2009–10 Notts County F.C. season
| 2009–10 season | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Chairman | John Armstrong-Holmes Peter Trembling Ray Trew | ||
| Manager | Ian McParland Dave Kevan and Michael Johnson (interim) Hans Backe Dave Kevan (interim) Steve Cotterill | ||
| League Two | 1st (champions) | ||
| FA Cup | Fifth round | ||
| League Cup | First round | ||
| League Trophy | First round | ||
| Top goalscorer | League: Lee Hughes (30) All: Lee Hughes (33) | ||
| Highest home attendance | 11,331 vs Cheltenham Town, 1 May | ||
| Lowest home attendance | 4,213 vs Bradford City, 6 November | ||
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During the 2009–10 English football season, Notts County competed in Football League Two, the fourth tier of the English football league system. Shortly before the season began, the club was subject to a high-profile takeover by Munto Finance, purportedly a wealthy Middle East-based consortium with ambitions to take the club to the Premier League. The former England manager Sven-Göran Eriksson was appointed director of football, and lavish spending began in apparent early efforts to achieve these ambitions. In reality, Munto Finance was controlled by the convicted fraudster Russell King, and the club had been acquired as part of an elaborate scheme to list a fake mining company on the stock exchange. The promised money did not exist, King fled when the scheme collapsed and Notts County were left deeply in debt. Eriksson resigned following a further takeover by Ray Trew, who prevented bankruptcy and oversaw a successful conclusion to the season, with the team winning the League Two championship and promotion to Football League One. The team also fared well in the FA Cup, reaching the last sixteen of the competition.
The season saw four different owners, three permanent first-team managers and two spells of interim management. In total, the team played 54 competitive matches, winning 31, drawing 14 and losing nine. Lee Hughes scored 33 goals across all competitions, becoming the first Notts County player to score 30 goals in a season since Tommy Lawton sixty years earlier, while Ben Davies made the most appearances, featuring in 51 games. Munto Finance's takeover and the wider scheme of which it formed a part were investigated by journalists from the beginning. It was the subject of a 2011 episode of the BBC One show Panorama and a BBC Sounds podcast series in 2022. Notts County continued to experience off-field problems over the following years, and the team were relegated to non-League football in 2019; coverage of the club's plight and subsequent attempts to recover often refer to the events of 2009.