I’m away from the website this week, writing furiously for the last episode of the Twohundredpercent magazine, which comes out at the start of next month. With this in mind, it’s time to take a look back through the articles that made it to this publication but not onto the website, starting with this piece from issue seven of the magazine.

In a few short months time, for the supporters of twelve Football League clubs, everything will grind to a halt for the exquisite agony of one of football’s cruellest dramas. This year marked the thirtieth anniversary of the introduction of the Football League play-offs. It’s been a long time since any changes were made to their format. First brought in as part of a package of reforms to reduce the number of clubs in the top flight from twenty-two to twenty, the play-offs were originally contested between the three clubs that finished directly below the automatic promotions positions and the club which finished directly above the automatic relegation places in the division above, and all matches were played over two legs until the introduction of Wembley finals in 1990.

Other than that, though, and despite attempts to tinker with the format that have been rejected over the years, the format has remained surprisingly resilient to change. The format still has critics, although the number of these has dwindled over the years. But while there is still a fundamental truth to the argument that there is something wrong with a system which allows a club that has finished its domestic league season in fifth or sixth place in the table, their benefits are now well-established, and they don’t look like going anywhere in the foreseeable future. Indeed, the Football League Championship play-off match, with a highly lucrative place in the Premier League at state, has now probably eclipsed the FA Cup final in the pecking order of end of season matches.

Although radical by extremely conservative standards of the time, though, even the introduction of the play-offs was not the first time that the Football League had run with the idea of inflating the end of the season in order to extend interest. At the end of the nineteenth century, as the league expanded from its original twelve clubs, a format to decide who played in which division became a necessity. The Football League had begun, as everybody knows, with a dozen clubs from the Midlands and the North of England in 1888, Its first rival, The Combination, was set up at the same time, but two decisions proved fatal to its chances of seriously challenging the Football League. Firstly, it was established with twenty clubs rather than the twelve that the Football League had opted for.

This, however, proved to be too much of a stretch for many of the clubs concerned, which led to a large number of fixtures going unfulfilled in an era during which travelling to away matches was a challenge that would be unrecognisable today. Secondly, whilst the Football League had centralised itself as a body, The Combination left the arrangement of matches to individual clubs, which led to it being difficult to establish whether some matches played had even been competitive matches or mere friendlies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, The Combination was disbanded after just one season, although a second iteration of the competition began a year later, and ran until 1911.

Several of the clubs that had been involved in The Combination became involved in the league that would come to be the Second Division of the Football League. The Football Alliance formed in 1889 as a rival to the Football League. It was similar in constitution to its competitor, with twelve clubs from the Midlands and the North of England, although this was expanded to fourteen with the admittance of Stoke – who had resigned from the Football League – and Darwen – who transferred from the revived Combination – a year later. Amongst the other clubs who were members of it were Ardwick (who would later change their name to Manchester City), The Wednesday (later Sheffield Wednesday), Small Heath (later Birmingham City), and Nottingham Forest.

In 1892, however, the decision was made to merge the Football League and the Football Alliance into one organisation, with the top three clubs from the Alliance going into the First Division of the Football League and the remainder making up its Second Division. How, though, to decide who was to make up the constitution of the two divisions. Straightforward promotion and relegation seems so intuitive to us who watch the game a century and a quarter on, but the Football League opted for a different format, which would come to run for the next five years. Modern nomenclature would come to know the format as play-offs, but apparently taking its cue from cricket, it was decided that end of season matches known as “test matches” would decide promotion and relegation issues.

Test matches didn’t follow the same format that modern play-offs do. They were considerably more convoluted than that. Unlike modern day play-offs, test matches were played only contested between the four teams below the automatic promotion places in each division, test matches involved the bottom teams of the First Division and the top teams of the Second Division going head-to-head, including the Second Division champions, although only on one occasion did the Second Division champions – Small Heath, in 1893 – fail to get promoted this way around.

From 1893 to 1895, six teams competed for three places in the top division. Each team played one match against the corresponding team from the other division (Second Division champions versus the bottom First Division side, and so on) at a neutral venue, usually closer to the designated home team. The winners of each game were then considered for election for First Division membership for the following season, whilst the losers were invited to the Second Division. From 1896 until 1898, however, the series was revamped into a mini league format, with four teams competing for two First Division places. The Second Division sides played both First Division teams on a home-and-away basis, with the top two clubs taking a place in the First Division and the bottom two playing the following season in Second Division.

