It was during a five-day training camp in Murcia that central defender Carl Piergianni first saw the evidence that this Stevenage season may be special.
The squad were doing three vs two attacking and defending drills and Piergianni told sporting director Leon Hunter that something had changed. Last season, when Stevenage were the third lowest scorers in League One, the defenders would be on top. Suddenly the drills were getting a lot harder.
Stevenage (and suitable apologies are offered to Charlton Athletic) are currently the most overachieving team in the EFL.
With two games in hand, they are fourth in League One and only two points off the top. Two of the teams above and seven below have all played in the Premier League. Stevenage may have a realistic shot of second-tier football for the first time in their history.
It is easy to underestimate Stevenage. The Lamex Stadium has the second lowest capacity in League One and 14 clubs in the division below have a higher average home attendance in 2025-26.
The club’s record transfer stands at around £100,000 in a league where nine clubs signed a player for half-a-million pounds or more last season alone. Fanbases routinely fall foul of the “little old Stevenage” misnomer. On the pitch, they can compete with everyone.
This is an astounding turnaround by every measure. Three years ago, Stevenage finished 89th in the EFL and were in serious danger of non-league relegation until Steve Evans’ appointment as manager in March 2022. The next season they were promoted and they haven’t looked back since.
I wanted to understand how a club manages such a transformation to be the best version of itself. To do so, I spent the day with owner Phil Wallace, sporting director Hunter and manager Alex Revell.
This is a story of long-term investment and shorter-term improvement. And it’s become pretty powerful.
Infrastructure is king
Wallace bought a 90 per cent stake in Stevenage in 1999, when the club was days from going out of business. He found a football club that had never played league football, were seriously impaired by long-term financial issues and had precious few facilities.
“It wasn’t just a different sport then – it was a different world,” Wallace tells me. “I arrived when we were in the Conference and were close to bankruptcy. It had a basic infrastructure – a west and east stand. But there was no training ground. During those early years, I put in the South Stand and then did the training ground in 2013.”
“I’m one of the longest-serving owners in the EFL. What happens is that you form a plan. I was always infrastructure-led and then recruitment-led, infrastructure first and whatever was left into the playing squad.”
The change over 25 years is ludicrous. The training ground is Championship standard and is growing all the time – a new media and player analysis theatre is being built as we speak. As someone who has been to most of these in the EFL but is here for the first time, I’m genuinely shocked by what is on offer to players.
But it’s the sheer breadth of development that is most impressive. Across the road from the Lamex Stadium is the Valley site, which came under club management earlier this year. Its 3G and grass pitches will be fully redeveloped to offer state-of-the-art playing facilities to the local community.
Further down Broadhall Way is the Stevenage FC Sports Hub Shephalbury site, which houses the club’s academy in elite facilities but also offers another base for junior coaching and bookings for grassroots clubs in the community. A former non-league club having four different sites, all growing at the same time, is a dream.
“Infrastructure creates everything: a permanent mentality and a legacy,” Wallace says. “It is good for the present and the future. We have signed a lot of players based on our training ground. It’s as good as it gets in League One and that’s probably true in the Championship too.”
“So you have this ‘little old Stevenage’ on attendances, comparatively. But we are not little in anything else. Our income is not that far off the average in League One, because we have built things that will pay back money to the club and act as permanent fixtures. It’s all about income generation.”
Using the underdog mentality
As Hunter explains, the finances of League One are a little frightening. It appears that, in some cases, budgets don’t really exist; it’s simply how much an owner is prepared to lose and, in some cases, that can routinely be more than £5m a year.
Stevenage want to be different. The overwhelming mantra is to minimise losses even when others are overspending. The infrastructure becomes of greater assistance every year, but this is a club where staff spend money as if it were their own.
“Every April we get the pats on the back for the finances when accounts come out,” Hunter says. “That’s when our fans realise: ‘You know what – we are doing pretty well’. We know that we can compete on the pitch; we beat Wrexham home and away last year. Off the pitch is a different story.”
You can use that to fuel your improvement and shape your behaviour. It creates an underdog spirit but it also demands that you must work harder and smarter (and Stevenage seem to do both).
