For the first time in 65 years, Lincoln City will play in the second tier of English football next season — a success achieved despite starting their 2025-26 campaign with the seventh-lowest budget among the 24 clubs in League One.
Lincoln’s 2-1 win over Reading on Monday secured promotion to the Championship with five games to spare, while also continuing an unbeaten run that now stands at 23 matches, in which they have won 18 games.
This moved them 19 points clear of third-placed Bradford City with five games still to play in the race to be one of the two teams going up automatically from League One.
Attention now turns to securing the title, with Lincoln 12 points ahead of closest challengers Cardiff City, having played a game more.
Lincoln are one of many English clubs to have received American investment, with Ron Fowler, a former co-owner of Major League Baseball’s San Diego Padres, now having the largest stake in the club. His compatriot Harvey Jabara is also a key investor, and the USMNT’s joint record goalscorer Landon Donovan is also on board as an investor and strategic advisor. South African former hedge fund manager Clive Nates has been involved since 2016, when the club were playing non-League football in the fifth tier of the English game, and he is the third largest shareholder.
Donovan describes Lincoln, located in the East Midlands of England, a three-hour drive north from London, as a “really sweet, charming town”.
“Small, understated; not the bright lights and the flashy of some other things,” says Donovan, who visits once or twice per season. “I love the people. It’s not the England most people would know if you’ve been to London or Manchester. It’s countryside. It’s rolling hills. There’s a sweetness to it. A beautiful cathedral in the town. A university city. A lot of young people. It’s been phenomenal to watch this club shape the town in some ways.”
Ron Fowler took a controlling stake in Lincoln City in December 2025 (Chris Vaughan Photography/Lincoln City FC)
Lincoln’s rise has been a shrewd and humble story.
They have the highest number of points, the most goals scored, and the fewest conceded in League One this season, and have done it all on a budget of around £5million ($6.6m). Jez George, the sporting director, tells The Athletic that the top budgets in the third tier are over £14million to £15m. He says getting into the play-off positions (the clubs finishing between third and sixth) should require spending £9m to £10m.
The squad’s highest-paid player is on £3,500 a week in a division where George says some are on “north of £10,000 per week” and where Lincoln see “the monster clubs” — Wrexham and Birmingham City were both promoted to the Championship following major spending last season — getting further away “in terms of sheer finance”.
The gap between Lincoln’s highest and lowest paid players is “very small”, George says, making for a strong collective. There is no individual star in the team. Despite being League One’s top scorers collectively, no Lincoln player is into double figures for league goals this season — “Just a bunch of people who have contributed throughout,” Donovan says. “That was the story in the best teams I played in, too.”
The wage structure requires discipline. When Lincoln were promoted back to the third tier in 2019, they had players on their books being paid more than their current highest earners. Now, George says, they target a mix of “really good senior players who have the ambition and hunger to have one more success”, but also operate a “trading model where the reason for coming to Lincoln isn’t to get paid the most money”.
Instead, he says, it is “to be in a really good environment where you can develop and know that the club will help you move on”.
In the past three years, Lincoln have sold over £3million worth of playing talent, with significant fees coming from Championship teams.
A data-led approach to recruitment — backed up by video analysis and character assessments — has identified calculated risks in the market.
These include forward Jack Moylan, who was playing in the League of Ireland; Ben House, a striker signed from non-League Eastleigh Town; and goalkeeper George Wickens, a former academy prospect at Premier League side Fulham, who arrived on a free transfer in the summer of 2024 having previously only played professional games during loan spells at Wealdstone in the fifth-tier National League and Ross County in Scotland’s top-flight Premiership. Looking further afield, Ukrainian midfielder Ivan Varfolomeev was bought from Czech side Slovan Liberec last August for £400,000.
George says Lincoln buy data from analysis company Impect, assessing talent across eight to 10 European leagues, while more often using eyes and ears for the domestic market.
Varfolomeev, Lincoln’s record signing, was flagged up by the club’s data scientists — “one writes Python (a programming language), he writes code… some really clever stuff, based on algorithms, which identifies our player profile for every position”. If they are interested after studying the statistics, Lincoln will then scout a player live and meet them in person to try to gauge whether he can flourish in the environment they’d be walking into.
Lincoln last played in the second tier of English football in the 1960-61 season (Chris Vaughan/Getty Images)
It helps the recruitment team that Lincoln have a defined style.
Under Michael Skubala, formerly a coach of England’s futsal team and Leeds United’s under-21s side, Lincoln have the lowest average possession rate in League One. Twenty-six of their 77 goals have been from set pieces, after they scored 30 of 64 goals last season from corners and free kicks when finishing 11th. Their research says that teams score from one in 33 corner kicks, but in that 2024-25 campaign, they found the net at a rate of one in every 16. Defender Tom Hamer’s long throws also pose a threat.
