The Reds Fans — Redditch United fixtures, results and the table

Redditch Town, 1891

Redditch United is one of the older surviving clubs in English non-league football. It was founded in 1891 as Redditch Town, in a town whose needle and fishing-tackle works had drawn in enough workers to sustain organised sport, and it has been playing under essentially the same arrangement ever since. The name has changed twice and the league has changed many more times than that, but the club has never folded and never restarted.

Redditch Town joined the Birmingham & District Junior League, a competition for clubs in Birmingham and the surrounding region that ran from 1892 until 1954 and served as a feeder to the senior Birmingham & District League. The first season was 1893/94, and it went well. Redditch Town won their opening home game 4–1 against Singers FC, a works side from Coventry that would later change its name to Coventry City.

The same season produced the club’s first trophy, and it came quickly. The Worcestershire Senior Cup was established in the year of the club’s league debut and is still played today; in 1894 Redditch Town became its first winners. Few clubs have a first season worth more than that.

The same year also brought a withdrawal from a qualifying tie against Hednesford, which reads oddly now but was ordinary then. Clubs at this level regularly pulled out of a competition when the money ran short, when a side could not be raised, or when a more important fixture clashed. It is a useful reminder that the fixture lists of the 1890s were provisional in a way modern ones are not.

In 1897 the club dropped the Town and became plain Redditch. In the same year it chose to stay in its local league rather than move up, a decision that says something about how clubs of that size weighed prestige against the cost of travel. By 1908 the Birmingham & District Junior League had grown enough to rename itself the Birmingham Combination, and Redditch went with it into the new competition.

The nickname has been constant throughout. Redditch have been the Reds since the Town years, and the town itself supplied the crowds: by the 1890s Redditch made the majority of the world’s needles and a great deal of its fishing tackle, and the works were large enough that a Saturday afternoon side could count on a gate. The club’s early competition was almost entirely local, which kept it viable when the travel costs of a senior league would not have been.

Cup ties, titles and two wars

Redditch played its first FA Cup tie in 1910 and lost 6–0 to Willenhall Pickwick, a league rival. The following season brought a measure of revenge and then a heavier defeat: a 1–0 win over Willenhall Swifts, a different club from Pickwick although the two later merged, followed by an 8–0 loss to Cradley Heath St Luke’s that remains the club’s worst result in the competition.

The first league title arrived in 1913/14, when Redditch won the Birmingham Combination for the first time. It was immediately followed by the longest interruption in the club’s history. The First World War broke out in 1914 and organised competition stopped; there was no league football to speak of until 1919.

The 1920s passed without much to record. The 1930s were the next good spell. The Worcestershire Senior Cup came back to Redditch in 1930, and the Birmingham Combination was won for a second time the following season. Then the pattern repeated: no competitive football in England between 1939 and 1945.

In 1953 Redditch won the Birmingham Combination for a third and final time. Final, because within a year the competition itself would no longer exist.

New league, new successes

The Birmingham Combination had long outgrown the feeder role it was created for. Through the 1930s and 1940s it was widely rated the strongest competition in the region, ahead of the senior Birmingham & District League it was supposed to feed, and in 1952 the senior league proposed a merger. The Combination rejected it. Clubs then began leaving for the senior league anyway, which forced the Combination to reconsider; by the time it did, the Birmingham & District League had lost interest and rejected the merger in turn.

With a single club left in 1954 the Birmingham Combination effectively ceased to exist and was absorbed. The enlarged Birmingham & District League now had forty members and split into Northern and Southern divisions. Redditch was placed in the Southern division and won it at the first attempt, taking the Southern Division championship in 1954/55.

That was the last league title the club has won. The competition then restructured repeatedly — dividing by performance rather than geography, reverting to a single division, splitting again into two and then three — and Redditch spent the next fifteen years inside those rearrangements without adding to the honours list.

Redditch United and the Southern League

In 1971 the club took the name it still carries, Redditch United, and in the same year reached the first round proper of the FA Cup for the first time in eighty years of trying. The tie was at home to Peterborough United of the Football League and it finished 1–1 in front of a crowd of 4,500, which is by some distance the club’s best-known afternoon. The replay at London Road was lost 6–0, which is roughly what the difference in division suggested once the tie was out of Redditch. Both halves of that are worth keeping: the draw is the achievement, and the replay is what the gap actually looked like.

From 1972/73 the club played in the Southern League, in Division One North. As after previous moves, it started well: the Worcestershire Senior Cup was won for a third time in 1975 and retained in 1976, the only time the club has won it in consecutive seasons.

The 1975/76 season is the one older supporters still talk about. Division One North was won with more than a hundred goals scored, and Redditch went up to the Southern League Premier Division. The Birmingham Senior Cup followed in 1977.

