The ground at Nelson FC is called ‘Little Wembley’ and however resplendent the scene at its far grander namesake where the FA Cup final is played, 286 days and 600 or so games from now, it will do well to match the inestimable beauty of Saturday, when the arc of the old competition’s journey began once more.The oasis of green in sun-starched east Lancashire has owed a lot to the club recently inviting the local fire service to carry out a practice drill which entailed spraying a lot of water on the pitch.Limited supplies are also being piped a few hundred yards from Pendle Water, the river you cross to reach the ground, which once powered the local cotton mill, whose 200ft chimney and stone-built workers cottages form the backdrop to one of the tournament’s 208 Preliminary Qualifying Round ties.By 11am groundsman Trevor Stamworth is marking out the pitch, which locals took to calling ‘Little Wembley’ decades back because of its quality. Staff are setting up in the little bar area, where sepia images provide reminders of Nelson’s small but very significant part in football history – a 4-2 win over Real Madrid in 1923, during a tour of Spain, which made them the first British side to beat the club on their own turf.A couple of deckchairs are set out in the front gardens of the workers’ cottages which form a warm-up area beside the pitch and Nelson manager Arron Ripley arrives at 1pm to lay out the team’s jerseys in the dressing room and hone a pre-match pep-talk which will include him reminding his players that only one in 3,400 people in Britain get to play in the FA Cup, so they should seize this day.‘You’re just looking for the small details that might get through,’ 32-year-old Ripley reflects as we sit in the dug-out, watching his players warm-up. ‘We look to put detail on things in many ways. ‘A friend of mine who’s an analyst, puts together clips for the players and we’ve got GPS vests for every game. Our video recorder’s broken at the moment, but we usually watch games back.’ Daily Mail Sport headed to Nelson for the opening round of FA Cup ties Nelson’s ‘Little Wembley’ ground perfectly captures the magic of the FA Cup Groundsman Trevor Stamworth marks out the pitch ahead of the match against Stockport GeorgiansThis bucolic scene on a peerless summer’s day creates the impression that there has not been a cloud in Nelson’s sky, though the reality is very different. The club has been the subject of various failed ownership experiments in recent times, leading to the club being in a state of financial peril, two years ago. The lumpy pitch always flooded, the team lost almost every week and they got barely 50 through the gate.This coincided with local businessmen Chris Price, who is in the industrial cleaning business, learning that it might be for sale. He and a friend Stewart Fort, an engineering entrepreneur, bought it for the best part of £30,000, and have together set out on a mission to build a thriving community club and take it from tier 10 to the tier eight Northern Premier League whilst doing so.The fruits of their labour and invention are all around the place, from the new club shop and stand, both built out of converted shipping containers, the smart, timber-built food facility and the small ‘Sponsors Lounge’, where Fort is helping lay out the knives and forks at midday. Price and Fort estimate they’ve put in £700,000, so far, with the £162,000 the FA has contributed a testament to the role the governing body is not always given full credit for.From a near certain plunge to the West Lancashire League – a relegation spared by another club folding – Nelson won promotion to the North West Counties Premier Division last season and have started the new campaign with a win. The talk is of promotion again. But roads to recovery are neither easy nor linear in football.Despite the co-owners laying out £32,000 on pitch drainage and £52,000 on new dressing rooms, seven of the ground’s eight floodlights have suddenly failed and contractors are currently battling to get new cables laid and get those lights back on. Nelson aim to have 260 paying fans through the turnstiles each week Co-owners Chris Price and Stewart Fort – who bought the club for just shy of £30,000, have turned Nelson into a local success story Nelson’s ground is called Little Wembley due to the high-quality playing surface Fans enjoyed beers pitchside on a glorious day in east LancashireHere, in a microcosm, is evidence of why the FA Cup, which seems to have become a minor consideration for football’s great and good, matters so very much. Price and Fort are not petro-dollar billionaires or captains of finance and while they find the money for capital projects, the football side of things must fund itself. The more advertising boards they sell, the more resource will be available to Ripley to find players who, at this level, are paid an average of £100 a week.