Shrewsbury Town can hardly say that they were not warned. Forest Green finished bottom of League One in 2023 and were relegated to non-league the following season. Carlisle United finished bottom of League One in 2024 and were relegated to non-league the following season. Shrewsbury finished bottom of League One in 2023 and it doesn’t look good.
This may be the most miserable fanbase in the country right now, and with good reason. Shrewsbury have become hardwired not to win matches, which is something of an end-game problem: 12 victories in their last 77 across two divisions. You can’t set your watch by away league wins but a calendar might do it: September 2025, April 2025, February 2025, October 2024, March 2024.
Most alarmingly of all, the inability of experienced managers to extract anything beyond relegation form from this squad. Paul Hurst, Gareth Ainsworth, Michael Appleton; a few laps around the block between them. All with win ratios between 16 and 23 per cent.
It wasn’t always bad here; it might be easier for supporters to bear if it had been. Shrewsbury lost a League One play-off final in 2018 and finished in the top half of the third tier in 2023, 12 points ahead of an Oxford United side who are now in the Championship. To most here, that feels like a decade ago. Covid hit hard and everybody forgot what winning regularly felt like.
“After 10 years in League One, it is so sad we are now facing relegation into non-league,” says Ollie Warner of Salopcast, the biggest Shrewsbury Town podcast.
“Salop have only won 4 games from 24, the same as Crawley, Harrogate and Newport. If we avoid the drop, it will only be because there are two teams worse than Shrewsbury. And dropping into non-league these days is so different to when we dropped down in 2003.”
The great unknown is the potential, eventual, Sisyphean sale of the club by Roland Wycherley, the longest-serving owner in the Football League. It is four-and-a-half years since Wycherley first stated that intention. He has regularly stressed that he wants to sell and yet no deal has ever been done.
Wycherley is not an obvious bad guy candidate. He saved the club, oversaw the move to the new stadium, had Shrewsbury in the third tier for a decade and there is still no external debt. He says that the repeated interest – with 20 different potential buyers – has led nowhere because he loves Shrewsbury Town so much and does not want to see them fall into the wrong hands.
But here’s the thing: four-and-a-half years. If Shrewsbury are as attractive to buyers as Wycherley says, and so many other EFL clubs have changed hands in the interim, how can it be possible that uncertainty still reigns supreme?
Were the club holding their own, there would be no emergency. That is emphatically no longer happening. Shrewsbury’s budget was amongst the lowest – if not the lowest – in League One and is bottom half in League Two.
The squad is desperately thin in areas that matter the most, particularly in central defence and central midfield. The current transfer window is the last likely shot at redemption, other than hoping some other clubs are worse off.
Shrewsbury do at least have a decent number of centre forwards, not that you would know it from the returns. Shrewsbury have scored 102 goals in their last 126 league games, a chronic inability to create and finish chances. Season-ticket holders saw their team fail to even score in 11 home games in 2025.
What inevitably happens in situations such as this: supporters stop bothering. This season, average attendances are at their lowest since 2007. The Family Stand on match day is largely empty, a sorry assessment of broken goodwill and spirit.
As the dark joke goes: if there are people there at kick-off, they won’t be there on 85 minutes. The atmosphere is heartbreakingly absent, a fanbase seemingly accepting its inevitable fate while the team and club stand accused of doing the same.
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“The last 18 months of supporting Shrewsbury Town has just been pure misery,” says Warner.
“It has got to the point where you question what you are doing: why am I sitting here in the cold watching a team lose almost every week. Managers and players come and go, the chairman is the only consistency, and with him I only see the club declining further.”
It’s hard to know what to say in response to that, largely because there is nothing you can say. But if clubs in provincial towns – even one as beautiful as Shrewsbury – really want to be futureproofed, you have to inspire the next generation.
That’s stopped happening here; there is no argument to make against it. A team that forgot how to win, a club that forgot what potential and forward momentum feels like and a need for a new vision that only grows with each defeat. If you stay in stasis for long enough, the only natural way is down.
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