Wolverhampton Wanderers - Live

Wolves Live

With a 1-0 win over Queens Park in April, the Wolverhampton Wanderers are back in the Premier League for 2009-2010. The Wanderers – or Wolves, as they are more commonly referred to – are an old club, started in 1877 with the name St. Luke’s, as the founders of the club, John Baynton and John Brodie, were students at St. Luke’s school in Blakenhall. In 1879, St. Luke’s joined with a local club and became the Wolverhampton Wanderers. Nine years later the club was one of twelve charter members of the English Football League.

Mediocrity plagued the club between the World Wars, before success returned when former player Stan Cullis became manager in 1947. His first season ended with an FA Cup Final victory – the first major honor for the club in over forty years. The 1950’s belonged to the Wolves, winning their first league title in 1954 and back-to-back titles in 1957-58, 1958-59. This was the heyday for the Wolverhampton Wanderers, enjoying success in the First Division for almost fifteen years.

The Wolves were the first club to install lights in their stadium. In the summer of 1953, the club played a series against foreign opposition dubbed “floodlight friendlies”. The marquee match was against Honved, a club featuring many players from the Hungarian national squad who humbled England twice in the World Cup. The Wolves took the game 3–2, leading Cullis to declare his club “Champions of the World.”

In 1964, Cullis was fired as a result of declining performance and the Wolves ended up out of the First Division for the first time in thirty seasons. Though the club spent only two years in the second tier before returning to the first, they never found the same kind of success they enjoyed during the Cullis era.

The most dismal period in the history of Wolverhampton Wanderers began in the early 1980’s, as the club dropped to the fourth division for the first time in almost 100 years of existence. The era was fraught with corrupt ownership, a decaying stadium, poor attendance and only rare cause for celebration. For nineteen years the Wolves were stuck in the lower tiers of English football, breaking out for one year into the Premier League before dropping back to the second tier.

The hiring of manager Mick McCarthy in 2006 has brought recent success. Wolves made the playoffs his first year, narrowly missed the second, and then claimed their first divisional title in 20 years. Now in the Premier League, with striker Sylvan Ebanks-Blake committing through 2013, the record signing of Kevin Doyle from Reading and other key moves, Wolverhampton Wanderers are poised to begin their return to prominence, maybe?!