What happened next placed a small Worcestershire club in the middle of a national reorganisation. The Southern League and the Northern Premier League both fed into the Football League, but without automatic promotion: Football League membership was decided by re-election, and too many clubs were applying. Alan Hardaker, then secretary of the Football League, pressed for the two strongest non-league competitions to combine and reduce the field. The leagues chose not to merge but to build a new competition above themselves, and in 1979 the Alliance Premier League was founded with thirteen clubs from the Southern League and seven from the Northern Premier. Redditch United was one of the twenty founder members. That competition is now the National League.

The club did not stay long. Against founder members of the size of Barnet and Yeovil Town it finished last and was relegated after the 1979/80 season into the Southern League Midland Division. A second-place finish in the Midland Division in 1985/86 brought a return to the Premier Division, which lasted until relegation in 1989. The season after that relegation the club reached the FA Cup first round again and lost 3–1 to Merthyr Tydfil, then of the Football Conference, in front of 2,000.

The 1990s produced no trophies at first but one genuine oddity. In 1997 Redditch played nine matches in nine days. No English club plans that and this one did not choose it: a backlog of postponements had built up through a wet winter, the Valley pitch could not clear it, and once the ground was playable the fixtures had to go somewhere. Nine of them went into a single week. It is the kind of run that only happens at a level where the fixture list is settled by weather and pitch inspections rather than by television, and it is the single most-repeated fact about the club outside its honours. The Staffordshire Senior Cup had come in 1991, and the Worcester Royal Infirmary Cup was won in 1999.

The new millennium

When the Southern League redrew its regional divisions for 1999/2000, Redditch United moved from the Midland Division into Division One West. The first seasons there were hard. Then came 2003/04, the most successful season in the club’s history: the division was won, and rather than take the place in the Southern League Premier Division that came with it, the club was offered a route into the newly created Conference North. Two play-off matches were won and Redditch United went up to the sixth tier of English football, the highest level it has reached. The manager was Rod Brown.

The club spent seven seasons at that level, from 2004 to 2011, which is the longest continuous spell it has had in the top six tiers. League form was often difficult and the club finished in the lower half more often than not, but the cups kept coming: the Birmingham Senior Cup for a fifth time in 2005 and the Worcestershire Senior Cup for a fifth time in 2008. Sustaining a sixth-tier budget on a Worcestershire town’s gates proved to be the harder problem, and after three progressively worse seasons Redditch was relegated to the Southern League Premier Division in 2011. The archive holds the club’s own account of the months that followed: a squad rebuilt in four weeks that October, and a match abandoned after the referee was struck a fortnight earlier.

The Worcestershire Senior Cup returned in 2014, a sixth win in the competition the club had won first, and the summer of 2015 brought a former favourite back to the Valley. In 2015/16 Redditch finished second in the Premier Division and reached the promotion play-offs, losing to Leamington on penalties — the closest the club has come to returning to the sixth tier.

The FA Trophy of 2010/11 produced the strangest progression in the club’s record. Redditch were drawn against Ilkeston Town in the third qualifying round, and Ilkeston folded before the tie could be played. The club went through to the first round proper without kicking a ball — a bye earned by nothing more than an opponent ceasing to exist, and the sort of entry that turns up in a competition’s history far more often than a neat scoreline.

The Southern League restructured again for 2018/19 and placed the club in the Premier Division Central, where it plays now. Counted from the Alliance Premier League of 1979, that is two tiers below the club’s highest level, and one below the Conference North side of 2004 to 2011. Counted from 1891 it is the same club, in the same town, on the same road.

The club now

Redditch United plays at the Valley Stadium on Bromsgrove Road, on a 3G surface laid in 2016 as part of a £900,000 redevelopment that also rebuilt the changing facilities. The Football Association and the Football Foundation contributed grant funding to the pitch. Before it was installed the ground had a long-standing reputation for not draining, which is what put nine games into nine days in 1997.

The first team competes in the Southern League Premier Division Central, at the seventh tier of English football. Alongside it the ground now carries the training and international match days of England Walking Football Community, on an artificial surface that is in use most days of the week, which is a different kind of number from a league position and probably the more important one.

A women’s side plays under the same name in the West Midlands regional league system, and its results and squad are covered separately on this site. The two teams share the ground, which is not universal at this level and is worth saying plainly. On a normal week the Valley is in use far more often than the first-team fixture list suggests.

As this page was last built, Redditch United sat 13th of 22 in the Premier Division Central on 17 points from 12 matches, with 4 won, 5 drawn and 3 lost, 19 scored and 17 conceded. The table above is rebuilt every day, so that sentence changes with it.

Seven divisions have carried Redditch since 1891 — the Birmingham & District Junior League, the Birmingham Combination, the Birmingham & District League, the Southern League in four of its arrangements, and the Alliance Premier League for a single season. Three league titles, six Worcestershire Senior Cups, five Birmingham Senior Cups, one Staffordshire Senior Cup and one Worcester Royal Infirmary Cup sit against that. The honours are set out in full below, and the current table is at the top of this page.