There will not be any heated seats waiting for Premier League leaders Arsenal at Mansfield Town on Saturday, but there will be the smell of a fresh lick of paint at the 10,000-capacity One Call Stadium.
Published March 6, 2026 • Source: https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/czd87gl664po
By Andrew Aloia, BBC Sport, East Midlands  and  Charlie Slater, BBC East Midlands Today
There will not be any heated seats waiting for Premier League leaders Arsenal at Mansfield Town on Saturday, but there will be the smell of a fresh lick of paint at the 10,000-capacity One Call Stadium.
Mansfield's first appearance in the fifth round of the FA Cup for more than half a century is also one of the highest-profile games in the club's 129-year history.
Chief executive Carolyn Radford freely admits that the League One club are much more used to the "unglamorous" side of football â the freezing winter treks to rivals both near and far flung in the lower reaches of the professional game.
This is a side who have taken on the likes of Worksop and Kettering during the 15 years in which Carolyn and her husband John have backed Mansfield's rise from non-league level to League One.
"This is what football is, days like this which mean everything," she tells BBC East Midlands Today.
"You have all those unglamorous matches, rainy Tuesday games away with a four- or five-hour drive back home, just to get up for work the next day.
"For supporters and for us it makes everything worthwhile, and shows that it doesn't matter if expectations say you shouldn't do something."
More bums on seats - just not heated seats
Huge sums of money have been ploughed into Mansfield Town since John Radford bought the club in 2010. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/m/mansfield_town/9023828.stm)
The Stags were a cash-strapped non-league side then, and did not own their ground or training facility.
They now own both, and have since moved up two divisions and quadrupled their average home attendance to about 8,000 in that time.
And yet, for all the years of development, getting ready to host Arsenal has been likened to preparing for a "shotgun wedding", according to Carolyn, as "there is not much time between rounds to kind of embrace it".
Minor improvements â be it a coat of paint or fixing taps â have been rushed through in the weeks since Mansfield's upstaging of Premier League side Burnley in the fourth round.
Still, John says Arsenal will just have to do without some of the luxuries that they are used to for Saturday's lunchtime kick-off (12:15 GMT).
"We were at Burnley the other week and their boardroom had heated seats. Now, we don't quite have heated seats, but Mansfield is always sunny," the club owner and chairman says with a laugh.
It was from those toasty seats at Turf Moor that the Radfords watched Mansfield fight back from a goal down to beat Burnley in February, with second-half goals from Rhys Oates and Louis Reed helping Nigel Clough's Stags through.
It set Mansfield up for the tie with Arsenal, a side that John admits he "keeps an eye on", but in the same breath he leaves little doubt that he is "Mansfield through and through".
He does, however, relish the fact that the win against Burnley means Mansfield have beaten more Premier League sides in 2026 than Arsenal's north London rivals Tottenham Hotspur have managed.
"There was a lot of excitement and high fives in the household when the draw was made," he says.
And there could be no more fearsome prospect for the mid-table League One club than the Gunners â a side who sit 59 places above them in the football pyramid and boast a 100% winning record in the Champions League.
Mansfield's best run in the FA Cup for 51 years has included two upsets already, with the win at Burnley coming after they bundled Championship side Sheffield United out, as well as a penalty shootout win against Accrington Stanley.
"We've earned the right to be here," John says. "Unfortunately, it's against Arsenal, who are top of the Premier League at the moment and on fire."
It is a tie that he sees as "a once-in-a-lifetime game", which echoes what Clough said earlier in the week.
But Mansfield's millionaire backer was not shy about saying the aim is to continue the club's rise of recent years to make such fixtures more of a norm.
This from an owner whose side not only beat Burnley in the FA Cup, but also faced Premier League side Everton in the Carabao Cup earlier this season.
"It's been a labour of love," he says of his time as Mansfield's owner.
"It's been nice seeing the progress, and while we've had some bad times too, it can only get better and it will hopefully go forward in the right direction for years to come."