The Football League
The Football League (often referred to as the
Coca-Cola Football League for
sponsorship reasons) is a league competition for
English football clubs (though three
Welsh clubs also take part) containing three divisions (the
Football League Championship,
Football League One and
Football League Two) that occupy the second, third and fourth levels of the
English football league system (below the
FA Premier League, but above the
Football Conference). In addition to the main competition, the League also organises two knockout cup competitions, the
Football League Cup and the
Football League Trophy.
The Football League represents 72 professional
football clubs in
England and
Wales, and runs the oldest professional football league competition in the world. It also organises two knockout cup competitions. The Football League was founded in 1888 with 12 member clubs, but steady growth and the addition of more divisions meant that by 1950 the League had 92 clubs. Financial considerations led to a major shake-up in 1992 when, in a step to maximise their revenue, the leading members of the Football League broke away to form their own competition, the
FA Premier League. The Football League therefore no longer represents the top 20 clubs who belong to this group, although promotion and relegation between the Football League and the FA Premier League continues.
League
The Football League's 72 member clubs are grouped into three divisions: the
Football League Championship ,
Football League One, and
Football League Two (formerly the
Football League First Division,
Football League Second Division and
Football League Third Division respectively, they were renamed for sponsorship reasons). Each division has 24 clubs, and in any given season a club plays each of the others in the same division twice, once at their home stadium and once at that of their opponents. This makes for a total of 46 games played each season.
Clubs gain three points for a win, one for a draw, and none for a loss. At the end of the season, clubs at the top of their division may win promotion to the next higher division, while those at the bottom may be relegated to the next lower one. At the top end of the competition, three Championship clubs win promotion from the Football League to the FA Premier League, with the bottom three Premier League clubs taking their places. At the lower end, two League Two clubs lose their Football League status with relegation to the
National division of the
Football Conference, while two teams from Conference National join League Two of the Football League in their stead.
| Division | Promoted | Relegated |
|---|
| Directly Up | Via Playoff |
|---|
| The Championship | Top 2 clubs | One from 3rd-6th
place finishers | Bottom 3 clubs |
| League One | Top 2 clubs | One from 3rd-6th
place finishers | Bottom 4 clubs |
| League Two | Top 3 clubs | One from 4th-7th
place finishers | Bottom 2 clubs |
Promotion and relegation are determined by final league positions, but to sustain interest for more clubs over the length of the season one promotion place from each division is decided according to a playoff between four clubs, which takes place at the end of the season. It is therefore possible for a team finishing sixth in the Championship or League One, or seventh in League Two, to be promoted rather than the clubs finishing immediately above them in the standings.
Three professional football clubs from Wales,
Cardiff City,
Wrexham, and
Swansea City, play in the Football League. This disqualifies them from participation in the
League of Wales and the
Welsh Cup, and so also deprives them of the chance to qualify for
UEFA competitions by this route (and for all practical purposes of any real chance of doing so, as they are too small to seriously challenge for major honours in English football). One English club,
Berwick Rangers, plays in the
Scottish football league system.
Reserve teams of Football League clubs usually play in the
Pontin's Holidays League (for the Midlands and North) or the
Pontin's Holidays Combination (for the South), though some play in the national
FA Premier Reserve League.
Cup
The Football League organises two knockout cup competitions, the
Football League Cup, currently called the
Carling Cup, and the
Football League Trophy (or for sponsorship reasons, the Johnstone's Paint Trophy) . The League Cup was established in 1960 and is open to all Football League and FA Premier League clubs, with the winner eligible to participate in the
UEFA Cup. The Football League Trophy is for clubs belonging to League One and League Two.
After four years of debate,
the Football Association finally legalised professionalism on
20 July 1885. Before that date many clubs made illegal payments to "professional" players to boost the competitiveness of their teams, arousing the contempt of those clubs abiding by the laws of the amateur Football Association code. As more and more clubs became professional the ad-hoc fixture list of FA Cup, inter-county, and 'friendly' matches was seen by many as an unreliable stream of revenue, and ways were considered of ensuring a consistent income.
A Scottish draper and director of
Aston Villa,
William McGregor, was the first to set out to bring some order to a chaotic world where clubs arranged their own fixtures. On 2 March 1888, he wrote to the
Blackburn Rovers,
Bolton Wanderers,
Preston North End,
West Bromwich Albion and to the secretary of Aston Villa about the formation of a football league.