As Hunter says: “This is a matter of compound interest. If we get 0.5 per cent better every day, and that becomes our only choice, we will continue to grow slowly and sustainably.”
Staffing is a perfect example. The first-team group consists of one manager, two assistants, a goalkeeping coach, one conditioning coach, one analyst and a kit man. Stevenage are understaffed compared to most, but it is by design.
“We have to overachieve, we all do,” says Hunter. “That’s who we are. If you have too many staff, you can lose some accountability and there is more communication needed. At some point that will have to increase, but right here and now everyone is working smart. And it means that we don’t just have pathways for players, but for staff too.
“This is a fantastic place to work. We must always remember how lucky we are. We have autonomy, trust, collaboration and we are all surrounded by a small group of very good people. The pattern of workflow is superb and it has created a culture of excellence.”
Backing the homegrown manager
Everyone I speak to at Stevenage credits Evans for his role in resetting Stevenage in 2022 – Evans was inspirational, used simple processes to forge significant on-pitch improvement, was open to the use of data in recruitment and took the club into the top half of League One.
But in April 2024, two games before the end of the league season, Evans chose to join Rotherham United (at that point relegated from the Championship).
“Momentum is just doing the same thing and being successful with it,” says Wallace. “We invested into the same thing: we went with Alex Revell.
“It would have been easy to go with more experience, and I did contemplate that, but he convinced me in one interview. And if he convinced me, I knew that he could convince the players. We have been proven right.”
Revell had previously been in charge of Stevenage, leaving his position as first-team manager in 2021. But he also stayed within the club, first as an academy coach and then as part of Evans’ first-team coaching staff. He was the continuity candidate, but that made him a brave choice.
Revell has been a revelation of his own. Last week, he signed a new five-year contract at Stevenage and it’s clear from speaking to him that it would be impossible to find someone more proud to have this position. At a close-knit community club, that has become powerful.
#StevenageFC confirms that manager Alex Revell has today agreed a new five-year contract at the Club.
— Stevenage FC(@StevenageFC) October 31, 2025
“I learned so much from my first time here,” Revell says. “I spent a lot of time with Steve and I had this journey of self-discovery that there were lots of things that I wanted to do but just didn’t have the confidence or self-belief to do.
“The biggest thing I learnt was about simplicity. We all want to go higher and be the best that we can be, but the way to do that best is by getting the most out of the group around you. Don’t try to do anything you can’t do.
“I have brought in staff that I would trust with my life. They work incredibly hard. We are a tight group and I use that same principle with my players.”
Recruitment and collaboration
When Evans was appointed as manager, his only demand was that there be complete collaboration off the pitch. Hunter says that Evans was the first manager in his experience to take such an approach. Not only has that continued under Revell, it clearly works for Stevenage.
Wallace and Hunter speak daily. The owner may spend much of his time in Florida and Jersey, but nothing happens at Stevenage that he doesn’t know about. The same is true of Hunter and Revell, who are both self-described workaholics and who act as a team.
“There is not one thing that goes on in my world that Alex doesn’t know about, whether it be a discussion with a player or agent or anything else,” says Hunter.
“It’s complete transparency and it creates joint-ownership. We keep our heads down, we work hard and we hope to make smart decisions.”
You see where the infrastructure and the manager combine. Hunter tells me that when Stevenage bring a player and agent to the training ground, they are routinely shocked at how good the facilities are.
One meeting with Alex, during which he does a presentation on the demands, the squad and the vision, can often be enough. The money has to be right – and Stevenage will lose targets to clubs with bigger budgets – but their offering is impressive.
When Evans left and Revell came in, there was a shift in recruitment. Evans preferred experienced players – and was justified with this win-now strategy – but it would have been unsustainable for that to be the only focus.
Hunter explains that Stevenage needed players who could help them win but also to recruit those with potential development and sell-on value. At 26.9, this is still one of the older average starting XIs in the division. It’s also down almost a full year on average from two seasons ago.
