Deegan Atherton: “The sky is the limit” for progressing Worksop Town

This is in marked contrast to how things were just over four years ago when the club were scrambling to raise £30,000 to hang on to their professional football club status.

“To be honest, it was a pretty worrying time,” Atherton said.

“Some of the lads had to take less money, which wasn’t great, but luckily we had such a good changing room that the lads were happy to agree to that in order to keep playing for the club.

“We had to take the games from week to week because we didn’t know what was going to happen the week after or a month later.

“It was a bit of a worrying time, but there were times that we actually enjoyed it because you had to go out there and enjoy it while you could.

“I was a young lad. I didn’t have too much to worry about really, but more experienced players had their families to pay for, so I could imagine there’ll have been people who were thinking that the money was more important to them.

“At the time though, we weren’t really talking about things like that because we didn’t want to lose our focus on the pitch.”

The 25-year-old joined the club in 2018, going on to win two league titles, two Sheffield and Hallamshire Senior Cups and making over 200 appearances for the club.

“I was new to non-league football, and it was my first year in it,” he said.

“I didn’t really have an idea what anything was going to be like - the money side of things or the actual football side.

“We had a great team for that level and made some good signings the year I came in, so I presume the money at that time was stable.”

Current chairman Pete Whitehead took over Worksop Town in 2020, appointing manager Craig Parry shortly after and branding this stage in the club’s history as the ‘new era’.

Atherton said: “For me as a player, when Pete (Whitehead) came in and you saw the new era start it was very exciting, and I was looking forward to trying to be a part of that.

“He came in and set his plans for the pitch, the bar and the new changing rooms, as well as where he wanted the club to go going forward. It was very exciting and I was very happy to be a part of it and still am.

“When I first came, we had cabins on the side of the ground as changing rooms and now we’ve got a very good quality changing rooms which Pete has built.

“We’ve also got the 4G pitch, which is good to play on but also helps the club massively financially because it makes it a lot more sustainable.”

The club have progressed from the ninth tier of English football to the seventh since 2018, and were defeated in the play-off semi-final last season, crushing chances of a return to the National League North.

However, third in the league this campaign, Worksop’s renewed ambition of promotion is plain to see, and Atherton insists there is no ceiling to Worksop Town’s success.

“For me personally, there’s been massive achievements,” Atherton said.

“I remember coming in before the financial troubles we had, we broke records and won the league.

“When the ‘new era’ started, the plans were exciting, but it doesn’t always go to plan.

“However, when Paz (Craig Parry) came in, we got new players in and started looking forward and the plans began to come together.

“We kept breaking records, we’ve since broken more records for the club.

“We’ve gained another promotion, won a couple of cups and got to the first-round proper of the FA Cup.

“If you asked me if we’d been able to achieve things like that a couple of years ago, I think even most of the Worksop fans wouldn’t have believed you.”

A historic afternoon in Greater Manchester last November saw 1,419 Worksop town supporters travel to Edgeley Park to watch their side take on Stockport County in the first round of the FA Cup, a stage which the Tigers hadn’t reached for 22 years.

“It is a great moment for everyone at the club to be able to look back at.

“We’ve got a few experienced players who’d been there before, but we’ve also got a lot of lads who had never played at that stage, so personally, and I think a lot of the lads would agree, it was a very proud moment.

“I can’t imagine the feelings of the 1,419 fans that went, seeing how the club was maybe going to go under, and they wouldn’t have had a club to support anymore to then be able to travel to a league team, I can only imagine how happy they were.

“The most important thing about non-league football is the fans, clubs wouldn’t be anything without them.

“The club now wants to go as high as possible, and everyone at the club believes that.

“This year, the target is to get to that next level and make sure we get over the line - and we’re doing everything we can to try to achieve that.

“Even then, I think the feeling in the club is that once we reach the next step we want to keep pushing on further and reach the next step after that and I think that’s the great mindset this club has at the minute – that the sky’s the limit.”