Welcome to this new website about the Cheshire County Football League

From the 1960s when I lived in Birkenhead and often went to watch Tranmere Rovers Reserves play in the Cheshire League, I have felt affection for non-league football and held a keen interest in the history and development of football, in particular its effect and influence on contemporary local society. As such, I have been surprised that no book has ever been written about what was one of the country’s major semi-professional leagues before it was dissolved in 1982. 

After obtaining the League’s original official minute books and a full set of handbooks some years ago, I set about trying to reconstruct all the results from the League and its various competitions from 1919 and I have spent many long hours at the British Newspaper Library at Colindale and now more recently at the British Library at St. Pancras extracting information from contemporary local and regional newspapers. My research has produced some interesting inconsistencies and contradictions compared with the final tables in the handbooks or published elsewhere. This leaves the dilemma of ascertaining whether the errors lie with the newspaper reports or the tables, many of which do not balance.

I have therefore created this website with the aim of making it the primary source for sharing information relating to the Cheshire County Football League. Although still under construction, I hope that like minded enthusiasts will feel free to contact me with any questions they may have for their own projects or who can offer to provide help to make information provided by this site as accurate and comprehensive as possible.

John Ellis