Squinting into the afternoon sunshine, you could just make out the match ball as it sailed into the heavens over Rotherhithe before crashing, unceremoniously, into the bank of foliage flanking St Paul’s Stadium. A portion of the roughly 250 supporters, there to watch Fisher FC in its first home league game of the season, erupted into an ironic cheer. “Well, there goes another one,” quipped one fan, leaning over the railing around the artificial pitch, decked out in his team’s colours of black and white. “I heard TFL’s put out a safety warning for the 381,” replies another, referring to the bus that passes on the road nearby, his voice raspy, his face obscured by smoke from a Hamlet cigar.

The match against Gillingham’s Hollands & Blair was not yet 10 minutes old, and didn’t seem destined to be a classic. But the Fisher faithful, whose side plays in the Southern Counties East Football League Premier Division — the ninth tier of the English pyramid — had not come to berate the players for the absence of overlapping wing play. They were there to support their club. Over the next 80 minutes, the team’s most vociferous supporters huddled together in the Dockers’ End, a small stand-cum-shelter behind the goal, its name a nod to the local area’s role in London’s once-booming shipping trade. As they watched, they belted out “When the Fish Go Swimming In”, their briny homespun chant.

Fisher ended up beating Hollands & Blair courtesy of a second-half penalty. But I got the sense the fans would have been just as happy, as they walked back up Brunel Road to the Overground, if they’d been hammered 5-0. Nor are they alone. From Mousehole AFC on the Cornish coast to Northumberland’s Blyth Spartans, gaggles of supporters brave summer sweat and winter snow, as well as some truly dreadful football, to cheer on their sides with a pint and a smile. Taken together, in fact, non-league football offers the perfect antidote to the petty tribalism and disenchantment of big-time fandom — and, perhaps, offers a path forward for society after the final whistle blows.

Non-league football is enjoying a moment. Average attendances in the National League South and the Isthmian Premier Division — levels six and seven of the pyramid, where most clubs are semi-professional — stood at 1,221 last season: up 134% from a decade earlier. Fisher, whose average crowds grew 13.9% in 2024-5, registered its highest ever attendance last November ,when 423 supporters filed through the stadium’s single turnstile to see the team take on Faversham Town. The depth of support in Britain’s football league pyramid is also impressive when compared against other similarly football-mad countries. In Spain, to give one example, the average attendance for the top team in the fourth tier of Spanish football is a mere 852.

The most obvious explanation for England’s non-league boom is the growing sense of fan disenfranchisement with elite football: namely the Premier League, where ticket prices continue to skyrocket. Manchester United’s announcement last season that it would increase match-day tickets for members from £40 to £60, and scrap concessions, as part of a cost-cutting exercise by its petrochemical magnate owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe, was met with protests outside Old Trafford. Leeds faced the same backlash after introducing a 14% markup for its lowest-rate adult rates.

The malaise also extends to the lower divisions. In the Championship, to give one example, Middlesbrough has faced criticism after increasing its top season ticket price to over £780. “What’s bred such disillusionment in the professional game is the ripping off of supporters,” Fisher’s secretary Jim Maycock tells me over a cup of tea, as we sit in the team’s empty clubhouse one weekday afternoon. “We’re trying to do the opposite. We just don’t see it as something we should be making money out of. We’re here for people to have somewhere to come and enjoy a game of football with their friends and family.” Fair enough: a Fisher’s season ticket will set you back a mere £100, with match-day admissions for adults capped at £8. Children under 16 get in free.

In truth, though, Fisher’s success rests on more than pounds and pennies. Football, after all, often sells itself on the romantic notion that it’s the game of the people: that the clubs would be nothing without their fans. And if that sentiment feels less-and-less relevant at the top, at Fisher it’s literally the case. Formed as a phoenix club out of the ruins of Fisher Athletic — a small team that bobbed about in the minnow leagues for several decades, before going bust in 2009 — it operates as a supporter-run cooperative. Members have a direct vote on who makes up the club’s board, which is responsible for everything from appointing the manager to picking the kit. In fact, Fisher is one of several fan-run clubs operating further down the footballing pyramid. Some were formed in protest at the unscrupulous dealings of their owners, such as FC United of Manchester, which appeared in 2005 following Manchester United’s takeover by the much-loathed Glazers. Others are minority supporter-owned, where fans collectively own a slice of the team’s shares through a fund or trust.

That sense of local ownership is a far cry from the creeping ugliness found elsewhere in the beautiful game: from the endless corporate sponsors to the sight of children in kits emblazoned with the names of shady betting firms and state-owned Middle Eastern airlines. Then there are those soulless converted retail parks and parking lots that increasingly pass for modern stadia. “The quality of elite football is probably higher than it was, say, 30 years ago,” says Neil Fredrik Jensen, a football analyst and author, “but the game has never felt less attractive because it’s so corporatised and polarised.” Fans, Jensen adds, are just “customers” now.

“Local ownership is a far cry from the creeping ugliness found elsewhere in the beautiful game”

Spend an afternoon at Fisher’s and corporate sterility feels a long way off. In the clubhouse, a melange of regulars mingles with groundhoppers clutching matchday programmes and pin badges for their collections. During my visit, the bar was doing a roaring trade in beer from a local brewery, and milky cups of tea. At half-time, a makeshift hospitality area was assembled for dignitaries from Hollands & Blair, who stood chatting around a small table piled high with coronation chicken sandwiches and Jammie Dodgers.

