Redditch United Players — the Full First Team Squad for 2026/27

29 Redditch United players have been named on a team sheet in the 18 competitive matches played so far. None has featured in every match.

Szhem Whyte-Hall leads the scoring with 10 of the club's 22, ahead of Tyler Bruck on 3, Joel Shambrook on 1, William Fielding on 2, Robbie Bunn on 1, Harrison Hazard on 2, Alex Cameron on 1, Dan Sweeney on 2. Goal times, penalties and the match each goal came in are on the fixtures and results page.

Robbie Bunn has worn the armband in 8 of the 18 matches. Rory Brown has worn number one.

This is a first team list only. The Redditch United squad numbers below cover no reserve fixtures, because the league publishes team sheets for the first team competition and not for the rest of the club.

Shirt numbers come from the team sheets and can change between matches; where a Redditch United player has appeared under more than one number the first recorded is shown. Positions are not listed, because the league's team sheets record a shirt number and a name rather than a position, and guessing one from the other would be inventing it.

A Southern League squad is not a fixed group of contracted professionals, and reading it as one produces the wrong expectations. Most players at step three are registered on non-contract terms, which means the registration can be cancelled by either side at short notice and the player is free to sign elsewhere. A club can therefore field a settled side for two months and then lose two of it in a fortnight, without anything unusual having happened.

On top of that sit three other kinds of registration. Contracted players, who are the minority and whose registrations are held for a fixed term. Loans from Football League and National League clubs, usually of young players who need senior minutes and who go back the moment their parent club wants them. And dual registration, which lets a player appear for two clubs at different levels in the same season, most often a step-four club and a step-three one.

The practical effect on a page like this one is that the appearance column is the honest measure and the squad list is not. A player can be registered all season and never be named; another can arrive in January and finish with more appearances. Counting from team sheets, as this page does, records what happened rather than what was intended.

Training reflects the same economics. A step-three squad trains two evenings a week, players hold full-time jobs, and travel to an away match on a Tuesday can mean leaving work at three in the afternoon. That is the reason a midweek fixture list matters more here than the same list would in a professional division, and the reason a run of three away games in eight days shows up in results.

Shirt numbers follow from that, not from position. Squad numbers are allocated at registration and reused when a player leaves, so a number does not identify a role and the same number can belong to two players across a season. Where this page shows a number it is the first one recorded on a team sheet for that player.

Six matches into a season the squad list is at its most stable it will be. By November a step-three club has usually lost a loan player back to a parent club, released one or two non-contract players who were not getting minutes, and added someone from a step-four club who has caught the eye. By February the January window has closed and the side that finishes the season can differ from the one that started it by a third.

That is why the appearance column on this page will keep changing shape, not simply growing. A player who leaves in December finishes on eight or nine appearances and stays on the list, because he played them; a player who arrives in January can end the season on twenty. Both belong in a record of who played.

It also explains a pattern that looks odd from outside: the leading scorer at a club like this is often not the leading scorer at the end. Strikers who score at step three attract attention from step two, and a club with no contract on a player has no way to keep him. The counterpart is that the same market works the other way, and a good January signing at this level costs nothing but a registration form.

Two entries in the table carry more weight than an appearance count suggests. The captain column records how many matches a player wore the armband, and at this level that is a useful proxy for who the manager trusts: the armband moves when the regular captain is missing, so a player with it in most matches is a fixture in the side rather than an honorary appointment.

The goalkeeper is the other. Number one is still allocated to a goalkeeper almost universally, including here, and a settled first-choice keeper at step three is worth more to a club than a settled anything else, because the alternative is usually a trialist. Where the appearance count for number one matches the number of matches played, the club has not had to solve that problem this season.

Every squad page on a bigger club's site lists positions, and the absence of them here is deliberate, not an omission. The league publishes a team sheet with a shirt number and a name. It does not publish a formation, a position, or which of the eleven started where, and it does not publish minutes played.

Position could be guessed from the number — one for a goalkeeper, two to five across a back line — but that convention broke down decades ago and squad numbering broke it completely. Inferring that a player wearing eleven is a left winger would be inventing a fact and presenting it as a record, which is worse than leaving the column out.

What can be said honestly from the same data is who plays and who scores, which is what the table above shows. Where the league publishes a goal it also publishes the minute and whether it was a penalty, and those are on the fixtures and results page against the match they belong to.

One number that is worth reading closely is the difference between starts and substitute appearances. A player with six starts has been picked; a player with one start and five substitute appearances is being used differently, and at this level that usually means either a specialist role late in games or a young player being managed carefully. The column separates them rather than folding both into a single appearance figure.

The squad list on this page is read again from the league's own team sheets every day, so it grows as the season does and a player who has not yet been named in a matchday squad does not appear on it at all. That is a different thing from a registered-squad list, which a club submits once and which can carry names who never play. What is shown here is the squad as it has actually been used.

It also means the page is shorter in August than it is in April. Early in a season a dozen names carry the whole appearance record; by the spring the same table usually runs past twenty, because injuries, suspensions, dual registrations and loan spells all widen it. A sudden jump of three or four new names in midwinter is normally a sign of a January window rather than of anything going wrong.