The end of their first season ended with something of a surprise. Notts County had been founder members of the Football League but had finished their first two seasons in eleventh place in the table, with only Stoke City – who would subsequently resign their place – below them. The 1890/91 season, however, had been more successful for the club, which finished that season in a record high third place in the table whilst also reaching the final of the FA Cup, losing by three goals to one against a West Bromwich Albion team that had they had beaten by seven goals to one earlier in the same season. A lower mid-table position followed, but at the end of the 1892/93 season, Notts finished two places off the bottom of the table. With Newton Heath, who’d finished bottom of the table, having beaten Small Heath after a replay in the first round of matches, they faced off away to Darwen, who had finished the season in second place in the Second Division, but were beaten by three goals to two be relegated into the Second Division.

Notts would go on to spend four years at this level before getting promoted back in 1897, but they would set one significant record while playing in the lower division. At the end of the 1893/94 season, they became the first Second Division club to win the FA Cup, beating Bolton Wanderers by four goals to one in the final. Accrington, who had finished one place below them in the 1892/93 season and lost their test match against Sheffield United, resigned their place in the Football League altogether and joined the Lancashire League instead. They folded altogether three years later. The Accrington Stanley club which joined the Football League in 1921 and remained members until folding in 1962, as an aside, had been formed in 1891 and was no relation to this particular club.

At the end of the following season, one of the test matches played was a match that now has a global significance. Liverpool had finished the season as champions of the Second Division, and they defeated Newton Heath by two goals to nil to claim a place in the top flight. Newton Heath, of course, would go on to be renamed as Manchester United. Small Heath, who’d failed to get promoted the previous season despite having won the Second Division, managed to get promoted with a win against Darwen, whose season in the top flight had ended with them finishing one place off the bottom of the table, whilst the third match saw a Preston North End, who’d finished the season in fourteenth place after having won the first two Football League titles and finishing in second place in the three previous seasons, defeated Notts County by four goals to nil.

The 1894/95 season was the last season of the original format of the test matches. By now, the format was starting to feature some familiar faces. Notts County, playing their third successive appearance in them, were beaten again, this time by Derby County. There was also a third successive defeat at this stage of the season for Newton Heath, who were comfortably beaten by Stoke, who’d previously resigned their Football League place, won the Football Alliance, and been voted back into the Football League while it still only had one division. Stoke would go on to declare bankruptcy in 1907, playing non-league football until 1919 and eventually changing their name to Stoke City in 1925 upon their home town being granted city status that year. Liverpool, the previous year’s champions, were relegated straight back after having finished at the bottom of the table, beaten by a goal to nil by Bury.

The following season would see the introduction of the mini-league system that the test matches would use for the remainder of their existence. The first season saw Liverpool, West Bromwich Albion, Manchester City and Small Heath go head to head against each other, with Liverpool, who had won the Second Division title, and West Bromwich Albion, who had finished bottom of the First Division, securing First Division football. The 1896/97 season ended with Notts County finally getting promoted alongside Sunderland, while Burnley were relegated and the hapless Newton Heath continued their desperate run of test match form and stayed where they were.

By the time that the following season’s test matches came around, change was in the air. Professional football was not the flash in the pan that some had suspected it might be upon its introduction a decade earlier, and the Football League was looking to expand. The test match group saw Stoke return to the First Division alongside Burnley, with Newcastle United and Blackburn Rovers missing out. Less than a month later, however, the test matches were dead. Three proposals were put before the Football League as to how this expansion might come about. The first came from Woolwich Arsenal, proposing three divisions of sixteen clubs, a First Division and two regional Second Division, with test matches. The second came from Burnley, that the League should consist of two divisions of eighteen clubs, and no more test matches. The third, from Aston Villa, was a convoluted system of regional leagues.

Burnley’s was accepted, and the test matches were dead. But their significance in the modern game remains. Although flawed, they provided a template from which the play-offs could draw inspiration almost nine decades later. They existed in a world in which a “£100m match” would have been unimaginable, but football’s combination of progress and tradition has always been one of its most notable defining characteristics.