1981–82 Swansea City A.F.C. season
season of football team
During the 1981–82 English football season, Swansea City A.F.C. competed in the Football League First Division, following promotion from the Second Division. It was their debut season in the English top flight and the first season in which a Welsh club was part of the top English league since arch-rivals Cardiff City were relegated at the end of 1961–62.
Background
Swansea's rise to the top flight of English football had come only four seasons after competing in the Fourth Division and thus few tipped Swansea to survive in the First Division. Swansea soon proved the naysayers wrong by crushing Leeds United 5–1 in their first match ever in the top flight, with debutant Bob Latchford scoring a hat-trick. The win saw Swansea rise from the basement division to the top of the entire Football League in barely three years. Victories over footballing royalty such as Liverpool, Manchester United, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur followed as the club topped the league on several further occasions. However, injuries to key players took their toll, and the lack of depth in the squad meant that the season ended in sixth-place finish.
Transfers
In
Dai Davies - Wrexham, July
Ray Kennedy - Liverpool, January, £160,000
Ian Walsh - Crystal Palace, February
Colin Irwin - Liverpool, £338,800
Out
Leighton Phillips - Charlton Athletic, June, £25,000
David Giles - Leyton Orient, December, loan
Football League First Division
Results
Last updated: 4 September 2013Source:
Classification
Results summary
Results by round
FA Cup
Last updated: 4 September 2013Source:
Football League Cup
Last updated: 4 September 2013Source:
Welsh Cup
Last updated: 19 January 2014Sources:, Welsh Football Data Archive
European Cup Winners' Cup
Last updated: 4 September 2013Source:
Kit
Swansea's kit was manufactured by Belgian company Patrick. The kit bore no sponsorship.
Squad
Squad at end of season
Note: Flags indicate national team as defined under FIFA eligibility rules; some limited exceptions apply.
The public source identifies “1981–82 Swansea City A.F.C. season” as season of football team. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Swansea, City and season.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4580243. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981 and 1961.
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This entry incorporates text from “1981–82 Swansea City A.F.C. season” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.