John Rooney going to Guiseley

😅😅. It is sad though that this league is being took over by Southern teams. It's not their fault but the National League should shake it up like the lower divisions as it costs a lot of money for fans owned clubs like us to travel to Torquay, Dover, Braintree each season.

The problem is further down the pyramid.

At Step 3, you have the Evo Stik North, the Evo Stik South and the Ryman League. That's two southern leagues and one northern. With two teams promoted to Step 2 (National League North and South) from each, it means that four of the six teams getting promoted to that level every season are southern. Unless three of the four that go down from the Conference National are reasonably northern (which happened last season with Halifax, Altrincham and Kidderminster but wouldn't normally), Step 2 gets increasingly bloated with southern teams, which is why teams like Brackley and Gloucester end up playing in supposedly 'Northern' leagues.

Even going down to Step 5, there's a reluctance for clubs in the far north of England to get promoted because of the number of long journeys they'd need to do. I believe the Northern League is said to be easily the strongest league at that level, and always does well in the FA Vase, because its teams are good enough to play higher up, but don't want to or can't afford to.

I've heard the pyramid is going to have a shake-up in the next few years, although I haven't read up on it much. I think whatever happens though, we have to accept that some degree of southern dominance is inevitable due to the fact that more people live in the South than the North and there are more teams down there. The number of semi-pro teams in and around London is insane.

One of the main problems is that the powers that be consider north to be any county on or above the M4. Hence why even when we were on the conference north we still had to play teams like Bishops Stortford. Daft really but there must be some logic to it. Much greater density of teams in the south i'm guessing

Terrible result for Guiseley today at home to North ferriby. I can see that turd crying back to Poland and accepting that new reduced contract if they get relegated.