Before Manchester City's four-peat, a side of part-timers won three straight League Cup finals

Manchester City's run of four consecutive League Cup triumphs under Pep Guardiola, completed between 2018 and 2021, is widely regarded as one of the most dominant streaks in the competition's history. But City were not the first side to put together a hat-trick of League Cup final wins at Wembley — that distinction belongs to a club whose players were, remarkably, part-timers rather than full-time professional footballers.

In an earlier era of English football, when the gap between the top flight and the lower reaches of the game was narrower than it is today, it was possible for a smaller club to reach the pinnacle of a major domestic cup competition while fielding players who combined football with jobs outside the sport. Winning a single League Cup final at Wembley would represent the high point of most clubs' history; winning three in succession, as part-timers, stands as an especially unusual achievement in the modern game.

A different era of English football

The feat is a reminder of how dramatically English football has changed in the decades since, as full-time professionalism became the norm even at lower-league level and the financial gulf between elite clubs and the rest of the pyramid widened considerably. Achievements of this kind, once possible for a well-organised smaller club with a talented core of players, would be virtually unthinkable in the current landscape of English football, where major cup finals are dominated almost exclusively by full-time professional sides from the top divisions.

The comparison with Manchester City's recent run underlines just how rare sustained cup success is, regardless of the era or the resources available to a club. While City's dominance was built on lavish investment and a squad of full-time international players, the part-timers who preceded them in winning three straight League Cup finals did so with far more limited means — a contrast still cited whenever conversation turns to the greatest cup runs in the competition's history.