn to one-club cities or towns,” he explains. “In these places, the entire community is focused on their club. Nothing compares to the English football pyramid — almost every town in England has a club that’s an integral part of its culture.
“There has been an enormous amount of North American investment over the last five to 10 years. If you look at the valuations for sports franchises in the big American sports, the cheapest is $1billion. Even MLS teams cost $500m.
“But £10m can get you a majority stake in an EFL team with a 100-year history and a 10,000-seat stadium. So, you can see that the cost of investment in English football is a fraction of the price in American sport.”
Trevor Watkins is the head of sports at global law firm Pinsent Masons and a former chairman of AFC Bournemouth.
“Several factors that drive decisions to buy or invest in football clubs will not necessarily make sense to other investors,” says Watkins. “Trying to understand the potential investor’s priorities is very important. For example, if sporting success is the most important factor, are you better off buying a National League South side inside the M25 or an EFL club that happens to be in the north?
“There is no science to buying football clubs but you do hear investors say, ‘Well, I know London, I know the airport, but I don’t know where this city is — does it have an airport?’.
“So, yes, it is an issue. It’s about familiarity and capital cities always have that pull. As (American investor) Jim Pallotta memorably put it when asked why he invested in Roma, ‘It’s f****** Rome!’
“But look at the guys who bought Roma from him, the Friedkins. They’ve just bought Everton, where they have an amazing new stadium, for considerably less than Tottenham spent on theirs, and a famous club, with lots of fans and history. And Everton and Tottenham have exactly the same rights as each other to play in Europe.”
Everton’s new home attracted investors northwards (Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images)
This is true and, if you look at M&A activity in English club football over the last decade, there have been marginally more deals in the north than the south, although you could also point out that there are still more clubs in the north than the south.
For Watkins, the main issues in today’s game are that the majority of potential new club owners are foreign, these investors are willing to look further down the pyramid than before, and once they have bought one club, they are more likely to buy another.
“In a bygone age, these guys would have been locals, most likely fans of the club who had enjoyed some success in business,” says Watkins. “That still happens, but it is just as likely that these investors will be successful people from abroad, with no previous connection to the club, who want to invest in a team on their own or with friends. And if you invest in one club, you’re more likely to invest in another one, sometimes with the same people, sometimes in a new group.
“I should also add that the rise of multi-club groups has made it more important to be close to major transport hubs, which suggests clubs like Reading, Swindon, Oxford and Wycombe (all within 90 minutes’ drive of Heathrow) should be very attractive to someone.
“So, there has been a shift towards London and the south east, but it’s a very competitive market and I still think some investors, once they weigh everything up, will decide they would rather be in a one-club city somewhere else rather than a club like Charlton, Watford, West Ham, Brentford and so on.
“They’re all good clubs but do they have much upside? Maybe. Like I said, there is no science to it!”
Pinto agrees.
“Is (the pull of London) a problem for English football?” he asks himself. “Perhaps. As a fan, I love good stories and I know there are loads of clubs in the north with great stories. I also worry about player development, because we know talent can come from anywhere.
“But this is just capitalism, and markets change. At some point, the market in London and the south east will get overheated and the value will be elsewhere. The smart money will follow.”
Meanwhile, back on English football’s shifting border, Neal and his fellow Oxford City fans have their cost-benefit analysis to make.
“I haven’t missed an Oxford City match since 2016 — it’s coming up to 500 games now. It’s very addictive. Most of our fans were unhappy when we were put in National League North again but, from a purely selfish point of view, I was delighted as it meant new grounds to visit. We had been in the National League South for eight years before our promotion in 2023.
“But being in the North is definitely harder for our club, as we will have one of the lower budgets in the division anyway, and the travel and hotel costs don’t help.”
But let us finish where we started. With vibes. Are northern clubs different to southern ones?
“Chalk and cheese,” says Neal. “The northern clubs are much better supported and they are also much friendlier. This season, we have really enjoyed being in the clubhouses at all these grounds.”
Dorling, who admits he knows very little about football, has previously worked at universities in Newcastle, Bristol, Leeds and Sheffield, but is now back where he was born, Oxford.
So, how does it feel to live in a northern football city?
“That’s great,” he says. “It makes me proud.”
(Top photo: London by Dan Kitwood via Getty Images)
