The top 10 best-supported clubs in EFL League One | OneFootball

League One may not grab the attention that the Premier League or Championship do, but there's still incredible loyalty to be found in the third tier.

The third tier of the English league system doesn't get anything like the attention that those above it do, but there are clubs at that level which attract incredible loyalty from fans, so here are the ten best-supported League One clubs.

One of the greatest strengths that English football has is its strength in depth. While there are other top-flight divisions that can challenge the Premier League in terms of the number of people attending matches, attendance figures in most other countries start to tail off quite quickly once you start to look below the top couple of divisions.

There can be variables that can affect the average attendances in a division. A big club getting relegated will skew them upwards, while the opposite may happen should someone near the top of the attendance tabl;e get promoted. But the numbers over time do tend to be consistent.

This is less the case between clubs in the same division. League One is a mixture of bigger clubs who've fallen on hard times, mid-EFL stalwarts and former non-league clubs who've had a run of success, and expectations of how many people a club can attract will vary wildly within the division from club to club. At this early stage in the 2026-27 season, the most-supported team in the division has an average attendance more than ten times that of the smallest.

And in League One, these numbers do matter. Clubs in League One receive about £2 million each per season in a basic award amount and solidarity payments from the Premier League, and the financial gap between this division and the Championship is growing. The last TV deal saw Championship broadcasting revenues rise by 46% while League One revenues only rose by 25%.

This means that, the further we descend the football pyramid, the more important match-day revenues are to clubs. With all of this in mind, then, here are the ten clubs in League One who are doing the best job at getting people through their turnstiles on a Saturday afternoon.

10 ? ? Oxford United - 10,208

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Oxford United have experienced a drop in attendances following their relegation from the Championship at the end of the 2025-26 season, but this doesn't mean a fall in loyalty from their own fan base. Their average in their two Championship seasons was over 11,000, and this has fallen away with the return of League One football to The Kassam Stadium this season.

There will be a small number of fans who are put off by a less-enticing fixture list, but smaller away followings will have a greater effect on the average but, significantly, early attendances for the 2026-27 season have been more than 1,000 higher than they were during their promotion season in 2023-24, which indicates that, although the problems the club faces behind the scenes have been well-documented, the fans' loyalty hasn't shown any signs of diminishing.

9 ? ? Luton Town - 10,945

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The similarities between Oxford United and Luton Town are striking. Both clubs reached unprecedented heights under colourful ownership in the 1980s and won major silverware before dropping back to the lower divisions and then into the non-league game before bouncing back in the EFL. Both have imperfect homes which they have plans to replace in the near future.

But Luton's ascent once back in the League went further than Oxford's. They reached the Premier League in 2024, but with two successive relegations back to League One, it has felt as though the club have been suffering something of an extended hangover from that since then, with their first season back in the third tier seeing them finishing short of a play-off place.

But as with Oxford, their attendance figures have both also been stable. They've remained static since relegation from the Premier League and remain close to Kenilworth Road's 12,000 capacity. With work having already started on their new 25,000-capacity stadium, which the club are hoping will be open for the 2028-29 season, the Hatters will soon be moving into a bigger home into which they'll be hoping to grow.

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Unlike Oxford and Luton, the one thing that Reading already have is a Premier League-ready home, in the form of the Select Car Leasing Stadium, which opened in 1998 and holds just over 24,000 people. But unlike these other two clubs, the Royals' attendances have been falling consistently, and for a long time.

When the club were last relegated from the Premier League in 2013, their average attendance was a near-capacity 23,862. This number fell by 5,000 immediately upon relegation, which isn't terribly surprising, but what may concern club owner Rob Couhig is that crowds have continued to fall consistently since then.

This can be partly ascribed to the disastrous ownership of Dai Yongge. By the time Reading were relegated from the Championship in 2024 they'd fallen to only just over 14,000. But Yongge has gone now, and that decline hasn't been arrested. Their average attendance for the first three games of 2026-27 is 11,756; were that to remain their average for the season, it would be their lowest since 1999-2000. And perhaps what Reading need more than anything else is a winning team. They have only finished above 7th in any League table once since winning the Championship in 2012.

7 ? ? Milton Keynes Dons - 12,852

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Next year will mark the 20th anniversary of the opening of Stadium MK, but over the intervening two decades there has been precious little evidence that this contentious club ever needed a stadium with a capacity of over 30,000. Attendance figures for their opening matches of 2026-27 have been encouraging for them. These are the highest they've enjoyed since they had a season in the Championship in 2012-13, and they're 50% up on last season.

But Stadium MK has never had an average home attendance of even close to half of its capacity, and an underwhelming start to 2026-27 on the pitch, which saw them draw five of their first six games and lose the other one, may call into doubt whether numbers stay as high. Season ticket prices aren't particularly low - the Yorkshire Post reported them as the 11th-highest in the division for this season - and the circumstances which led to them being in Milton Keynes in the first place continues to leave a sour taste in the mouth for some fans.

The big test for MK Dons was always assumed to be how they might increase should the club get into the upper reaches of the Championship or the Premier League, but there's been little evidence so far in 2026-27 that they'll be getting there any time soon.

