Woodside Road holds, at an absolute push, a few thousand people. On the last Saturday of the 2025-26 season, with a title and a place in Step 1 football on the line, it held a record 4,002 — every single one of them watching something that had never happened in the history of Worthing FC.
Joe Cook scored. Razz Coleman De-Graft scored. Ebbsfleet United got none. Worthing FC won 2-0, finished the National League South on 84 points, and went somewhere they have never been.
The top of non-league football. Step 1. The National League proper.
Who are Worthing FC
Worthing FC play at Woodside Road on the English south coast between Brighton and Chichester. They have been in the National League South for several seasons, competing comfortably without ever threatening the top. Manager Adam Hinshelwood has been the steady hand — the kind of manager who doesn't get written about nationally until something national-newspaper-worthy happens, and then everything he did for the previous three years is described as "building towards this moment."
This was the moment.
84 points and a record
84 points from 46 games is not a fluke. It is consistent, week-in week-out excellence at a level where the difference between first and fifth can be a single bad run in February. The 2-0 win over Ebbsfleet on the final day was composed. By the time Coleman De-Graft added the second, Woodside Road was already beginning the kind of celebration that only happens once.
4,002 were there. The club's all-time ground record. More people than have ever watched Worthing FC at home — gathered for the occasion that justified every turnstile click for the decades before it.
What Step 1 means
Next season Worthing face Hartlepool, Yeovil, Aldershot, Sutton — names that come with fanbases and away atmospheres that Woodside Road has never had to accommodate.
It will be more expensive. Some weeks it will be quite difficult.
It will also be, for every volunteer who has been turning up at Woodside Road since before some of those 4,002 were born, the absolute vindication of every hour spent painting stands, selling programmes, and arguing about whether the tea hut should open twenty minutes before kick-off or thirty.
The Premier League cannot manufacture the specific sensation of being at Woodside Road when the record crowd watches the first-ever Step 1 promotion happen. That exists only in that ground, on that day, for those people.
4,002 of them. Every one of them there because they wanted to be.
Up the volunteers. Non-league — making the difference.
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