The 61 FC, consistently finishing at the bottom of their league, is a testament to the enduring love for the sport. Their story highlights the challenges faced by clubs at the lower tiers of English football, where financial constraints and lack of facilities often outweigh talent.
The 61 FC, quite possibly the worst team in the country, is a story of survival, unfair relegations and an undying love for the game. The 61 FC are a football club living on the edge of the English system that refuses to die.
\Next to the pool table in the compact and, in its own little way, cosy clubhouse of the 61 FC hangs a framed “There’s a story behind that,” Richard Everitt, one of the club’s founders and six decades later still club secretary, recalls from behind the bar where he is fixing a cup of tea. “It covers where burglars tried to get in through the wall.” They attempted to smash through the wall? “Oh yeah,” he adds, walking around the pool table. “And over there.” He points to a spot where a patch of bricks look newer than the rest and four pins hold a metal plate outside. “And there.” He points to a crack in the ceiling. “They tried to come in through the roof one time.”\ I have come to this tiny alcove of Luton, just off the A505, to find out what it’s like being a club at the bottom, why people stick with it and how they keep going. During an illuminating hour, Everitt tells a harsh story of survival, unfair relegations, the strange football purgatory many clubs in the seventh tier of the pyramid are stuck in, unable to be relegated yet without the requisite facilities for promotion. He recalls the astonishing tale of a match abandoned due to a murder, the hard times and the good, and describes the love, underpinning it all, of a football club living on the edge of the English system that refuses to let it die. Richard Everitt, one of the the 61 FC’s founders, is still involved at the club six decades later. \You’d struggle to get more bottom than the 61 FC. This season, they have lost 15 of 15 games, conceded 107 times, scored nine. Their heaviest defeat is 12-0. Two seasons ago, they finished bottom conceding 181 goals in 32 games – almost six goals per game – with two wins and a draw all season and a goal difference of -164. Last season saw a relative improvement – conceding only 84 goals. They still finished bottom. “It’s tough, but in a funny sort of way you build up a camaraderie about it,” Everitt says. “Oh, we’ve been beaten 12-0, we go in the bar afterwards, we have some food and a laugh and a joke with the other team. What more can you do? You can’t cry.” They have finished bottom in six of the last seven seasons (they finished second bottom in the other one) in a kind of reverse. All played out in the Second Division of the Spartan South Midlands Football League, because it is impossible to be relegated. “There’s nowhere to go,” Everitt says. “Why do we carry on? Well, other clubs haven’t. You go back 10 years within a mile of here were three other clubs in the pyramid – Brache Sparta, Luton Old Boys and Kent Athletic – they’ve all gone. Because they haven’t got an old man like me saying, ‘No, we’re going to keep doing it’.”\A frustration for Everitt is that the club’s position is not entirely of their own making. It wasn’t so long ago they competed in the fifth block of the pyramid, until the“We got to the South Midlands Premier Division,” Everitt explains. “We won the County Cup in ‘84. We had a really good period. In the ‘90s the FA brought in the ground grading rules. We finished seventh in the Premier and got relegated because we hadn’t got the facilities.” They tried to comply, raising money for floodlights and getting permission from the council, who own the pitch, to install them. “The following season not only do you need floodlights, the ground has to be enclosed and you have to be able to take money from a gate. We couldn’t do it. It’s a public park. “So we’re down from One to Two. Not because we weren’t any good but because the FA deemed the pyramid should be based on the facilities not ability. “When a footballer comes here on a Saturday afternoon they’ve got decent changing rooms, good kit, they come into the bar afterwards, we cook good food, we look after them well – what more do you want?” Many other clubs like the 61 FC are now essentially trapped at the bottom of the pyramid. Old Bradwell United finished top in four successive seasons but were blocked from the league above. “In our league table there are only about three teams who can go up. That’s a huge problem with the pyramid,” Everitt says. “The FA have created this, but they don’t really look down at our level. They’re not interested in it.”Old Bradwell, he points out, are starting to fade away after finishing in the top two for eight seasons. Being unable to offer promotion is a hard sell to potential players and turnover is high. Last summer for the 61 FC was particularly bad. Preseason training and friendlies had been prepared when the manager called Everitt to say after 18 months he was leaving to take an assistant manager job higher up the leagues
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