• League One club apply for permission to fit rail seats in Salop Leisure Stand • Hope to ‘pave the way for other clubs in England and Wales to follow suit’

Shrewsbury Town have been backed by the EFL as they seek to become the first English club to introduce rail seating at their ground, a move campaigners for safe standing believe will blaze a trail for the Premier League to follow.

The League One club has applied to have rail seats at the 10,000‑capacity Greenhous Meadow stadium before the end of the 2017-18 season.

It is understood that more than half of Premier League clubs would be open to the idea of standing areas, which have been banned in the top two divisions of English football since the 1990 Taylor Report into the Hillsborough disaster.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sunset over the Greenhous Meadow Stadium. Photograph: Matthew Ashton - AMA/Getty Images

Clubs that have played for three seasons in the top two tiers of the football pyramid are required by law to provide all-seater stadiums. But Shrewsbury does not fit this criteria and has capitalised on a deal struck by the EFL and the Sports Ground Safety Authority that allows lower‑division sides to apply to have safe standing areas similar to Celtic in the Scottish Premiership.

The club, who finished 18th in League One last season, are attempting to raise the £50,000-£75,000 required through a crowdfunding campaign.

The EFL chief executive, Shaun Harvey, said: “This is an important step on the journey towards our stated aim of seeing standing in stadiums across the EFL and I wish Shrewsbury Town every success in reaching their crowdfunding target to support their application.

“The installation of standing accommodation will be popular with the club’s fans and, more widely, will prove a valuable opportunity to assess the use of this form of accommodation at an English football ground.”

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There are 21 clubs in the Football League with standing areas and a further seven, in addition to Shrewsbury, which are all-seater but could make an application to build safe standing. Northampton Town Supporters’ Trust has had discussions with the club about safe standing and are in favour of it being introduced while Colchester United, Chesterfield, Mansfield Town, Bury, Oxford United and Lincoln City are closely monitoring the situation at Shrewsbury.

The Premier League wrote to all 20 of its clubs this month to assess if they would be interested in trialling safe standing.

Jon Darch, a long-time campaigner for safe standing who has taken his roadshow of rail seats around the country in an effort to build support, said: “They all add together to a feeling now that more and more clubs would like to do this if only they were allowed to,” he said. “Shrewsbury may only be a small club and the Premier League is powerful enough to force change on its own but it is more forward movement.

“Hopefully, we’ll see safe standing in the Premier League because you see on Match of the Day every week that fans are standing behind normal seats with low backs that come halfway up their shins and if they get excited by a last‑minute goal they can fall over and hurt themselves. It’s a good idea to make those fans safer.”