I went to Burton Albion to witness the completion of a miracle ...Middle East

Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. This is club 85/92. The best way to follow his journey and read all of the previous pieces is by subscribing here

It is 10 minutes after full-time and the Pirelli Stadium is bouncing. In front of each stand, on an incessant loop, a player or staff member raises an arm to the crowd three times and is roundly cheered. On that third raise, the loudest noise. Nobody seems to tire of the repetition.

“Bounce around if you’re staying up,” becomes the chant of choice. Some people have moved out of view, although it is mostly those of a Wigan Athletic persuasion or those in the Main Stand who have duties to fulfil. The rest will stay as long as they are allowed. For much of this season, supporters couldn’t wait for this season to end. Now they never want this night to.

Late-season midweek matches, rearranged from a previous date, can often cause pathos to hang a little in the air. The warmth of the sun and the daylight that refuses to cede until half-time give the impression of August, when you were hungry and excited for the nine months that were coming. In April and May, they are a reminder that the domestic football void is coming.

Still, an evening at Burton Albion is the perfect cure for any ennui. For most of the last 20 minutes of the match, as night finally takes over, the West Terrace has been chanting a Bob Marley chorus as they see their team home: “Singing don’t worry, about a thing. Every little thing is gonna be alright”. Well, it is now.

Burton Albion 1-1 Wigan Athletic (Tuesday 29 April)

Burton Albion is a small, community-focused club with average crowds of around 3,500. I have been to this stadium for coffee mornings that address loneliness and afternoons that provide support for low-income families. Derby County is 14 miles away and Stoke City just over 25, so there is great competition for affection and family loyalty. Burton – only promoted to the Football League in 2009 – are comparative newbies.

That remarkable rise, four promotions in 15 years from the Northern Premier League to the Championship, will forever be the Burton legacy: Nigel Clough as manager, Ben Robinson as owner and chairman. It – and they – platformed everything else. But 2024-25 might run it close. This has been one of the most remarkable league seasons in recent English football history, described by the club themselves as a miracle.

On 18 January, Burton drew 1-1 at Crawley Town. That was their 25th league game of the season and they had taken just 15 points. In the Carabao Cup, they lost 4-0 at home. In the FA Cup, they were knocked out by non-league Tamworth. The season, as every fan said at the time, was done.

With four teams relegated from League One, Burton were 11 points plus goal difference from safety and had won twice in five months. Only four months of misery awaited them. On Tuesday, they secured their survival with a game to spare. That is why they are bouncing.

This story starts last summer, when Robinson decided that it was time for him to step aside after 40 years, over two spells, as owner and chairman. The most interested party was Nordic Football Group (NFG), a consortium based in Sweden that included billionaire H&M chairman Karl-Johan Persson alongside two NHL ice hockey players and 15 other individuals. They wanted an EFL club of roughly this size.

Some of the Robinson influence was retained: Ben’s daughter Fleur, who had been chief executive at Wrexham, moved to take on the same role at Burton. But everything changed in a summer like no other: new technical director (Bendik Hareide), new commercial director (Kevin Skabo), new chairman (Ole Jakob Valla Strandhagen), new deputy chairman (Tom Davidson). From May to August, Burton could not have looked more different.

NFG had a vision to rebuild Burton as the home of data-led recruitment and player development. They wanted to play exciting football that attracted new supporters and wanted to use the player trading model to increase budgets. None of that was controversial and none of it was unique to this club or these owners. That is the model now.

But the sheer rate of overhaul was unprecedented; NFG tried to pull most of this off over the course of a single summer. Burton set a new British record for the number of first-team players signed in a single transfer window, 23: one goalkeeper, four forwards, eight defenders, 10 midfielders. Fifteen of those 23 players were aged 24 or under. Eighteen players left on permanent deals or expired contracts and four more when out on loan. They effectively had a new squad.

With Martin Paterson leaving the Brewers at the end of the previous season, a change of manager too. NFG appointed Mark Robinson, who had been working as head of Chelsea’s development squad. Robinson is an excellent coach, but has yet to fully prove himself at first-team level and was handed an extraordinary task in building a team and a culture in two months. He was sacked after 11 winless matches. His assistant Tom Hounsell took over as caretaker for 12 matches before he left, too.

