Elsewhere on this site, you can read about the largest places around England that haven’t yet had a Premier League side play football from them. The flip side of that conversation, of course, is a look at the smallest towns and cities around the country that have been graced by English top-flight football at one point or another.
It is, in many ways, proof that it isn’t always about the size of the area that a team is from that matters, but rather the ability of the club to attract players and the willingness of those players to push themselves enough to be able to make it all the way to the top.
Burnley ~78,000
Mention the name of Burnley Football Club to most people who have watched Premier League football over the years and the ideas that will be conjured up will not be overly complimentary. Thanks to the influence of Sean Dyche on the Lancashire club, many think of the Clarets as being an industrial side who opted for big centre-backs, long balls forward and dirty tricks whenever necessary. Of course, given the fact that the club comes from a town that has a population of around 80,000 people, it is hardly surprising that they’ve had to do what was needed to survive.
And survive they did. Although the club played top-flight football back during the sport’s more formative years, as well as being a stalwart of the First Division during the 1960s, their relegation out of it in 1979 was followed by decades in the wilderness, not returning until a brief spell in the 1990s and then early in the early 2000s. Having gained promotion in 2014, they went straight back down, but when they returned in 2016 it saw their longest spell in the top-flight since the end of the 1960s. Not bad for a town with a population lower than the Wembley Stadium capacity.
Barnsley ~71,000
Barnsley Football Club is one of the oldest teams in the country, having been formed in 1887. Back then, the club was just a local side, slowly looking to make its way up through the ranks but without ever really having ambitions of challenging at the top of the English game. Even making it into the Second Division was seen as an achievement, so when the club made it into the First Division in 1992, it seemed as though things could barely get any better. That was when the Premier League had been formed, meaning that the First Division was actually the second tier of the sport in England.
The club was on something of an upward trajectory, however, finally reaching the top-flight ahead of the 1997-1998 campaign. In addition to making it to the quarter-finals of the FA Cup, Barnsley, a club in a town of around 90,000 people at the time, also enjoyed famous wins on the road against Liverpool, Aston Villa and Crystal Palace. Although they won ten games and drew five, that wasn’t enough to keep them up and they missed out on staying in the league by five points, whilst also having a significantly worse goal difference than the team that finished in 17th, Everton.
Wigan Athletic ~107,000
The presence of Wigan in what is generally referred to as Greater Manchester, as well as its proximity to Liverpool, means that the town is often forgotten about as a genuine footballing entity. It certainly doesn’t help that it is better known as somewhere more closely associated with rugby. Yet the Latics have played top-flight football several times over the years, thanks in no small part to the money invested in the club by Chairman Dave Whelan. For a team that began life in the Cheshire County League back in 1932, playing at the top end of the game is some achievement.
It took until 2005 for them to make their way to the top of the English sport, by which time it was known as the Premier League. In spite of Whelan’s investment, it was not thought that Wigan would be able to survive very long, and yet the club defied expectations and remained a Premier League side until the end of the 2012-2013 campaign.
What made that season even more special was that the Latics defeated Manchester City, who at that point had been bought out by the Abu Dhabi United Group as part of the country’s sportswashing operation. A brilliant achievement for a club from a town with a population of around 100,000.
The Others
As you might imagine, the towns and places listed above aren’t the only ones to have seen Premier League football played within them on a regular basis, in spite of the relatively small size of them. There are others that have slightly larger populations and yet are still small enough for it to be relevant to our conversation.
Here is a look at some of them, along with their rough populations:
- Huddersfield Town: Around 140,000
- Blackpool: Around 140,000
- Norwich City: Around 145,000
- Bournemouth: Around 200,000