James Belshaw says taking Notts County back to Wembley is a “surreal honour” for a supporter who grew up with the club's highs, lows and near-misses. On Monday, the Magpies will try to win promotion at Wembley for the second time in four years, with a place in League One and a return to the third tier for the first time since 2015 on the line.

Belshaw, who joined Notts in January, said his own story has made the run to the League Two play-off final feel even stranger. The goalkeeper is from a family that has supported the Magpies for generations, and he lined up against them in 2020 when Harrogate beat Notts in the National League promotion final. “There were times when you didn't know whether you would have a football club to follow because of financial difficulties, and previous things that are well documented within the history of this club,” he said.

That history is heavy. Notts County were founding members of the Football League in 1888, but by 2019 they had dropped out of the English Football League and into non-league level after two relegations in five seasons. The club's decline came after a turbulent decade marked by fake sheikhs, winding-up petitions, unpaid wages and fears that the club would not survive.

Belshaw pointed to the period that followed the “Munto finance thing” in 2009-10, which brought Sven-Goran Eriksson briefly to Notts, as part of the club's broader swing in fortunes. “Following the promotion to League One and then the Munto finance thing [which brought Eriksson briefly to Notts] in '09-10, to then have success pretty much immediately in League One and then the two relegations, it was a tough time to be a Notts fan,” he said. “There are a lot of Notts fans that would argue that it's a League One football club and should be playing at that standard as a minimum,” he added.

He said the years in the National League helped change the mood around the club, even if the drop was painful. “But to be on the right path to that, I think a lot of Notts fans would definitely take the years in the National League to be supporting a football club that they can be proud of that is ultimately still a football club, because that obviously was real danger,” he said. “To now have an ownership group that cares about the club, that's a stable club, that has a set way of running the football club in a way that has bought success can't be overlooked.”

That ownership is the Danish pair Christoffer and Alexander Reedtz, who bought Notts after the club fell out of the Football League in 2019 and bankrolled the return to League Two in 2023. Their backing has given Notts a stability the club spent years without, and Belshaw's arrival at Meadow Lane in January has only added to the fairytale element of this latest promotion bid.

What happens next is simple enough to write and hard enough to do: Notts County must finish the job at Wembley. If they do, they will move back into League One and end one of the more battered journeys in the modern history of English football with a promotion their fans have spent years waiting to see again.