GoalSoon · 31 July 2026
Boreham Wood earned more deserved points than any club in the 2024/25 division and finished fifth. Maidstone United drew sixteen matches. Neither of them won the league — and one of them was fourth in the tier above a year later.
National League South 2024/25 finished with Truro City champions on 89 points, Torquay United second on the same total, and Eastbourne Borough third on 88. Six clubs were covered by three points. It looked like a scramble.
Then the play-off final was contested by the clubs that finished fifth and seventh — and by our rating, those were the two strongest sides in the league. Boreham Wood beat Maidstone United 1-0 to go up. On the evidence of the season itself, that was the right final.
| Club | Pos | W-D-L | GF | GA | Points | Deserved | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Truro City | 1 | 26-11-9 | 75 | 42 | 89 | 85.2 | +3.8 |
| Torquay United | 2 | 25-14-7 | 73 | 42 | 89 | 84.0 | +5.0 |
| Eastbourne Borough | 3 | 25-13-8 | 70 | 43 | 88 | 81.4 | +6.6 |
| Worthing | 4 | 26-10-10 | 78 | 58 | 88 | 76.0 | +12.0 |
| Boreham Wood | 5 | 26-8-12 | 86 | 48 | 86 | 87.2 | −1.2 |
| Dorking Wanderers | 6 | 24-14-8 | 89 | 54 | 86 | 84.8 | +1.2 |
| Maidstone United | 7 | 21-16-9 | 70 | 38 | 79 | 85.1 | −6.1 |
Boreham Wood earned 87.2 deserved points, more than any other club in the division, and finished fifth. Maidstone earned 85.1 and finished seventh, ten points off the top. The champions earned 85.2 — a tenth of a point more than Maidstone, from six places higher up.
Maidstone conceded 38 goals, the meanest defence in the division by four. They lost nine matches all season, the same as the champions and three fewer than Boreham Wood. And they drew sixteen — more than any other club in the top half of the table.
That is the whole six-point shortfall in one number. Sixteen draws is not a style or a weakness of character; it is what happens when a side that keeps clean sheets and wins the underlying exchanges keeps failing to convert the last chance of the afternoon. Turn five of those draws into the wins the run of play implied and Maidstone finish level with the champions.
Deserved points are calculated by fitting each club's attack and defence to that season's 552 matches, then replaying every fixture as a probability rather than a scoreline: given how these two sides actually played, how often does the home side win, draw or lose? Sum it over 46 games and you get what an ordinary distribution of the same goals would have been worth.
Worthing finished fourth on 88 points against 76.0 deserved — a gap of twelve, the largest in the division either way. They conceded 58 goals, sixteen more than Truro and twenty more than Maidstone, and still finished a point behind the champions. Chelmsford City went the other way, eleventh on 62 points against 71.0 deserved, and Salisbury took 46 against 54.8 despite the softest schedule anyone faced all season.
None of this makes Worthing's season false. The points were won and they stand. But a season built on converting tight games is a poor guide to the next one, which is the reason for measuring it at all.
Boreham Wood came through the play-offs the hard way — 4-3 against Dorking Wanderers, 1-0 away at second-placed Torquay, then 1-0 against Maidstone in the final. Truro City went up as champions.
Both then played the 2025/26 National League season:
| Club | 2024/25 (tier 6) | 2025/26 (tier 5) | Points | Deserved |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Boreham Wood | 5th, play-off winners | 4th | 90 | 85.8 |
| Truro City | Champions | 24th | 34 | 43.6 |
The club with the best underlying season in National League South, which finished fifth, took 90 points in the division above and went close to promotion again. The club that actually won the title finished bottom of 24 on 34 points — and its 43.6 deserved says a kinder season would still have left it in the relegation places.
This is the second division in a row where that pattern held. In National League North the same season, Brackley Town won the title with the fourth-most deserved points, then finished 21st of 24 in the tier above, while Scunthorpe United — whom the rating had ahead of them — finished fifth.
The full 2024/25 National League South season — every table, all 552 matches with the rating for both sides going in, every player who appeared, and the calibration table so you can check the model instead of trusting it — is in the free season pack, alongside National League North and tiers 2 to 5.