At that point, Burton supporters are happy to admit, there were serious doubts about the ownership. Nobody was near the point of outright protest, but they believed that naivety had governed the course of their season and it would end in relegation and the lowest league position in a decade. For all the vision, the magic years would be over.

The protagonist of this miracle is Gary Bowyer, who by the time of that Crawley draw had been manager for several weeks and was beginning to turn around the mood. Bowyer is an interesting case: he had been out of work since leaving Dundee following promotion from the Scottish Championship in 2023. Before that he had had 48 matches as Salford City’s permanent manager and 48 more in charge of Bradford City.

Bowyer has delivered an astonishing return on Burton’s leap of faith. He is a personable guy who relies upon a series of non-negotiable demands and looks to play the ball through midfield quickly to a centre forward or wingers. On Tuesday evening, Bowyer stands on the touchline in a black tracksuit and his glasses, throwing a bottle of water up in the air and catching it again when a pass goes astray or a wrong decision is made.

Burton’s players also describe him as a brilliant man-manager, somebody who deserves this magical half-season more than most in the game. When a Burton winger wins a tackle on the touchline during the second half, Bowyer rubs his head profusely and gets a wide grin in response. The first miracle here was not staying up, but creating an environment, after so much change and so many defeats, that was conducive to survival even being possible.

As Bowyer says, the players deserve immense credit for that too: they are young and it would have been easy to give up – even only subconsciously – in the same way supporters must have. Momentum works both ways and losing is a hard habit to break. Young players have become men here in 2025 and their careers will likely be far better for it.

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For all the mockery of the mistakes made in effecting far too much change last summer, several young players have stepped up: 21-year-old midfielder Charlie Webster; 22-year-old midfielder Kegs Chauke; 24-year-old full-back Udoka Godwin-Malife. The club deserves credit there. If we criticise the quantity, some quality came with it.

If Bowyer has resurrected his reputation at Burton, the on-pitch saviour is an even more extraordinary tale. Last season, Rumarn Burrell was playing for Cove Rangers in Scotland’s third tier having left Falkirk after a single season. Burrell had been at Grimsby Town, Middlesbrough and Bradford City in English football without ever starting a senior league game.

Burrell was one of the 23 new signings last summer, but struggled to make any impact at all. Before December, the striker had played 15 League One minutes across three appearances. Hounsell gave him a couple of starts due to injury absentees. Bowyer kept him in the team to see what might happen. Anything was worth a go.

And then something unexpected happened. On New Year’s Day, at home to Peterborough United, Burrell scored his first goal in English football. On 18 January, the day that marked Burton’s league table nadir, he scored again. Since Bowyer came in, Burrell has scored 11 league goals that have been worth 11 points to Burton. That gap on 18 January, as big as it got, was 11 points.

On Tuesday, it is Burrell’s name that they sing loudest of all the players and he who gets the biggest cheers post-game after Bowyer. He scores the opening goal that eradicates the nerves and stands in front of the West Terrace, a yellow flare surrounding him in smoke. All of this must seem like a dream to him. Now there are talks of EFL scouts casting a hopeful glance.

The change in this team is astonishing on every level. Since a pitiful home defeat to Northampton on 4 January, Burton lost six games and five of those were against some of League One’s richest: Birmingham, Bolton, Wrexham, Wycombe and Stockport. They finally climbed out of the bottom four on 12 April and have not been back there since. January became February, became March, became April. Desperation became dream, became hope, became joy.

Nothing long-term has been magically solved here. The questions that supporters were asking of the new owners at Christmas largely still apply, although there has been a good deal of humility and acceptance and public gratitude towards Bowyer for keeping them in League One.

They know that they got plenty wrong and concede that they are new arrivals to an environment where trying to run before you can walk normally leads to you falling over a few times first.

But, as the Pirelli finally stops bouncing and supporters begin to spread into a muggy late-April evening, saying goodbyes until August comes back around again, everybody is vowing to leave those questions for another day.

For a month or two, they can dwell upon one of the most ridiculous, and ridiculously good, half-seasons in the history of this club and of any club at their level. They would prefer it to be more settled next season, of course. But nobody is admitting that tonight.

Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here

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