Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.
On the top of a whiteboard in Martin Ling’s office at Leyton Orient’s stadium, a date is written in permanent marker so it will never be accidentally wiped away: 22 July, 2017.
That was Ling’s first day back here: player, coach, manager and, finally, director of football. Supporters might argue that it was the moment the good times started to return to this place too.
In 2025, there may be no better club in the EFL to support than Leyton Orient. In their last six completed seasons they have won two league titles, finished in a higher league position than the previous season in six of seven years and seen home attendances rise by 80 per cent.
The dream here was always, eventually, to break into the second tier for the first time since 1982, but that project has been accelerated by their own steady, surprise improvement. Overperformance has become the new normal.
Before 2017-18, Leyton Orient was a circus. It roughly began in 2013, when Orient won their first eight league games to go five points clear at the top of League One but eventually succumbed to a run of one win in eight and fell into the play-offs. There they were 2-0 up on Rotherham United in the final at Wembley and still lost on penalties.
At the end of that season, Italian businessman Francesco Becchetti took over as owner from Barry Hearn.
Becchetti oversaw a reign of terror: Orient had four managers in 2014-15 and five in 2016-17. Players were repeatedly paid late, there were winding-up hearings and a general sense of farce that eventually caused outright mutiny amongst supporters.
Orient’s final minutes as a league club – relegated after a 112-year stay – were played out in front of a deafening, behind-closed-doors silence because the final league game of the season was abandoned following a protest.
In March 2018, eight months after Ling rejoined, Orient drew 0-0 draw at Eastleigh and sat 17th in the National League, directly behind Halifax Town and Maidstone United. A club had hit rock bottom.
“I had been away for six or seven years and I came back to find the shell of the club I knew,” says Ling.
“It was fighting, but it was losing. I had heard some of the stories. My boy was a scholar at the club and he relayed some of the problems to me.
Leyton Orient 3-2 Lincoln City (Saturday 15 February)
- Game no.: 68/92
- Miles: 262
- Cumulative miles: 12,089
- Total goals seen: 203
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: Last-minute winners are always memorable, but at Orient you get to see people celebrating while watching from their the balconies of their flats
“When the consortium started to take an interest in me coming back, I spoke to Lindsey, who was my secretary during my time as manager. She was on the verge of walking out.
“Wages weren’t being paid, there weren’t enough senior players, there was no training ground, only a skeleton staff remained. If you could have picked someone up and placed them in the middle of a football bomb site, that was Orient. That is what I walked into.”
That consortium was led by Nigel Travis, a lifelong Orient supporter and then-chief executive of Dunkin’ Donuts. He met Kent Teague, a senior Microsoft director and Texan multimillionaire who wanted to invest in an English football club.
Even Ling says that Travis and Teague have been lucky with just how much success – and how little heartache – they have experienced in seven years.
If getting Ling back was a masterstroke, Orient doubled down on that by appointing Richie Wellens as manager in March 2022.
It was Wellens who oversaw the League Two title win by making his team defensively mighty (24 clean sheets in 2022-23) and who has overachieved significantly in League One.
Ling first met Wellens before he took the Doncaster Rovers job and became convinced that he would be a good fit at Orient.
When Kenny Jackett left his position here and Wellens was also out of work, they reconnected, Ling put him forward as one of the candidates and Wellens impressed the owners during the interview process.
What’s most striking is how Ling mentions Justin Edinburgh so readily when talking about Leyton Orient’s current manager. It was Edinburgh who took Orient back into the Football League and who tragically passed away a month later after suffering a cardiac arrest.
When Orient won under Wellens at Gillingham to gain promotion to League One, Justin’s son Charlie was there and the away end chanted his Dad’s name.
Justin will forever remain a pillar here. Charlie Edinburgh appreciates the love of supporters who help cherish the memory of his Dad. Travis and Teague have spoken eloquently of Wellens continuing Edinburgh’s work.
“I didn’t expect it to go quite as smoothly as it has, but I knew that there was a good Leyton Orient manager in there,” says Ling.
