League One Title Winning Seasons Compared: Where Do Lincoln City 2025-26 Rank

League One Title Winning Seasons Compared: Where Do Lincoln City 2025-26 Rank

League One has produced some genuinely dominant title-winning campaigns over the years, and with Lincoln City closing in on promotion, the League One odds have long since made the destination clear. The only real debate left is where Michael Skubala’s side will rank among the division’s most impressive champions.

The benchmark: Birmingham City 2024-25

Last season’s title race did not so much set a benchmark as detonate one. Birmingham City finished on 111 points, winning 34 of their 46 games, and in doing so broke not just the League One record, but the all-time points record for any professional league in the world. They scored 84 goals and conceded just 31, finishing 19 points clear of Wrexham in second. That number almost certainly will never be beaten, and it puts everything else in the division’s history firmly in second place.

The previous high-water marks

Before Birmingham rewrote the record books, Wolverhampton Wanderers held the League One points record with 103, set in 2013-14 when they won the title by nine points over Brentford. Charlton Athletic matched that total in 2011-12, winning 30 of their 46 games and finishing eight points clear of Sheffield Wednesday. Plymouth Argyle also reached 101 in 2022-23, pipping Ipswich Town to the title on a remarkable final day. Those three campaigns, Wolves, Charlton, and Plymouth, represent what a genuinely dominant League One season looks like, short of Birmingham’s freakish 2024-25.

Where Lincoln sit right now

With seven games remaining, Lincoln sit on 84 points, seven ahead of Cardiff in second and 18 clear of Bolton in third. Promotion is settled, and the title almost certainly is too. What remains is where this campaign ends up in the historical rankings, and the underlying numbers make a strong case for it sitting among the better League One title-winning seasons of the past decade.

Lincoln have scored 74 league goals at a rate of 1.9 per game, and their attack has been built on spread rather than dependence on one player. Reeco Hackett leads the division’s second-best attacking unit with nine goals, while Jack Moylan and Rob Street have contributed eight each, and captain Tendayi Darikwa has chipped in with four from right back. At the other end, they have conceded just 32 league goals all season – the fewest of any club in the division – averaging 0.87 per game. No other side in League One comes close to that defensive record, and it is the combination of those two numbers, scoring freely while keeping the opposition out, that separates Lincoln from most of the title winners in the comparison table above.

A strong finish puts them in the company of Luton Town’s 94-point title campaign in 2018-19 and Wigan Athletic’s 92 in 2021-22. A quieter run-in would still leave them well above Doncaster Rovers’ 84 in 2012-13 and Wigan’s 87 in 2015-16. Only Birmingham City’s world-record 111 last season and Sheffield United’s 100 in 2016-17 look genuinely beyond reach.