6 ? ? Notts County - 13,756

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Getting promoted from League Two to League One certainly seems to have an effect on crowd size. Notts County joined Milton Keynes in going up at the end of 2025-26, and their opening two crowds of 2026-27 showed a 40% increase on last season.

Notts' growth is all the more impressive because they are firmly not in a one-club city. Their growth has come against the backdrop of a similar story of improvement just over the River Trent at The City Ground, where Nottingham Forest have established themselves as a Premier League club and have even played European football, reaching the semi-finals of the Europa League in 2025-26.

But Notts County have grown by focusing on themselves rather than what their cross-city rivals have been getting up to. They've been making solid progress over the four years since they returned to the EFL behind Wrexham in 2023, with an improvement in league position every year since then. Crowds so far this season at Meadow Lane have averaged more than doubled over the last five years.

5 ? ? Plymouth Argyle - 15,869

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One of the more tantalising questions that can be asked of any EFL club is that of what Plymouth Argyle might be capable of, were they to ascend all the way to the Premier League. They are, after all, the sole professional club in a city of 264,000 people, but they've never played in the top-flight before.

What's striking about Plymouth's attendance figures is the extent to which they haven't fluctuated over time. The club drew an average of 16,500 over their two seasons in the Championship, but while there has been a small drop since relegation back to League One in 2025, that fall has been nowhere near calamitous, especially considering that their 2025-26 season wasn't especially good, although losing just two of their last 16 games of last season will have allowed a degree of optimism to build around Home Park which has been vindicated by a solid start to 2026-27.

4 ? ? Huddersfield Town - 16,573

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As the only unbeaten team in League One after six matches have been played, Huddersfield Town fans might be starting to wonder whether this is their year after two years of falling short of being able to make a play-off place following their 2024 relegation from the Championship.

Attendances, however, have fallen year-on-year since that relegation, though Huddersfield may well expect them to recover and start growing again, should their strong start to the season on the pitch continue. Even after their 2018 relegation from the Premier League, they were still attracting crowds of almost 22,000 back in the Championship. The aim for this season will be to get the team back to that level again and hope that attendance figures follow suit.

3 ? ? Bradford City - 19,299

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It's now been 19 years since Bradford City slashed their season ticket prices to just £138 in order to attract more people into Valley Parade on a Saturday afternoon, and the results have been startling. Attendances have fluctuated over the years since, but the Bantams have never reported an average home attendance of under 10,000 since, and the crowds for their first games of 2026-27 are nudging 20,000, following their promotion from League Two at the end of 2025-26.

And the most striking aspect to this is that on the pitch over those years, the Bradford City team has frequently failed to deliver. In 2021-22, for example, they finished in 14th place in League Two, yet were still able to manage to attract an average home attendance of 15,582. And with Valley Parade capacity of 24,840, there is still space into which the club could grow their crowds further, should they be able to maintain their upwards momentum on the pitch.

2 ? ? Leicester City - 27,744

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It says something for the fall of Leicester City over the last couple of years that the twenty League wins they've managed since the start of the 2024-25 season is fewer than nine of the clubs taking part in this season's League One managed last season alone, including the four promoted from League Two.

There can be no sugar-coating that the last two years have been a waking nightmare for Foxes fans, with two relegations sending them from the Premier League down to League One, followed by a less than stellar start to life back in the third tier. A six-point deduction for breaches of PSR rules ultimately sent them down from the Championship.

But while they may be incandescent at the way in which the club has been run in recent years, Leicester fans clearly haven't given up on their team yet. Their opening matches of 2026-27 have seen almost 28,000 people turning out to watch them on average, a figure which represents a fall of less than 1,200 on their average in the Championship last season.

1 ? ? Sheffield Wednesday - 31,306

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The summer of 2026 has brought the return of a commodity which has been in extremely short supply in recent years at Hillsborough; optimism. The sale of the club to David Storch's consortium at the end of 2025-26 has reawakened something in Sheffield Wednesday supporters, and although expectations in League One were, on account of the sheer amount of work that needed to be done to their playing staff over the summer, necessarily modest, the team have responded by shooting to the top of the League One table.

But that loyalty wasn't invented this summer. To say that the 2025-26 season was a waking nightmare for Wednesdayites is something of an understatement. The shortcomings of the team following their disastrous summer of 2025 were already clear; 18 points' worth of deductions made relegation an inevitability by the autumn, and it's worth remembering that, given that they finished on zero points, they would have been by far the worst team in the division even if they hadn't been docked a single point. Even then, the average home crowd at Hillsborough in 2025-26 was 23,199, and it's risen by more than a third despite dropping a division.

And this stretches back far further than last season. Sheffield Wednesday have become a byword for underachievement since relegation from the Premier League in 2000, yet average crowds for a season have only fallen below 20,000 twice since then, and they never did at all under the ownership of Dejphon Chansiri. Should they be able to maintain it at over 30,000 for the whole of this season, it'll be the first time they've done so since the 1967-68 season. It remains a little early to be definitively saying that they're BACK, but it's been a solid start, and the mood around the club couldn't be much more different to this time last year.