History of Scunthorpe United F.C.
history of an English football club

Scunthorpe United Football Club is a professional association football club based in the town of Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England. The team compete in the National League North, the sixth level of the English football league system.
The club was formed in 1899 and turned professional after joining the Midland League in 1912. Crowned Midland League champions in the 1926–27 and 1938–39 campaigns, they were elected into the Football League in 1950. They went on to secure promotion as champions of the Third Division North in 1957–58 and spent six seasons in the Second Division, before they were relegated in 1964 and then down to the Fourth Division in 1968. United spent 34 of the next 37 seasons in the basement tier, punctuated by one-season stays in the third tier after they secured promotions in 1971–72, 1982–83 and 1998–99. Brian Laws saw the club promoted out of League Two at the end of the 2004–05 season and his successor, Nigel Adkins, led the club to the League One title in 2006–07. Scunthorpe spent just one season in the Championship, but victory in the 2009 League One play-off final saw the club promoted back into the Championship. They remained in the second tier until two relegations in as many years saw them back into the fourth tier by 2013. Scunthorpe were promoted to League One at the end of the 2013–14 campaign, before being relegated back to League Two in 2019.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “History of Scunthorpe United F.C.” is history of an English football club. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through History, Scunthorpe and United, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “History of Scunthorpe United F.C.” 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.