By Pete Tscherewik
There are moments in non-league football where you sit back, look at the fixture list, and genuinely wonder whether anyone at the Football Association has ever opened a map. The National League North, in its current 2025–26 incarnation, is one of those moments stretched across the length of England and into the Welsh valleys like an elastic band pulled well beyond its limits.
Consider this: South Shields, perched proudly on the banks of the Tyne in the far north-east, now share a division with Merthyr Town, a community-owned club from the South Wales valleys. The distance between them? Getting on for 330 miles.
Throw Bedford Town into the mix — another newly promoted side — and you have a division that spans more geography than most European leagues. This is not the National League North. This is, at times, a national league.
The FA’s line is that clubs are allocated to “the most geographically suitable league possible”. Suitable to who, though?
Certainly not for the players. At this level, the vast majority are part-time- men juggling football with jobs, families, and mortgages. Asking a semi-professional from Merthyr Tydfil to travel to Darlington or Scarborough on a Tuesday night, returning in the small hours of Wednesday morning, is not a minor inconvenience. It is a genuine intrusion into someone’s life.
Fatigue accumulates. Injuries follow. And at some point, good players simply decide it is not worth it.
Then there are the clubs themselves. Travel costs at this level are not absorbed by television deals or wealthy owners. A 600-mile round trip to South Shields - hotel costs, fuel, a driver - can swallow a significant chunk of a match-day budget before a ball is kicked.
For a community-owned club like Merthyr, operating on tight margins and supporter trust, these journeys are not just logistical headaches; they are existential financial pressures.
Above and beyond everything else, spare a thought for the supporters. Non-league football is built on the fan who goes everywhere — the one who turns up in the cold on a Tuesday night at Spennymoor or Scarborough because they love their club.
But expecting a Merthyr supporter to make that trip midweek, or a Bedford fan to head to the north-east for a 7:45 kick-off, is asking something many simply cannot afford — in time, money, or energy.
The argument will be made that the numbers simply didn’t balance this season — that too many southern clubs were relegated or promoted in ways that distorted the geography. That may be true.
But “the numbers didn’t balance” is a reason, not a solution.
Until the FA is willing to have a serious conversation about changing the structure — whether that means expansion, redistribution, or something more creative — the National League North will remain a division where the fixture list doubles as a geography lesson nobody asked for.
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