The streamlined processes and lack of middle management tiers have their advantages: Phil to Leon to Alex. When a striker became available in August, it took one phone call from the sporting director to the owner – stressing the need to move quickly – for the deal to be sanctioned.
Stevenage got their man within 48 hours. Other interested clubs moved more slowly and had more discussions – they missed out.
This is where the overachievement and financial prudence stands out. Stevenage have two part-time scouts and, as such, their match assignments are determined by Hunter with an exacting eye.
The sporting director only attends infrequent Stevenage games – “on in every four or five” – because he prefers to visit other clubs and sit with chairpersons and others in his role. Signings have been made possible by these visits. Everything you do with time, effort and money has to have a potentially beneficial impact.
Finally, every person I speak to makes the point that retention can be as important as recruitment. Jamie Reid, Luther Wildin, Jordan Roberts and Piergianni are all first-team fixtures and all have been at the club for more than three years.
It was the retention of players that platformed the 2022-23 promotion season and all four of those aforementioned players were regulars during that League Two season. They have grown as Stevenage have grown.
With bigger clubs in League One continuously circling to pick off talent, Stevenage are proactive about offering new contracts that top up the time left on existing deals. That is how a comparatively inexperienced manager is able to maintain standards: he has pillars within this squad who lead by example.
On-pitch identity
“We looked to build a team that reflected the town,” says Hunter. “Stevenage is a hardworking town, with new and upcoming investments and improvements. We kept eight or nine players in a struggling team and we had a nucleus. Every single decision now is a collaboration. And we’ve made more good decisions than bad – I think that’s the only viable strategy.”
Stevenage concede the second fewest shots and second fewest shots on target in League One. As with the division’s other overachievers (Lincoln City and AFC Wimbledon), they rank low for possession, but they aim to be direct and attacking because Revell understands that supporters demand as much.
That is played out in the numbers. Stevenage have scored 50 per cent more goals from set pieces than any other team this season (and they are rightly proud of that record). Only one team plays more forward passes as a percentage of their total.
The statistic I like most: no team has a lower “sequence time” than Stevenage. Put simply, that means that something happens when this team has the ball more often than anywhere else, be it a shot, a defensive action or a stoppage in play.
They call it “disruption” and it depends upon damn hard work and intensity with and without the ball: pressing, harrying, sprinting, creating. When Stevenage sit down with a potential signing, they present the physical data that will be expected of them and ask, with complete honesty, whether the player can meet the levels required. When you’re punching above your weight, what other option is there?
“We looked at Wycombe and Leyton Orient last year,” Revell says. “Whatever money they spent to do it, they disrupted. That can be us now. They had character. You can be quiet off the pitch, but you have to be a beast on it. That’s how we keep our DNA and that cannot change. All the time in recruitment we were looking for talent, absolutely, but the main thing was character.
“Leon uses a good line: ‘It’s so difficult to create and it’s so easy to fall’. Are we going back to the old days? No, but that group had an incredible mentality and that’s what people want to see.
“We should never be embarrassed about what we have experienced. That’s what we lost before 2022. Now it’s what we are again. We have a heartbeat.”
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The only conclusion anyone could reasonably make now is that it is working. The Championship remains are far off dream and its own financial reality is daunting, but Stevenage have found something that works because it fits and fits because it works.
It would be lovely to reveal a special hidden secret, but there isn’t one. The infrastructure came first, the bad times shaped the good and they only reinforced the need to stay true to ideals and to believe that what you’re doing will eventually bear fruit.
“I took a club that was bankrupt and going out of business in 48 hours,” says Wallace. “And I have patiently – over 25 years – turned it into a decent EFL club with really good facilities and a fantastic community involvement. You have to be proud of that. Nobody alive would engineer that and not be.”
“We get Stevenage,” says Hunter. “We know what the owner wants: to minimise losses, to have some fun, to care, to be a custodian of the club. We spend every penny as if it was our own. And our losses are lower than most other clubs at this level as a result.
“And it will not stop us from improving every day. Can we get to the Championship? Burton Albion did it. Yeovil Town did it. Wycombe Wanderers did it. So why can’t Stevenage do it?”
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