🕵️‍♂️ Football League Focus: Swansea City | OneFootball

Welcome to our latest series here at OneFootball where we’re shining a light on one Football League club each week.

It’s our chance to go in-depth on sides that don’t normally attract our attention and hold up a magnifying glass to the plethora of brilliant stories outside the Premier League.

So far we have looked at:

Cardiff City, Derby County, Sunderland, Nottingham Forest, Huddersfield, Stoke, Birmingham, Sheffield Wednesday, Norwich, Bristol City, Portsmouth, Watford, QPR, Middlesbrough and Brentford.

This week it’s the turn of the Jacks – a proud club from a proud, working class city – it’s the Football League’s emblematic rags to riches and back again story, it’s Swansea.

Can you tell me a bit about the club?

A Jack of just one trade – inflicting as much pain on its supporters as humanly possible.

Swansea City’s story is, really, the story of the Football League. No side has endured and enjoyed more moments of pure emotion than those at the Vetch Field and, latterly, the Liberty Stadium.

The only club in English Football League history to go from the Fourth Division to the First and then back again, Swansea have seen and done it all.

Any great moments from their history?

A predominantly rugby area, the Swansea Valley didn’t have a football club until J. W. Thorpe decided to create Swansea Town in 1912. The ‘Vetch Field’ – named after the vegetables that grew there – was rented from the Swansea Gaslight Co, and the club we know today as Swansea City was born.

They spent most of their formative years bouncing around the Third Division and it wasn’t until the arrival of club legend Ivor Allchurch in 1947 that fortunes began to change.

The Second Division beckoned and the Swans spent the next 15 years there but their first truly great moment came, not in the league, but the FA Cup in 1964.

Languishing at the bottom of the Second Division, no one gave them a hope of beating First Division leaders Liverpool at Anfield. However, goals from Eddie Thomas and Jimmy McLaughlin ensured a famous 2-1 with the Welsh club going all the way to the semi-finals.

A downward spiral beckoned soon after but fortunes changed on one single day, arguably the most important in Swansea’s history.

28-year-old former Liverpool striker John Toshack was hired as the Football League’s youngest manager on May 1, 1978 and set about taking Swansea to heights they had never seen.

At the bottom of the Fourth Division on his arrival, Toshack started a meteoric rise that made British football history.

Promotion to the Third Division was followed a year later by promotion to the Second Division. And after one season of consolidation, Swansea went into the final game of the 1980/81 campaign knowing that a win away at Preston would take them to the First Division for the first time in their history.

Goals from Tommy Craig, Leighton James and Jeremy Charles saw them win 3-1 at Deepdale and thus became the only team to claim four promotions in four years.

1981/82 started as ridiculously as their recent success would suggest. The fixture computer handed Swansea a home game against the mighty Leeds United on the very first day – a game Swansea, unbelievably, won 5-1.

Victories over Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal and Tottenham later in the season would see Swansea sit atop the First Division for the only time.

But the Swans too had wax wings and their fall was as fast as the rise … more on that later.

A barren 25 years followed but Swansea returned to their old promotion-chasing ways in 2002 with the arrival of local businessman and saviour, Huw Jenkins.

It was a long, winding road back to the top but on the eve of the club’s centenary, Swansea were promoted to the Premier League for the very first time after beating Reading in the Championship play-off final.

What followed was a seven-year run of unprecedented success including finishing ninth in the Premier League, a League Cup final win over Bradford and a subsequent run to the last 32 of the Europa League where they would eventually lose to Italian heavyweights Napoli.

And surely there must be some lows as well?

Swansea have been just about as low as you can go in the Football League – having to reapply for membership on a number of occasions in the 1940s and 1950s as there was no relegation down to the National League at that time.

But things got truly farcical in 1996 when the club hired four managers over the season with one of those man – Kevin Cullis – having never managed a professional football team before.

Cullis’s only experience in football was as youth team coach of Cradley Town in the east Midlands, and yet he somehow managed to convince the board at the Vetch that he was right for the job.

After two defeats in six days, Cullis was sacked before eventually being arrested for fraud seven years later.

But the true nadir was 2002 when the Swans avoided relegation to the Conference on the final day of the season, with Exeter eventually going down to Non-League and the club being sold to the Supporters’ Trust for £1.

Who are the club legends?

Ivor Allchurch was known as ‘the golden boy of Welsh football’ and was honoured with a statue outside the Liberty Stadium in 2005.

Alan Curtis is known as ‘Mr Swansea’ after five decades with the club in various capacities.

Lee Trundle was Swansea’s great entertainer in their fallow years at the wrong end of the Football League.

What about the current squad? Any players to look out for?

It’s all about the collective rather the individual at Swansea this season but there are a few standout names who have impressed in their rise to a promotion challenge.

Matt Grimes is an Exeter youth graduate who has grown to become one of the very best central midfielders in the division and it’s his partnership with loanee Conor Hourihane that could well see them back in the Premier League come May.

One man who will be in the top division, whether the Swans get there or not next season, is Ban Cabango.

The 20-year-old central defender has been an utter revelation this term and is attracting the attention of some of the biggest clubs in the country.

Is the manager any good?

What a job Steve Cooper is doing at the Liberty Stadium.

No one gave these South Walians a hope in hell at the start of the season and yet here we are, just three months away from the end of the season with Swansea on course for an automatic promotion place.

The former England youth international manager was a surprise appointment when he took over from Graham Potter but has carried on the good work done by the now Brighton boss, and is creating a brilliant side in his own image.

Playing football the right way, Cooper has clearly improved every single player in this Swansea squad and for a coach, there can be no higher praise.

Finally, how are things looking this season?

It really couldn’t be any more positive. Swansea are riding high at the moment having won 15 of their 27 games and conceded a league best 15 goals.

Even if promotion doesn’t come this term, it will have been a superb season for the Swans.