‘Reaching the First Round Proper would earn us nearly £25,000 and that would make a massive difference to us,’ says Fort, as he reflects on some of the unglamorous work of the past few years here, including shifting 27 tons of muck out of the goalmouths to create the flat surface he looks out across. ‘The bigger picture is finding the 260 or so people we aim to get through the turnstiles every week. But this competition is everything for us.’Ripley feels the significance of the income just as acutely, given that Nelson’s new ambition puts him under the same pressure that every manager knows – and contributed to the club parting company with him, just before Christmas 2024. ‘They sacked me after we’d lost five games but after my replacement didn’t get us promoted, they brought me back and last season we managed it,’ he says, ‘So yes, there’s all the pressure that comes at any ambitious club.’That promotion has delivered Nelson to this, their first FA Cup appearance since 2017, since tier nine clubs are the lowest level who enter. ‘Over £1,000 winnings if we win today and that all goes into pot,’ Ripley says.His managerial ethos entails being ‘very locally-driven’, with only one of his squad living more than half an hour from Nelson, and putting the time in to knowing who you’re up against. Ripley is very much part-time, too – a digital project manager with filling station operator EG – but he watched opponents Stockport Georgians beat Wythenshawe Town in the Midland League Premier a few days earlier.The preparation shows. Nelson are stronger and quicker to the ball and, vitally, have Sefton Gonzales, a powerful and combative centre forward who works as a storeman, in their ranks. They lead through Lewis Brown, one of a Nelson midfield tandem who dominate the early stages, though no manner of opposition scouting can quell Stockport’s Lucas Berry, a former Salford City academy player who leaves the home team’s defence standing as he equalises. Nelson’s Sefton Gonzales celebrates scoring the winner with a back-flip The victory for the hosts set up a meeting with eighth-tier Witton Albion in the next round of the competition The club have spent £52,000 on new dressing roomsA compelling game of combative and technically proficient football evolves on the Little Wembley baize, and it morphs into a question of which of the two outstanding goalscoring threats – Gonzales or Berry – will ultimately prevail. Berry spins and scores again after Luke Hepple has sent Nelson 2-1 up, but it is Gonzales who controls in close space and fires Nelson’s winner before sending his 6ft 2in frame through an improbable backflip.The 3-2 scoreline blinks out from the new digital screen where they’re proud to display an image of the FA Cup and 87-year-old Eric Manning, whose meticulous, handwritten reports of the team’s games are typed up and published in the weekly Nelson Leader, can start reflecting on history repeating itself.Next up, in the Preliminary Round, Nelson play eighth-tier Witton Albion, who they improbably beat on the way to a 3-2 loss at Port Vale in one of their most memorable Cup runs, in 1951. Manning missed the Port Vale game because his parents insisted on taking him on holiday. Daily Mail Sport’s Ian Herbert interviews Nelson manager Arron RipleyWe will be with Nelson at Witton, as the next in a series of pieces in which we take a club, any club, from the Preliminary Qualifying Round of the FA Cup, and follow them through the competition until they are defeated, then transferring allegiance to the victors…- and so on until Wembley.The same project which Daily Mail football writer Brian James embarked on, exactly 50 years ago this month, for what became his legendary book, Journey to Wembley. We hope it will build a picture of the real football – our football – full of its hope, dreams, triumphs and setbacks.Another of Nelson’s great historical claims is a 100% home record against Manchester United, given that they once beat them in the old Second Division and have never played them since.‘We invited them over to play us and to see if we could extend that record,’ says Price. ’They’ve politely declined. We live in hope and they’d be so welcome!’ But a venture deep into the Cup would mean much more. ‘We want people to know what’s going on down here at our little place,’ Price says. ‘We believe that if we build, they will come.’