In year of the underdog, Forest Green Rovers, not Leicester City, is the real fairy tale of English football

Leicester City captain Wes Morgan lifts the Premier League trophy. Michael Regan / Getty Images

This season in English football will go down in history as belonging to the underdog, thanks to the incredible Premier League-winning exploits of Leicester City. But four rungs down the ladder, there's perhaps even more unlikely tale of minnows triumphing against statistical likelihoods.

On Sunday, May 15, Forest Green Rovers will compete in the Vanarama National League promotion play-off final at Wembley Stadium, against either Braintree Town or Grimsby Town, for a place in next season’s League 2.

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They are potentially 90 minutes away from making their home base, the Gloucestershire town of Nailsworth, the smallest settlement by population ever to be represented by an English Football League club.

According to the most recent British census in 2011, Nailsworth’s population is a paltry 5,794. To put that into perspective, the entire town could be seated five-and-a-half times over in Leicester City’s King Power Stadium (capacity: 32,262). Indeed, it’s such a tiny place, all but a few hundred of those people could fit inside Forest Green’s own ground, The New Lawn (capacity: 5,032).

Forest Green finished second in the regular season in the Vanarama National League, after matching the eventual champions (and Gloucestershire rivals) Cheltenham Town for much of the season.

In terms of cold, hard league-table stats, Forest Green should be the overwhelming favourites for the play-offs, heaving finished eight points ahead of Braintree Town, in third.

They completed a two-leg victory over Dover Athletic (Dover’s population: 31,000) on Saturday evening with a 1-1 home draw that secured a 2-1 aggregate scoreline. In a weird quirk of fixture fate and final-day results, the two sides actually met three times in a week – Forest Green’s 1-0 victory at Dover in the last round of regular fixtures consigned the latter to fifth place, the final play-off spot, and a return meeting between the two a few days later. Reaching the promotion play-off final means that Forest Green have already gone one better than last season, when they bowed out at the semi-final stage to the eventual winners, their near-neighbours Bristol Rovers.

That doesn’t tell the whole story, however. What came in the past couple of months was an awful run of league form that saw Forest Green claim only one win since late February, a capitulation that cost the club the chance of automatic promotion and saw their manager, Ady Pennock, fired a week before the play-offs. Pennock lost his way in a uncomfortably public manner that saw him involved in spats with fans, media and even the club’s hierarchy before the axe fell. A permanent replacement is yet to be confirmed, although it seems likely to be the former Notts County manager Mark Cooper, a one-time Forest Green player.

There’s a cautionary tale in all of this, too. The current holders of the “smallest club in the Football League” title is Rushden & Diamonds, perhaps the formative modern-day example of cash-backed non-league club that shot from obscurity to Football League status.

Rushden, from the Northamptonshire town of Irthlingborough (population 8,535), were bankrolled by the man behind the Dr Martens shoe company. But after a short spell in the Football League in the early 2000s, they dropped back into the non-league realms in 2006, and eventually went bust in 2011.

You would hope that rags-to-riches-to-rags tale wouldn’t be repeated by Forest Green, whose ascent has been more gradual. They are backed by their millionaire chairman Dale Vince, who founded the environmentally friendly energy company Ecotricity – green credentials to match the club’s name and shirt colour.

As a Gloucestershire native, on Sunday, at the same time as the Premier League completes its season, I’ll be donning my own Forest Green shirt. I couldn’t call myself a true fan by any means – I’ve attended all of one game at The New Lawn – but from 7,000 kilometres away, I’ll be hoping that the plucky club from Nailsworth can make a tiny bit of football history.

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