Accrington Stanley, who are they? The whole strange story

There is an English club whose name is, literally, a question. For decades, saying Accrington Stanley in England was the way to refer to a club so small nobody knew who they were. The strange part is that the phrase became famous at a point when the club, as people knew it, had not existed for years.

The mistake almost everybody makes

You will often read that Accrington Stanley were one of the twelve founder members of the Football League in 1888. They were not. The founder was Accrington F.C., nicknamed the Owd Reds, and it was a different club from the same town. It resigned from the league in 1893 rather than accept relegation to the newly created Second Division, and folded in January 1896 after a 12-0 defeat by Darwen.

Accrington Stanley began separately, in 1891, as Stanley Villa — named after the Stanley Arms pub on Stanley Street — and did not enter the Football League until 1921, in the Third Division North. They are two different clubs, and it is worth not mixing them up.

The letter of March 1962

Accrington Stanley's last match as a league club was on 2 March 1962: a 4-0 defeat at Crewe. Four days later, on 6 March, they submitted their resignation from the Football League with thirteen fixtures still to play. The league accepted it on the 11th.

And here is the detail that makes this story unique: because they withdrew mid-season, their record was expunged. The 33 matches they had played — five wins, eight draws, twenty defeats, 18 points — vanished from the tables as though they had never happened.

On the debts, the figures do not agree with each other. The chairman admitted around eight thousand pounds in February; a creditors' meeting uncovered some forty thousand more, and the papers of the failed rescue carry a total of sixty-two thousand. The honest version is that they ran somewhere between forty and sixty thousand pounds, and that the club initially owned up to far less.

They survived a few more years in the Lancashire Combination and folded altogether in 1966.

The advert

In 1989 the Milk Marketing Board released a television advert with two boys in Liverpool shirts. One explains that milk is what Ian Rush drinks, and that without it he would end up "only good enough to play for Accrington Stanley". The other asks: "Accrington Stanley, who are they?" The answer: "Exactly".

Ian Rush does not appear in the advert, he is only mentioned. He has said since that he is better known for that commercial than for being Liverpool's all-time leading scorer.

The punchline of the story is that when the advert aired, the original Accrington Stanley had been dissolved for twenty-three years. The whole country was laughing at a club which, strictly speaking, was not there.

The way back

Except that it was. A group of supporters had refounded the club in October 1968, and from there it climbed the pyramid without hurrying. In 2005/06 it won the Conference National with 91 points and returned to the Football League forty-four years after that letter.

Twelve seasons later came something the club had never achieved in its whole history: in 2017/18 it won League Two with 93 points and went up to the third tier of English football for the first time. It stayed five seasons, with an eleventh place and 67 points in 2020/21 as its best return, before going down in 2022/23.

The return was neither quick nor glamorous. The refounded club started in the regional leagues of north-west England and took almost four decades to climb the rungs between local football and the professional game. There was no foreign owner and no documentary: there were thirty-eight seasons of moving up a step at a time.

Accrington is also one of the smallest towns ever to hold a Football League place, with a population of around thirty-five thousand. Its ground holds roughly five thousand, and through five seasons in League One it hosted clubs whose budgets were several times its own.

In 2026/27 they are back in League Two, which is another way of saying they are still in the Football League sixty-four years after walking out of it by letter. For a club whose name became a national joke about obscurity, outlasting the joke is its own kind of answer.

""Accrington Stanley, who are they?" "Exactly." Today the answer is: a Football League club — which is more than it could say when the advert was filmed."

• Simulate all 46 League Two matchdays and decide who goes up and who goes down.
• Fill in the four-team play-off bracket all the way to Wembley.
• Change any result and watch the table rearrange instantly.
• See how often a small-budget club actually goes up.

"Open the EFL simulator and decide who goes up this season."