A relatively short blog this week as quite frankly I am sick of writing the same thing over and over again each and every week through this season. Equally, the time for in-depth analysis has long gone, the situation is completely clearcut: if Orient beat Burton Albion tomorrow afternoon they guarantee their League 1 survival. There are of course other permutations depending on ours and Exeter’s respective results, but just for once in this wholly depressing campaign I think we would all prefer us to do things the easier way.  

While I really didn’t expect a great deal from our trip to Bloomfield Road to take on a resurgent Blackpool, it did feel like the players put in more of a shift than they had the previous weekend at home to Rotherham. Although didn’t it completely sum up Orient’s 2025/26 season that the winning goal game from a silly penalty conceded for shirt-pulling, which was then converted off the back of Will Dennis’ foot after hitting the post?

Our 22^nd defeat of the campaign combined with Wimbledon’s win at Wigan means that the relegation picture is down to just us and Exeter to avoid the drop. Although, we did have to be somewhat thankful to Saturday’s opponents Burton for finding a second half equalizer against the Grecians to prevent it being even worse for us.

We have covered the reasons as to why this season has gone so completely wrong way too many times for me to want to go over them yet again, but essentially the whole season, if not the entire future development of the club rests upon 90 minutes of football tomorrow afternoon. As fans our job is to get behind the team as best we can and hope they can re-find the improved level of performance that we know deep down they are capable of.

When Nigel Travis and Kent Teague rescued the club from the brink of extinction, the third tier seemed a long way away, but thanks to their careful and forward-thinking stewardship we reached it, (via two league titles I hasten to add!), in just six seasons. To then be on the verge of reaching the Championship just two years later was simply phenomenal. Admittedly there were missteps and significant bumps along the way not least losing our beloved manager Justin Edinburgh, but the overall trajectory of the club has been unquestionably upwards. So what is so different now?

We know from their open and frequent communication that the board’s vision is for the club is to become sustainable in the Championship, however delivering on that ambitious desire is far from straightforward, and so it is proving.  Whether we like it or not modern football is ever-increasingly about money. Even at National League, League 2 and League 1 level, the more financial resource a club has at its disposal the easier it is for them to progress towards the Championship, Hollywood-funded Wrexham being very much a case in point.

However, those clubs without the benefit of huge financial backing face a particular conundrum if they want to progress higher up the EFL and even have a tilt at reaching the “promised land” (sic!) of the Premier League. Do they gamble, risking money they don’t have in the hope of getting to a point where the financial rewards can eradicate the debt incurred in getting there? Or do they try to run a tight financial ship ensuring the self-sustainability of the club but risking being left behind by clubs with much more wealth? There are plenty of examples of both, but the risk if it goes wrong is the potential loss of the club forever.

Orient find themselves very much in between those two schools of thought: we don’t have the kind of financial backing that could see us simply spend our way up the tiers, but we do have ambitious owners and are located in a growing and increasingly attractive area of London. 

The logic of a much bigger stadium to fund our future existence in the Championship makes sense, it is getting there that is proving the challenge. For the time being we have a relatively modest budget, ranking bang in the middle of the division according to Football League World; as such we are reliant on shrewdness in the transfer market if we are to challenge for promotion. We saw last season that if we get it right we are capable of challenging for promotion, but 2025/26 has taught us that the margin for error is very small.

As supporters who have enjoyed some very good times and seen some real progress over the past 9 years, we can only hope that we can survive in League 1 and then build again for next season, as the alternative is simply too depressing to think about.

Up the O’s!