10 Longest Absences From The Premier League

After London, Greater Manchester has the largest concentration of professional football teams in the country, though only Bolton Wanderers and Wigan Athletic have regularly shared a division with the peerless Manchester United and their once-mocked but now enriched ‘noisy neighbours’ Manchester City. The likes of Bury (RIP), Rochdale and Oldham Athletic have always been mainstays of the lower divisions, though that wasn’t always the case for the latter.

Oldham were promoted to the old Division One a year before it became the Premier League, almost seventy years after their only previous stint in the top flight. After narrowly avoiding the drop in the first campaign, beating Crystal Palace by virtue of their -11 goal difference to the Eagles’ -13, they fell after the second, failing to win any of their final eight games as they finished 19th.

After dropping to the third tier just three years later, Oldham remained in the same division for twenty-one years, reaching the playoffs on two occasions but otherwise consistently finishing midtable. They dropped to League Two in 2018 and seem destined to stay there given how they have hovered just above the drop zone so far during their two-year tenure.