All the while, the steel and glass monoliths of Canary Wharf loomed large across the Thames, sparkling like polished diamonds in the sun. From Rotherhithe’s bend of the river, Britain’s financial heartland feels almost close enough to touch. Yet amid the no-frills surroundings of the Dockers’ End, it might as well have been an image beamed in from some distant universe. Beyond the bar-room banter, indeed, non-league football offers authenticity on the pitch as well. Unlike at the big stadiums, you can hear the thwack of the ball, and the crunching tackles, and the corner flags fluttering in the wind.

Free from the clutches of international television networks — which dictate that Premier League weekend games must take place either just after midday or late in the evening — the traditional 3pm kick-offs are also still upheld on Saturday afternoons. “That’s a huge thing that’s worked in our favour,” Maycock explains. “There’s none of these 8pm kick-offs where you end up getting home at midnight. Fans can come and watch us play knowing they can be back home for tea and Strictly or whatever.”

That sense of gentility — of integrating sport into the normal rhythms of life — is arguably also encouraged by the comparatively low stakes. The furious tribalism rife in higher levels of the English game, often not relevant to any real historical enmity between clubs, but a confection borne out of Sky Sports’ marketing departments, is rare at the non-league level. That conviviality makes it appealing to young families, much like women’s football has seen an influx of supporters grateful for an alternative to the toxicity that often accompanies male fixtures. “Non-league crowds have definitely changed,” says Jensen. “There was a time when they were almost entirely made up of men in their 50s with a passion for real ale and trains. Now, it’s much more about families.”

There are other reasons to watch too, for watching non-league football can sometimes be a portal to the bizarre. Where else would you find matches postponed as a result of sheep invasions and Canadian Geese droppings? Where else might an unsuspecting fan be prevailed upon to undertake linesman duties because the official went missing, as one Fisher fan was obliged to do a couple of seasons back?

Not that this amateurishness should take away from the sheer effort that goes into running the clubs and making the match days happen, often solely dependent on volunteers. When I meet Maycock, he had just spent the morning mending a fence and descaling the showers. “It can be hard work,” agrees Richard Davies, treasurer of Welsh semi-pro side Taff’s Well FC, and who also happens to be my brother. “And it’s not just match days. It’s marking out the pitches, cutting the grass, stocking the bar, washing kits. But we all chip because it’s for the good of the club. There are still those working-class values that you don’t see at the big clubs anymore.”

Of course, non-league football is not always a bastion of bliss. Jensen recently witnessed racist abuse while watching his beloved Hitchin Town. Concerns have also been raised over whether some of the jerry-built grounds, however charming they may seem, are truly fit for purpose. In September, one player died after colliding head-first with a concrete wall bordering the pitch at Wingate & Finchley.

But such tragedies are rare. And besides, what non-league football ultimately offers, above all else, is that illusive sense of connection, whether with one’s fellow fans or indeed with the players themselves. Fisher’s players, Maycock tells me, can often be found in the clubhouse after home matches mingling with supporters over pizza. “Even the referee,” he adds, “will come in for a slice.” Instagram may have made Premier League players appear more accessible than ever, but your chances of sharing a Capricciosa with Erling Haaland remain slim.

Yet if non-league attendances are on the rise, Premier League fans continue to display an impressive following. For all the grousing over being exploited, the waiting lists for season tickets remain long. Despite the team’s ongoing problems on the pitch, the current queue for season tickets at Manchester United exceeds 120,000: with some fans set to wait 25 years for their slot. Average shirt prices across the league’s 20 teams last season crept up to £73, meanwhile, but that proved no deterrent to merchandise-hungry fans, with Liverpool generating $1.8 billion in kit sales alone.

We are unlikely, then, to see minnows like Fisher entirely supplant the bigger clubs in fans’ affections. Maycock still holds a candle for Brentford from his native West London. My brother’s first love remains Cardiff City. And while Wrexham’s ascendancy from non-league obscurity to the Championship, under the celebrity ownership of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, may have captured imaginations and gained it an international fanbase, it’s worth remembering that the North Wales club has an established history dating back to the 1860s. Its stadium, the Racecourse Ground, is among the oldest on Earth. Wrexham’s status as a “sleeping giant” therefore made it ripe for a renaissance of the sort that most non-league teams could only dream of. Not that the minnows really care: they’re just happy to exist, sustained by peak attendances and the hope, some day, of a televised run in the early rounds of the FA Cup.

All this is also a reminder of Terry Eagleton’s tart assessment of football as the “crack cocaine” of the masses, which he speculated was part of a capitalist plot to suppress appetite for political change. That bread-and-circuses theory might raise some eyebrows, but the fact remains that the sport holds enormous sway over people in Britain in a way other pastimes don’t. When cricket moved from terrestrial television to Sky in 2006, it lost its place in the national conversation overnight, as armchair fans weren’t ultimately prepared to pay.

You could never imagine that happening with football, even for tiny teams like Fisher FC. My most recent visit was for a cup game against Bridon Ropes from Greenwich. It was an early September evening, Canary Wharf now twinkling bright against the dusk. As Fisher eased to a 4-0 win, I noticed a bear of a man in a tracksuit, cooing at a baby and with a side-eye on the game. It was Fisher’s manager Ajay Ashanike. He briefly paused to bark some instructions into a mobile phone to his assistant in the dugout across the pitch — “tell them not to get complacent and take pride in a clean sheet, yeah?” — before returning to the more pressing duty of peekaboo.

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Ross Davies is a journalist and writer based in London. His work has previously featured in the* Financial Times*, Guardian, New Statesman and Los Angeles Times.

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