The dead-ball work is methodical and painstaking, leading to a record so impressive that Scottish title chasers Rangers hired away their set-piece coach Scott Fry in November. The trend has continued without him. George says Lincoln’s model, similar to those of Brighton & Hove Albion or Brentford at Premier League level, is to always prepare for the next hire. “We are really clear that the structure of the club beats every individual,” he says.
Skubala, 43, has a contract running for several more seasons after a thorough hiring process that involved five separate meetings. George says he keeps a database of future potential hires for every role, regularly meeting those who may be on his radar in the future, including three coaches over the past month alone.
“That’s what good clubs do,” Donovan says. “Brentford — it does not matter who leaves, they still succeed. (Manchester) United is still struggling from Fergie (legendary manager Sir Alex Ferguson) leaving (in 2013) because he was everything to that club. Clubs are realising we need to have all the proper systems and infrastructure, so if a player leaves or a coach leaves, we can continue being successful.”
As for the set-piece record, it has been a deliberate effort. Are Lincoln the Arsenal of League One? “Arsenal are the Lincoln City of the Premier League!” Donovan laughs.
Landon Donovan, left, and Lincoln’s sporting director, Jez George (Chris Vaughan Photography/Lincoln City FC)
The club employ methods new and old.
A lot of time is spent both on the training ground and in the meeting room. The team’s bonus structure weighs heavily on set pieces, incentivising players to practise even harder.
Lincoln spent £10,000 to access data from Insight Sport, a soccer technology business that has since been bought and taken in-house by the Friedkin Group, who own Premier League Everton and Roma of Italy’s Serie A top flight. George describes it as an AI-based tool that analyses millions of previously taken set pieces, which helps to devise fresh patterns and identify flaws in their opponents’ defensive setups, while goalkeeping coach David Preece also works on routines.
“We’ve got to create a unit that is better than the individual sum of its parts,” George says, explaining their approach.
“Then we think about what the game model needs to look like. We don’t like putting the ball at risk in our defensive third because we don’t think there’s much value in that when set against the risk. We like pressing high, because other teams put the ball at risk (at the back) and we can get reward from that.
“We are looking for the small margins that make a big difference in a low-scoring sport, where the first goal is crucial. We have scored the first goal in 75 to 80 per cent of our games. We’ve led for 52 per cent of the minutes, which is 20 per cent more than the next-best team. We’ve been behind for eight per cent of the minutes, which is crazy. (George was speaking before last Friday’s 1-0 home win against Wimbledon.)
“The set pieces also make a massive difference to how teams play against Lincoln. We see a pattern of teams maybe making different selections, changing their shape, changing their personnel, trying to get as big as possible, and they start to play the game on our terms a little bit rather than what they’re best at.”
A revamped £1.3million training complex has also helped — a dividend from Lincoln’s memorable FA Cup run as a National League side in the 2016-17 season, when they beat Ipswich Town, Brighton (Championship sides at the time), and Burnley (who were in the Premier League) en route to a quarter-final against eventual winners Arsenal.
“No article would be right without highlighting the work of Danny and Nicky Cowley, the coaches at the start of this journey,” George says. “They galvanised a club in a city that was languishing in the bottom half of the National League. They made an FA Cup run and got the club promoted back into the Football League, which is the hardest promotion, because to guarantee promotion, you have to win it (only one club goes up automatically).”
Promotion this time, lifting Lincoln into the Championship, brings fresh challenges. Even as a modestly run club in League One, Lincoln still lost around £3million in the 2023-24 season. Many across their division lost far more. George says: “A CEO at a club I really respect recently said to me, ‘When did it change from, ‘How do we not lose money?’, to, ‘How do we find an owner that funds losses?’.”
Once again, Lincoln will need to act smarter than their rivals, many of whom operate on far greater revenues, when the new season starts in August. “It’s not about going up,” Donovan says. “It is about staying up.”
“We can’t have a personality transplant,” George says. “We can’t throw away what has served us well so far. The challenge of doing that in the league above is going to be far greater.
“This club has not been promoted to the second tier of football in England since 1952. We’ve done it against all odds.
“The principles will stay. If the club has got stability, good governance, if we are collaborative in our approach, if we make good decisions at the point of most knowledge, if the recruitment, sports science and medical teams align on our strategy, if we invest in people, if we back people, if we create a good environment and a good culture — we believe we can out-achieve our budget.”
