By George, Cowley: Lincoln City and English Football’s Glass Ceilings

Rob Fitzgerald
4 min readSep 11, 2019
Danny & Nicky Cowley — Source: The Independent

The fates of my beloved Tranmere Rovers and Lincoln City have intertwined of late. Even though Rovers have fared rather well quite recently, I have looked in wonder and considerable awe at the impact of Danny Cowley since he took over at Lincoln City just over three years ago.

Under Cowley (along with his brother Nicky), Lincoln saw two promotions in three seasons and had assembled a squad better equipped for a tilt at the play-offs than Rovers at present. At least that was the case until Monday. Following the departure of the Cowley brothers to Huddersfield, whom Lincoln knocked out of the League Cup last month, the Imps now face a period of uncertainty in terms of how they will fare for the rest of this season.

I would not blame Lincoln fans of a certain age experiencing a sense of déjà vu. For this is the second time they have lost their manager after winning the old Fourth Division title. The previous occasion saw Graham Taylor drop down a division to take the Watford job after getting a call from a certain Reginald Dwight.

Furthermore, Imps fans may not take comfort from what happened to Braintree, whom the Cowley Brothers left to take over at Sincil Bank. Having achieved an unlikely play-off place above Rovers and Lincoln during the 2015/16 National League season, where they were so close to beating eventual winners Grimsby in the semi-final, Braintree have yo-yoed between the National League and National League South ever since.

However, whilst Braintree entering the Football League would have been a fairy tale, there is no way of knowing whether they would have withstood the financial pressures of having to make the transition from a semi-professional to a full-time professional outfit. To this, North Ferriby United serve as a cautionary tale of reaching for the sky. Having won the FA Trophy in 2014/15 and reached their highest ever level when they got promoted to the National League in 2015/16, within three years they were dead owing debts less than £8,000. To put that sum into context, it is not beyond the realms of possibility that there are some in the squad that the Cowley brothers will be working with who earn that sum in a day.

This begs the question as to whether the Cowley brothers felt that they had taken Lincoln as far as they could go. I can only speculate that the size of Lincoln’s ground and the lack of any firm strategy in terms of expanding their capacity (whether at Sincil Bank or elsewhere) may have forced the issue. In the season they went up from the National League, Lincoln had the third biggest ground in terms of capacity. When they went up last season from League Two, they had the eleventh largest. In League One only five teams have a smaller venue than Lincoln.

Even though Lincoln have enjoyed gates approaching its capacity of just over 10,000 since their return to the Football League, whether this would be enough to sustain them should they reach the Championship is questionable as even this figure might not help support the wages of the players they would need just to compete at that level. To this, Yeovil Town serve as another cautionary tale. Having reached the dizzy heights of the Championship during the 2013/14 campaign, Yeovil find themselves back in the National League for the 2019/20 campaign.

It is with this in mind that I felt some level of concern at Mark Palios’s remarks when he announced Rovers’ selling of a minority shareholding to the Santini group and Rovers’ aim ‘to aspire to a sustainable life in the Championship’. Given the financial pitfalls in that particular league, with their significantly higher TV revenues compared to Leagues One and Two, unless you have an average five-figure gate there is little chance of operating on a self-sufficient basis. As it is, Rovers are only likely to get above 10,000 at Prenton Park when Sunderland’s humongous travelling support come to town this season.

Another twist is that Huddersfield may still have their work cut out staying in the Championship in spite of their recruiting the most promising management team in the EFL. If Lincoln get someone who can carry on where the Cowley brothers left off, no one can rule out the possibility that Huddersfield and Lincoln will pass each other at the end of this season. Yet Huddersfield, with the absurd bounty they received from their two years in the Premier League and a decent venue, would still be a step up in the current climate.

This is a long way away from Graham Taylor’s odyssey at Watford, where he took them from the Fourth Division to Europe in five seasons. Nigel Blackwell (ever perceptive at the changing trends of the game) sang as early as 1995 that ‘Trouble is these days you never see a dog on the pitch’ in Half Man Half Biscuit’s Even Men with Steel Hearts. The way things are now financially, there are no underdogs on the pitch when it comes to league football, and this denies the opportunity to the likes of the Cowley brothers to create a true footballing legacy comparable to Taylor. Do I not like that.

--

--