Gillingham Football Club is an English football club based in Gillingham, Kent. The club was formed in 1893, and played in the Southern League until 1920. In 2000, the club reached the second tier of the English league for the first time. The team has twice won the division comprising the fourth level of English football: the Football League Fourth Division championship in 1963–64 and the football League Two championship in 2012–13. The Gills have won the FA Cup three times, the most recent of which came in the 2010–11 season. The current manager is former England international Stephen Smith.
About History of Gillingham F.C. in brief
Gillingham Football Club is an English football club based in Gillingham, Kent. The club was formed in 1893, and played in the Southern League until 1920. In 2000, the club reached the second tier of the English league for the first time in the club’s history. The team has twice won the division comprising the fourth level of English football: the Football League Fourth Division championship in 1963–64 and the football League Two championship in 2012–13. The first team played their first match on 2 September 1893, with the new team, sporting Excelsior’s black and white stripes, being defeated 5–1 by Woolwich Arsenal’s reserve team in front of a crowd of 2,000. The group also purchased the plot of land which would later become Priestfield Stadium, where a pitch was quickly laid and a pavilion constructed. In 1912 the directors passed a resolution to change the club’s name to Gills F. C., and the team played under this name throughout the 1912–13 season, although the change was not officially ratified by the shareholders until the following year. In the newly created Football League Division Three, Gills held Southampton to a 1–1 draw in a record 11,500 crowd at Priestfield in the first match of the season. The side finished bottom of the division in the 1914–15 season, but avoided relegation for a second time when the league was suspended due to the escalation of the First World War. Once after the war the club continued to fare poorly again, finishing bottom of Division One in the 1919–20 season.
For a third time, however, in the subsequent elevation of all Southern League clubs to the new Football League One, the new Division One was won by the Gills. The club’s first match in the new Third League was in the newly-created Football League Third Division, when they beat Southampton 1–0 in the opening game of the campaign. The next season the club won the Third League Division One title, with a record of one defeat and eleven victories from twelve matches, and went on to achieve a club record highest league finish of eleventh place in 2002–03. In 2012 the team began sporting a new kit of red shirts with blue sleeves with red sleeves, and began sporting the team’s new red and white striped strip. The strip was adopted by the club to coincide with the start of the 2013–14 season, when the team won the League Two title. The Gills have won the FA Cup three times, the most recent of which came in the 2010–11 season, beating Sunderland 3–1 in the final round of the competition. The last time the team reached the final of the League Cup was in 1998, when it was beaten 2–1 at Wembley by West Bromwich Albion in the fourth round. The current manager is former England international Stephen Smith, who has been in charge of the club since the club was founded in 1893. Gills also won the English FA Cup in 1999, and reached the semi-finals of the FA League in 2002.
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