Leyton FC’s Unfathomable Past, Unsustainable Present & Uncertain Future
The easy option would be to say that the resignation of Leyton FC from Division One North of the Ryman League brings to an end the story of London’s second-oldest senior football club, but nothing in the history of this particular club has ever been as straightforward as we might expect it to be. The story of this particular club (or the several that have played under its name) is an extraordinary story that has taken in four reformations, a trip to the High Court over a dispute regarding the right to claim the club’s expansive history and a VAT fraud case that imprisoned the club’s chairman. What is not in doubt is that the original Leyton FC was founded in 1868. Crisis of some sort or other seems to have been a recurring theme of the history of the club, with it having been disbanded in the late 1890s, 1911 and 1914, but it was the incarnation that played in the Athenian League from the 1920s on that hit the purple patch in the clubs history, winning the league in 1929 and the FA Amateur Cup in 1927 and 1928. After another briefly successful period in the mid-1960s – they won the Athenian League again in 1966 and 1967 – they merged with the Jewish club Wingate FC, and played as Leyton-Wingate until 1992 before merging again, this...
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