Colchester United: From Conference to Championship

Since 1992 Colchester United have risen from the obscurity of Non-League football to the upper echelons of the Championship, a feat that shocked its own supporters, never mind the football world at large. Season after season the pundits have made the Us certainties for relegation, but time and again the team have defied the odds. For a cash-strapped club operating from a tiny, tumbledown ground in front of meagre crowds, recent progress has been little short of astonishing. After decades among the also-rans, in 2007 Colchester officially joined one of Englands top 30 clubs. Only fifteen years earlier they had been playing alongside the likes of Slough, Runcorn and Merthyr. Traditionally, Colchester had to sell its best players to merely survive. The club could only attract cast-offs and free transfers to their footballing outpost in north-east Essex. Now all that is changing. In 2008 the club is scheduled to move into a swish new stadium, 35 years after plans were first aired for a move from Layer Road. The story of the Us three-division rise in the League pyramid is told here in full for the first time. It features a remarkable cast of characters and enthralling events both on an off the field of play.