Bury FC: expelled after 125 years, and the climb back

In May 2019 Bury celebrated a promotion. By August 2019 they were no longer a Football League club. Ninety-two days passed between the two, and a hundred and twenty-five years went with them.

The promotion that was never played

The 2018/19 season was a genuinely good one: second in League Two on 79 points, twenty-two wins, thirteen draws and eleven defeats, with 82 goals scored. They went up behind Lincoln and ahead, on the tiebreak, of an MK Dons side who had also finished on 79.

That team never played a competitive match in the division it had won. The EFL suspended their opening fixtures of 2019/20 one by one while it waited for proof the club could meet its debts, and at five o'clock on 27 August 2019 the final deadline passed without it. The league withdrew Bury's membership.

They were the first club expelled from the Football League since Maidstone United in 1992. Bury had been elected in 1894 and had been there ever since: a hundred and twenty-five unbroken years.

A club for one pound

The trigger had a name. In December 2018, Steve Dale bought the club for a pound. Over the following summer a sale to C&B Sporting Risk collapsed, and a late alternative bid also failed. Dale later tried to have the expulsion overturned; the league replied that no right of appeal existed.

It stings more when you remember what that badge had been. Bury won the FA Cup twice, beating Southampton 4-0 in 1900 and Derby County 6-0 in 1903. That 6-0 is still the biggest winning margin in an FA Cup final: Manchester City matched it against Watford in 2019 but did not beat it. And Gigg Lane had been home since 1885.

What the supporters did

The answer began almost as soon as the expulsion was signed. Supporters set up a new, member-owned club, Bury AFC, formally constituted in April 2020. The authorities placed it in the tenth tier of English football, and it played its first match on 3 October 2020 against Steeton, ground-sharing with Radcliffe because Gigg Lane was not theirs.

The aim, though, was never to build a second club: it was to get the original one back. A first vote to merge the two entities, in late 2022, fell short of the required threshold. The second, in May 2023, passed with more than 97% in favour. The club took back its name — Bury Football Club, nothing appended — and returned to Gigg Lane from the 2023/24 season.

Four promotions from the bottom

What a small town loses when its club disappears is not just a line in a table. Gigg Lane had stood since 1885 and was one of the oldest continuously used grounds in English football, holding around twelve thousand in a town of a little over seventy thousand people. For almost four years it sat closed, with no football, while ownership of the site remained tangled in the courts.

Buying the ground back took public money: Bury Council contributed to a deal of roughly £1.3m that returned the stadium to community hands. That detail explains why the 2023 merger was not merely a sentimental formality — without the ground there was no club to recover.

Bury have been climbing ever since. They won the North West Counties Premier Division in 2024/25 and then the Northern Premier League Division One West in 2025/26, sealing the title on 25 April 2026. For 2026/27 they play in the Northern Premier League Premier Division, the seventh tier of English football.

That still leaves them four rungs below the Football League they were thrown out of, which sounds like a lot or a little depending on how you look at it. In August 2019 the club had no division, no ground of its own, and not even the right to use its name in competition. It now has all three.

"Bury were sold for a pound and expelled from a division they had just won on the pitch. It took their supporters four years to get the name and the ground back."

It is the story that recurs most often in the lower reaches of English football, with wildly different endings: a club more than a century old, an ownership that goes wrong, and a support that decides the club does not end because a courtroom says so. Some of those clubs never come back at all. Others reappear four divisions down, playing in front of a few hundred people, and spend a decade climbing. Bury are somewhere in the middle of that second story, and the part that matters is that there is still a story to tell.

• 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 the favourites actually go up.

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