Leicester City vs Notts County

Lore & Background

The story of this rivalry begins not on a pitch but in the workshops and mines of the East Midlands. Notts County, established in 1862, is the oldest professional club in the world—a fact that gives the Magpies a peculiar, almost aristocratic pride in their heritage. When the Football League was formed in 1888, Notts County was among the twelve founding clubs, a fact they still invoke with quiet defiance. Leicester, founded twenty-two years later in 1884, joined the League in 1894 and spent much of the early twentieth century in the lower divisions, building a loyal following at Filbert Street that would eventually carry them to the top flight.

For long stretches of the twentieth century the two clubs occupied the same division, and the East Midlands Derby became a fixture that local supporters looked forward to with the same anticipation as any big-city rivalry. Meadow Lane, with its tight stands and thick atmosphere, was a particular challenge for Leicester visitors. The proximity meant that fans from both cities would travel to each other's grounds, filling the away ends with a distinctive East Midlands accent and a shared cultural vocabulary of canals, market towns, and industrial heritage.

The rivalry's character shifted as Leicester climbed the divisions in the 1990s and beyond, while Notts County endured repeated relegations and a long period outside the Football League. Yet the fixture never truly disappeared from the regional imagination. When the two met in the FA Cup or in the lower leagues, the atmosphere would still crackle with the memory of decades of shared struggle and mutual respect. It is a rivalry defined less by trophies and more by identity—two communities that see themselves as the true heart of Midland football.

In Their Own Story

The November fog had rolled off the Fens and was settling over Meadow Lane like a grey wool blanket. The floodlights cut through it in pale columns, illuminating the red-and-white hoops of the Notts County defenders as they set their line. Three miles down the M1, in a city that had once shared this very division, a Leicester fan in a blue scarf pressed his face to the cold glass of the away stand, breath fogging the pane. He'd driven up from Leicester in the early afternoon, passed the canal locks at Loughborough, and now stood in a crowd of a few hundred who'd made the same journey. The Magpies' goalkeeper, a local lad who'd grown up three streets from the ground, picked the ball up and looked across the pitch. For a moment the two cities were the same place—a single rectangle of frost-bitten grass, a single ball, a single shared history stretching back to a time when both clubs were still learning what it meant to be professionals. The kick-off whistle blew, and the fog swallowed the rest.

Reader's Guide

The East Midlands Derby is best understood as a rivalry of identity rather than of trophies. Notts County's claim as the world's oldest professional club and a Football League founding member gives them a historical weight that no amount of recent success can erase. Leicester City, by contrast, built its reputation on steady upward mobility—joining the League in 1894, winning the Second Division in the 1960s and 1990s, and eventually reaching the pinnacle with the 2015-16 Premier League title.

When both clubs occupied the same division, the fixture was a genuine local derby: travelling supporters, shared pub culture, and a mutual awareness that the other city was only a short drive away. Meadow Lane's compact, intense atmosphere was a particular test for Leicester, while Filbert Street's long, sloping stands created a different kind of pressure for Notts County visitors.

In the modern era the competitive gulf has widened considerably, and the two clubs meet less frequently. Yet the rivalry persists in local memory, in the stories passed down through generations of East Midlands fans, and in the quiet pride each community takes in its club's distinct heritage. It is a fixture that reminds supporters that English football's foundations were laid not in London or the North West, but in the canalside towns of the Midlands.

Did You Know?

• Notts County, founded in 1862, is recognised as the oldest professional football club in the world and was a founding member of the Football League in 1888.
• Leicester City joined the Football League in 1894, making them a later entrant to the organised league system than their East Midlands neighbours.
• The two clubs are separated by roughly thirty miles of road across the East Midlands, making this one of the geographically closest major regional derbies in English football.
• Notts County's home ground, Meadow Lane, has been their home since 1892, making it one of the longest continuously used football grounds in England.