Plymouth Argyle FC · History

Plymouth Argyle Football Club is an English club from the port city of Plymouth, in Devon, founded in 1886 and turned professional in 1903. It plays at Home Park, wears green and white and is known as the Pilgrims, in memory of the Pilgrim Fathers who sailed from Plymouth in 1620; the Mayflower appears on the club crest. Its isolation in the far south-west of England, a long way from any other Football League club, has shaped its entire history.

From Argyle Football Club to the Pilgrims

The club was formed in 1886 as Argyle Football Club and played its first match on 16 October of that year. It folded in 1894 and was revived in 1897 by former members. The decisive step came in 1903: the club turned professional, took the name Plymouth Argyle, joined the Southern League and appointed Bob Jack, who would run the team for close to three decades. Its first professional fixture, on 1 September 1903, ended in a 2-0 win over West Ham United.

Argyle entered the Football League in 1920, when the Southern League was absorbed as the new Third Division. There began one of the strangest sequences in English football: six consecutive runners-up finishes in the Third Division South, from 1921-22 to 1926-27, in an era when only champions went up. The reward finally arrived in 1929-30 with the Third Division South title and promotion to the Second Division, where the club settled for the whole of the following decade.

The 1924 South American tour

In the middle of that run the club undertook an expedition remarkable for a third-tier side. In 1924 Argyle travelled to South America and beat the Uruguay national side 4-0 and Argentina 1-0. The Argentine press singled out the Welsh captain Moses Russell, a hard-tackling full-back who became the club's first great figure. The tour carried Plymouth's name across a continent that was only then organising its own football.

Home Park: bombs, rebuilds and records

Home Park opened in 1893 and staged rugby and athletics before football took over; Argyle played their first competitive match there on 5 September 1903. On 10 October 1936 it recorded its highest attendance, 43,596, for a 2-2 Second Division draw with Aston Villa. Five years later, in April 1941, German bombing of Plymouth wrecked the grandstand and left the pitch pitted with craters; the ground had to be rebuilt from scratch after the war.

It changed again in 2001 and 2002, when three new all-seater stands went up — the Devonport End, Lyndhurst Road and the Barn Park End — around the old main stand. That last structure, the Mayflower Grandstand, was rebuilt between 2019 and 2021. Capacity today is around 17,900.

Pelé, the 1984 semi-final and the Sturrock years

Argyle's story alternates long spells in the wilderness with sudden bursts of drama. The club won the Third Division South again in 1951-52 and in March 1973, as a third-tier side, beat Pelé's Santos 3-2 in front of 37,639 at Home Park. Its finest cup run came in 1984: again from the third tier, Argyle reached the FA Cup semi-finals and lost 1-0 to Watford.

The most productive period began in 2000 with the arrival of the Scot Paul Sturrock. In 2001-02 the team won Division Three with 102 points and 28 clean sheets, and two years later, in 2003-04, added the Division Two title to reach the second tier, where it stayed for six straight seasons. Its record victory, 8-1, was posted twice: against Millwall on 16 January 1932 and away to Hartlepool United on 7 May 1994.

Administration, rebuilding and the swings since

The fall was as quick as the rise. Argyle went down from the Championship in 2010 and, in March 2011, entered administration over unpaid tax, which brought a second successive relegation and a landing in League Two. Six seasons there ended when Derek Adams took the club back to League One in 2016-17. Relegation followed in 2018-19, promotion again in 2019-20, and in 2022-23 Argyle won League One with 101 points, returning to the Championship after thirteen years.

That stay lasted two seasons: after surviving on the final day of 2023-24, Argyle finished twenty-third in 2024-25 with 46 points and dropped back to League One. In that same campaign they produced one of the FA Cup's recent shocks by beating Liverpool, then leaders of the Premier League, 1-0 at Home Park. The businessman Simon Hallett has been majority shareholder since 2018.