Northampton Town’s move to Sixfields: the ground switch a rescued club nearly never made (1994)

The Football Documentary Channel · Published 15 October 2026

Northampton Town’s move to Sixfields: the ground switch a rescued club nearly never made (1994)

The Northampton Town Sixfields era began on Saturday 15 October 1994, when the club drew 1-1 with Barnet in front of 7,461 people, 19-year-old Martin Aldridge opening the scoring at the new ground. It reads as a simple change of address, from a cricket ground shared since 1897 to a purpose-built home. What that move hides is that two years earlier the club had almost gone out of existence, and the supporters who rescued it changed how English football clubs are owned.

Behind that change of address lie the ground they left, the match that closed it, and the winter meeting in 1992 that decided there would be a club to move at all.

The Three-Sided Ground They Left Behind

Ninety-Seven Years Beside a Cricket Pitch

Northampton Town had shared the County Ground with Northamptonshire County Cricket Club from the club’s formation in 1897. The arrangement left them with one of the strangest home grounds in the Football League. Because a cricket outfield is far bigger than a football pitch, the football ground had stands on only three sides. The fourth side was simply open. That gap gave supporters a clear view of the cricket pavilion, and temporary seating had to be wheeled along the open touchline for the bigger FA Cup ties.

By the early 1990s there was not much left of even the three sides. The main stand had been lost in the mid 1980s, leaving a small temporary structure across the halfway line and, at one end, an open terrace known as the Spion Kop. A club in the fourth tier of English football was watching matches from a ground designed around somebody else’s summer sport, and shrinking.

The Last Match at the County Ground

The final league fixture there was a quiet one. Mansfield Town won 1-0 at the County Ground on Tuesday 11 October 1994, in front of 4,993. The date is worth pinning down. Cobblers Past, the club’s own history project, prints it as Tuesday 12 October, but 12 October 1994 was a Wednesday, and the Tuesday it names was the 11th.

Ninety-seven years of football there ended in a home defeat watched by fewer than five thousand. Four days later the club opened Sixfields and drew more than seven thousand.

Why There Was Still a Club to Move

The Northampton Town Sixfields Move and the Meeting That Made It Possible

The reason a new stadium was even conceivable in 1994 sits two years earlier, in the middle of a financial collapse. On 2 January 1992, more than 600 supporters crammed into the Exeter Rooms in Northampton to find out how bad things were. At that meeting, a long-standing shareholder named Martin Pell stood up and revealed the club’s £940,000 debt. Wages had gone unpaid, and the pressure on the chairman was to produce a financial plan capable of heading off a liquidation that otherwise looked certain.

Out of that room came something new. A group of supporters, led by Brian Lomax, formed a trust to hold the club to account and, crucially, to take a stake in running it. Two of its figures, Lomax and Phil Frost, were placed on the board. This went further than a fan club or an old-style supporters’ association: it put ordinary fans at the boardroom table, formed to stop their club dying.

The First Supporters’ Trust in English Football

What the Cobblers built that January was a first: the original supporters’ trust in English football, formed in January 1992. Its arrival arguably mattered more to the English game that year than the launch of the Premier League. The model spread. Supporters Direct, the government-backed body later created to help fans set up trusts and take democratic ownership of their clubs, was built on exactly the template Northampton had improvised out of a debt crisis.

The Sixfields opening carried that history with it. When the club walked out at the new ground on 15 October 1994, it did so as a going concern that, thirty-three months earlier, had been openly discussed as a candidate for liquidation. Northampton Borough Council was a partner in the £6,000,000 stadium, contracted to Ballast Nedam in December 1993 and built to hold a little over 7,700. None of it would have been worth planning for a club that no longer existed.

A 19-Year-Old’s Goal and a 1-1 Draw

The football on the day was modest. Northampton Town drew 1-1 with Barnet in that first Division Three match at Sixfields on 15 October 1994. Martin Aldridge, a 19-year-old forward who had come through the club as an apprentice, opened the scoring. The 7,461 who saw it were the season’s biggest home crowd for a side who, that same campaign, drew as few as 2,466 against Hartlepool United. Northampton finished the 1994-95 Division Three season 17th on 44 points, a mid-table year that mattered far less than the fact of still being there to play it.

READ MORE: More clubs that came closer to the end than the league table ever showed, in our Football Disasters series →

Northampton Town’s Sixfields, and the Rescue Behind It

A three-sided ground beside a cricket pitch, a 1-1 draw with Barnet, a teenager’s goal and a crowd of 7,461: on its own, 15 October 1994 is a groundhopper’s anniversary. Set it against the winter meeting in the Exeter Rooms two years before, and it becomes the day a club that had stared at liquidation walked into a home it had earned the right to build. The rest of the survivors, the folded, and the barely-rescued are in our Football Disasters series, and the anniversaries that go with them run through On This Day.

Sources: Wikipedia, Cobblers Past, 11v11, RSSSF, Football Supporters’ Association.