“I think that Richie is a northern Justin Edinburgh, and that is a compliment to both of them. People want to run through a brick wall for him and they wanted to do that for Justin here too. If you’re tactically aware, you are a decent human being and you inspire people like that, you have every chance.”
Leyton is a very different place to the one that Ling remembers from his time here as a player – “I can never believe that there are million-pound houses here now!”.
The high road has good restaurants and a buzz. There have – or soon will be – 5,000 new homes in the area. Even if only one person lives in each home and if only one in five of them choose to go and watch local football, that adds a potential 1,000 onto a home attendance that has already risen to virtually fill the stadium.
That creates potential, but also challenges. If “Operation Championship” – as Ling refers to it as – is realistic, they need all the revenue they can get and all the matchday supporters they can fit in.
There may be a need for either a new ground or a significant refurbishment of the current one. Orient haven’t owned a training ground throughout Ling’s association with the club and that is clearly a next natural step.
That all takes money. Ling and I speak extensively about the potential investment opportunity here. Everybody knows that the right owners are more important than the richest owners, but pick your options wisely and you can allow new custodians to carry on your work.
In October, Travis announced that he was actively seeking investment and, by December, he revealed that there had been significant interest. The week after my visit, Leyton Orient announced an exclusivity agreement with one party.
The new age may be just around the corner. After the rebuild and the recovery comes an attempt to rise further than ever before. Leyton has changed beyond recognition; Leyton Orient want to too.
There’s another angle to this story, though, and it’s why I wanted Ling to be my guide. If this is a great story because of where Leyton Orient have risen from and how desperate the situation once looked, it is five times more important for having Ling at the centre of the tale.
Early in 2013, Ling took a leave of absence from his job as manager of Torquay United due to illness, with little other information revealed (he would eventually leave the club permanently in April of that year).
In 2015, he got his dream job as manager of Swindon Town, the club who had provided him with Premier League football as a player. Ling left after just nine games, again citing ill-health.
In fact, Ling was suffering from severe bouts of depression that took him to the brink of his own existence and changed his life forever. He had been using alcohol as a coping mechanism and that had made everything infinitely worse. He spent seven weeks in The Priory and says that nothing in life can be worse than your children seeing you in that state.
“It was a battle,” Ling says. “You don’t see light at the end of the tunnel. You keep seeing dark, dark, dark and that’s how you go down. I still take tablets, which I’m quite proud of.
“When I first went onto the tablets, I didn’t think I could be well by taking them. Now I understand the tablet makes me well, drinking alcohol didn’t make me very well and not drinking alcohol makes me well.”
I ask Ling if he’s well now, but I already know the answer even though we have never met before: he is here because he is well. He promised his wife Caroline that he wouldn’t be a manager again and wouldn’t return to the game if it wasn’t the right thing to do.
That was one of the best moments, asking her about the offer from Orient in 2017, hearing the words “I think you will be fine” and knowing that she was right.
“My last bout of mental health was at Swindon, which is coming up for eight years ago,” he says.
“I’ve had no sign of it since. I can walk away from here today and go to bed at night, wake up in the morning and the world’s on my shoulders. But I know how to move the world off my shoulders now and that’s by respecting it.
“I also know what my mechanisms are to keep well and my family’s the biggest mechanism of all. They have gone through seeing their husband and dad like that and I can’t describe what that’s like. To see that they’re happy that I’m happy, well that’s just the best thing in the whole world.”
To me, that’s the best bit of this club doing well again with Ling here. He would – and did – dismiss any added importance, because he’s a humble guy. But there’s something special about the symbiosis of all this.
Leyton Orient are flourishing again because Ling is helping them. Ling is flourishing because this club – the job, the success, the people around him, the community – is helping him. Long may both continue.
“Someone said exactly that to me the other day,” Ling says and smiles.
“That I’ve been good for the club and that the club’s been good for me. It’s so true. When I was at my lowest, when I’d had the two bouts of the worst thing, this was the place that I always wanted to come back to.”
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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