READING — Lincoln City’s entire promotion has presented itself as one gloriously unlikely, extended dream sequence and the denouement was perfection. Pegged back in injury-time, needing only a point but suddenly nervous for no reason, 2,900 Imps in an away end watched their team promptly stream up the pitch at Reading’s Select Car Leasing Stadium and score again. It isn’t supposed to happen as splendidly as this. But then none of this was.
Five minutes later, players, managers and coaching staff are running into each other’s arms and celebrating the most extraordinary achievement. I am lucky enough to join them, giddy with deferred joy because if you can’t revel in the smaller guys doing bigger things then what does sport even mean to you?
In the stands, they chanted of the Championship and of Tottenham, improbable potential opponents next season as equals. Manager Michael Skubala did his fist pumps and the players posed for photos with an adoring mass as the backdrop.
Others were overcome entirely: kit manager Terry Bourne is Lincolnshire born and raised and he cried his eyes out as he stared at the red-and-white sea and heard it sing. On the touchline, away from the noise, sporting director Jez George stood still and just watched. Never underestimate how much it means to those who have worked hardest to make this happen.
Three days earlier, wandering across the back of Lincoln City’s Rilmac Stand on a Good Friday that ended up being a great one, a collection of camera operators spoke to supporters about what they have paid witness to this season. As I passed them and caught slivers of conversation, the same phrase three times in 30 seconds: “It is beyond everything we could have imagined”.
Which just about covers it. Most at Lincoln City look forwards, not back, but it’s worth doing so just this once. A decade ago, Lincoln were finishing in the bottom half of the National League for the fifth season in a row. Now they are unbeaten in 23 matches, have won 18 of them and will be playing second-tier football for the first time since 1961.
I started my 2025-26 domestic season at Lincoln’s training ground quite deliberately, attending an early day of pre-season to spend more time with Skubala, his coaches and players. Last season, doing a similar piece with chief executive Liam Scully and sporting director George, I found myself convinced by the ambition and logic of a club being built, literally and figuratively, to overachieve. Then, the aim was to finish four or five places higher in the division than their budgets.
You can now make that 15 places at least; this simply isn’t meant to happen. League One contains nine former Premier League clubs (four of them in the six places directly below Lincoln) and vast desperation to get back – or get up – to the Championship. All of them have been outclassed by a club that hadn’t finished in the top 50 places in England for 43 years.
For this has been no fluke. Lincoln City have kept 17 clean sheets and only twice this season have conceded more than twice, not bad given that they are also the top scorers. Nineteen different members of the first-team squad have scored. They have lost one of their 20 matches against sides in the top half. The date – 6 April – makes this the earliest confirmed third-tier promotion in at least 50 years.
“We always say that it takes a village,” said Scully in a room inside the LNER Stadium on Friday. “I think I’ve said that to you before. It’s really important that we don’t forget the contribution the whole club has made, including many people who are no longer working here.”
“We always want it to be a sustainable, competitive, balanced football club. Maybe the biggest compliment anyone could ever give us is that we have been boringly consistent. We’ve never chased the glamorous elements.”
“This has been a how-to guide for Lincoln City and who we are. Every club is different, every club has a heartbeat. There is no copy-paste job that you can do. We made a hell of a lot of mistakes and we still make mistakes now. But we learnt the fabric of the club and we designed and executed something that works for Lincoln City: the people, the city, the infrastructure.”
There is certainly some serendipity to this long-termism. There are sections of the LNER Stadium that Liam can point to and tell you which success story funded which development. The famous FA Cup run under the Cowleys in 2017 paid for the new training ground and it is comfortably Championship standard.
Success creates opportunity that, when good sense and good practice rushes in, can become self-fulfilling. Lincoln’s recruitment, led by the sporting director, has been exemplary. Last August, Lincoln sold Jovon Makama to Norwich for a club record £1.2m.
The money was reinvested in creating greater squad depth, adding the experience of Adam Reach and Sonny Bradley and taking a chance on Ukrainian Under-21 international Ivan Varfolomeev. The idea was to create a highly competitive first-team environment. Lincoln have used fewer players than almost every other League One club. A core of six players have started 35 or more matches. The others rest and rotate effectively.
All of this is overseen by surely the highest-performing coaching staff in England this season. Skubala’s journey is fascinating, through teaching PE, academy coaching, Loughborough University and then England futsal before a senior coaching career. At 43, this is Skubala’s first senior managerial role and he has been a revelation.
Skubala is supported by two assistant head coaches, Tom Shaw and Chris Cohen, who are given freedom with individual players. David Preece is the goalkeeping coach but has taken on set-piece responsibility this season. That is one of the key tenets to the overperformance: autonomy within a team where everybody works for each other and the supporters. Everybody you speak to deflects praise and talks up the work of others.
“I cannot tell you how hard we work,” Skubala tells me on the pitch in front of the fans. “I’m knackered. I’m shattered.
“But we have to work hard. You work for 20 years in coaching, developing yourself, in the hope that you get to give your all to a group of players and colleagues such as these. You drive the minibus as an academy coach, plan training sessions for futsal, all for this chance.
“And then you find your pathway, find something where everything is aligned and are afforded a superb group of players whose mentality is off the scale. And you are able to give these people in front of us days like this. And, honestly, it is everything.”
The small-sided football background may sell Skubala as a coach interested in passes and small spaces; that was his education. Two years ago he told me about his pride at working within the Football Association’s England DNA programme to create better technicians from the next generation of footballers.
Skubala’s greatest strength might just be his pragmatism. Lincoln’s players are comfortable on the ball, particularly when transitioning through midfield. But the manager had a plan to steal a march on this division. Lincoln have the lowest possession by a distance but rank in the top three for shots on target and big chances.
They soak up pressure, work damn hard off the ball, tempt opponents to over-commit and then counter. They are magnificent at attacking set pieces, the best of any team in the EFL. They know what they are good at and exploit it to its maximum and they are brilliant at identifying weaknesses in their opponents. And they have been underestimated by other clubs and their supporters all season.
The Championship is a different beast, competitively and financially; nobody is ignoring that but nobody is fearful either. The midseason change of ownership structure and US investment will allow budgets to shift a little. As Scully puts it, selling players and cup runs were the only way Lincoln could spend on legacy projects. Now Ron Fowler can give them more leeway and that is extremely exciting.
And if Lincoln City can punch four places above their budget again, and people continue to underestimate people doing smart things and giving their all in the process, Lincoln will be alright.
“I was 21 when I won my first promotion with [Nottingham] Forest and I thought that it could happen every year; that was my last one,” says Cohen, my favourite ever footballer and so naturally given the last word. “As you get older and wiser, you remember to make the most of them.
“We don’t have the biggest budgets but we have the best team and the best staff in England for the way that we want to play. This isn’t luck. This is because every single person works their hardest every single day. We will enjoy this briefly, as we deserve to, and then we will start preparing for next year.”
Sing it from the rooftops. A provincial football club created a blueprint for punching above their financial weight and have supercharged it under an inspirational coaching team. They have made something mighty difficult look easy. Lincoln City are the most overachieving football club in England.
Covering the EFL regularly can often make you feel like a football grim reaper, knocking on doors when financial crises or ownership controversies have swept into town. The fragility of the financial model threatens the pyramid itself and is fuelled by a wealth gap that grows continuously.
So visiting clubs like Lincoln City over the course of 18 months, meeting its people, understanding its methods and checking in regularly as they come to fruition, doesn’t just leave you impressed but restores your faith in the game itself.
