Thirty-nine and counting

There was a time when a Welsh league title was a thing you could lose on a wet afternoon in front of a few hundred souls, and everybody knew it. So here is the question worth asking: how does one club win the JD Cymru Premier thirty-nine seasons running, from 2024/25 all the way to 2062/63, and still have the appetite to go again?

The New Saints. Say the name to anyone in Wales and they'll nod, the way you nod at the weather. A club its country knows well, and fifty-three major titles sitting behind it. But the number that stops you in the street is the thirty-nine. Thirty-nine in a row. Not a golden spell of six or seven and then a rebuild. A generation and more of seasons where the only real question, come spring, was who finished second.

I played my football at a level where a run of three wins felt like a dynasty. So I'm not going to pretend I can explain it from the inside. But I've watched enough one-sided leagues to know what a run like this does to everyone in it. It sets the temperature. The chasing clubs don't measure themselves against each other any more; they measure themselves against a standard that never dips. And the champions, year after year, have to find something new to want.

The men who did the scoring

You can't talk about all those seasons without talking about the ones who put the ball in the net, and four names carry most of it. Tom Griffiths, two hundred and nine goals across those title-winning campaigns. Kevin Taylor, seventy. Stephen Thomas, fifty-one. Mark Morgan, forty-nine.

Griffiths is the one the arguments will be about, and rightly. Two hundred and nine is not a hot streak; it's a career's worth of Saturdays, of cold afternoons and heavy pitches and defenders who'd long since stopped pretending they fancied it. Taylor's seventy and Thomas's fifty-one tell you the supply didn't dry up when one man moved on. Morgan's forty-nine say the same again. Different scorers, same outcome. That's the mark of a side built to keep going rather than a side built around one pair of boots.

What it's like in the chasing pack

I've a soft spot for the underdog, always have, and the underdog in this story is everybody else. Imagine turning up season after season knowing the title is, in practical terms, already spoken for before a ball is kicked. Some clubs fold under that. Others find a stubbornness in it — the cup run, the derby, the night the champions come to your place and you get a point that you'll talk about for years.

That's not a small thing. A league where one club wins everything can feel like a closed shop from the outside. From the inside, on a wet Tuesday, it's a test of why you bother. The lads who keep turning up, keep training, keep believing that this is the year the gap closes — they're the ones I'd buy a pint for.

And the champions? "We don't talk about the run," one of them might tell you, and you'd believe it. "We talk about Saturday." That's how these things are done, or at least how they're survived. The moment you start counting, you start feeling the weight of it.

Still going

Which brings us to now. It's still going. The New Saints are champions again for 2062/63, and the run stands at thirty-nine, and nobody in Wales can tell you when it ends, because it hasn't. That's the honest position as this is written. No final chapter, no tidy ending. Just a club that keeps turning up and a league that keeps trying to knock it off.

I've seen a lot of football in my time, and I've learned to be suspicious of anything that looks permanent. Leagues change. Money moves. A great side gets old all at once. But you have to give credit where it's due, and thirty-nine straight titles is credit enough for anyone. Whether the fortieth comes, and the one after that, is a question for another summer.

There was a time when a Welsh title was a thing you could lose on a wet afternoon. The New Saints have spent nearly four decades making sure nobody else gets the chance. And still, somewhere in the chasing pack, a manager is telling his players that this is the year. Good on them. That's football, that is. Long may they keep believing it.