The first meeting was held at Anderson's Hotel in London on
23 March 1888 on the eve of the FA Cup Final with the name of the Football League being settled at a further meeting on 17 April at Manchester's Royal Hotel. The first season of the Football League began a few months later on
8 September with 12 member clubs.
Each club played the other twice, once at home and once away, and two points were awarded for a win and one for a draw. This points system was not agreed upon until after the season had started; the alternative proposal was one point for a win only. Preston won the first league title without losing a game, and completed the first league-cup
double by also taking the
FA Cup.
The early years of the League saw the addition of more clubs, and a new Second Division was formed in
1892 with the absorption of the rival
Football Alliance. The bottom clubs of the lower division were required to apply for re-election to the League at the end of each season. Automatic promotion and relegation for two clubs was introduced after the League expanded to two divisions of eighteen in
1898; this came into effect when the previous system of
test matches between the bottom two clubs of the First Division and the top two clubs of the Second Division was brought in to disrepute when Stoke and Burnley colluded in the final match to ensure they were both in the First Division the next season.
Aston Villa and
Sunderland dominated the early years of the game, but after a few years other northern clubs began to catch up, with the likes of
Newcastle United and
Manchester United joining the League and having success.
Liverpool won the first of their record 18 League titles in
1901. It was not until the early years of the 20th century that southern clubs such as
Arsenal,
Chelsea and
Tottenham Hotspur established themselves in the League, and there would be a further wait until
1931 before a southern club, Arsenal, would win the League for the first time.
 |
William McGregor founder of the Football League |
The League was suspended for four seasons during
World War I and resumed in
1919 with the First and Second Divisions expanded to 22 clubs. The following year,
1920, leading clubs from the
Southern League joined the League to form a new Third Division, which in
1921 was renamed the
Third Division South upon the further addition of more clubs in a new
Third Division North. One club from each of these divisions would gain promotion to the Second Division, with the two relegated clubs being assigned to the more appropriate Third Division. To accommodate potential difficulties in this arrangement, clubs in the Midlands such as
Mansfield Town or
Walsall would sometimes be moved from one Third Division to the other.
Following this burst of postwar growth, the League entered into a prolonged period of relative stability with few changes in the membership, although there were changes on the pitch. A new offside law in
1925 reducing the number of opponents between the player and the goal from three to two led to a large increase in goals. Numbers on shirts were introduced in
1939 and white balls in
1951. The first floodlit game was played between
Portsmouth and
Newcastle United in
1956, opening up the possibility of midweek evening matches.
The League was suspended once more in
1939 with the outbreak of
World War II, this time for seven seasons. The Third Divisions were expanded to 24 clubs each in
1950, bringing the total number of League clubs to 92, and in
1958 the decision was made to end the regionalisation of the Third Divisions and reorganise the clubs into a new nationwide Third Division and
Fourth Division. To accomplish this the clubs in the top half of both the Third Division North and South joined together to form the new Third Division, and those in the bottom half made up the Fourth Division. Four clubs were promoted and relegated between these two lower divisions, while two clubs exchanged places in the upper divisions until
1974, when the number increased to three.
A new cup competition open to all the members of the League, the
Football League Cup, was held for the first time in
1960-
61 to provide clubs a new source of income.
Aston Villa won the inaugural League Cup and, despite an initial lack of enthusiasm on the part of some of the bigger clubs, the competition became firmly established in the footballing calendar.
Substitutes were first allowed for injured players in
1965, and for any reason the next year.
Beginning with the
1976-
77 season, clubs finishing level on points began to be separated according to goal difference (the difference between goals scored and goals allowed) rather than goal average (goals scored divided by goals allowed). This was an effort to prevent overly defensive play encouraged by the greater advantage in limiting goals allowed. In the event that clubs had equal points and equal goal differences, priority was given to the club that had scored the most goals. There has been only one season,
1988-
89, when this level of differentiation was necessary to determine the League champion, and this was the occasion of one of the most dramatic nights in League history, when
Arsenal beat
Liverpool 2-0 at Anfield in the last game of the season to win the League on this tiebreaker.
Another important change was made in
1981, when it was decided to award three points for a win instead of two, a further effort to increase attacking football. In a similar vein, playoffs to determine promotion places were introduced in
1987 so that more clubs remained eligible for promotion closer to the end of the season, and at the same time to aid in the reduction over two years of the number of clubs in the First Division from 22 to 20. At the same time, automatic promotion and relegation between the Fourth Division and the
Football Conference was introduced for one club, replacing the annual application for re-election to the League of the bottom four clubs and linking the League to the developing
National League System pyramid. Emblematic of the confusion that was beginning to envelop the game, the number of clubs at the top of the league would return to 22 for the
1991-
92 season, before once more dropping to 20 for
1995-
96. The issues creating the uncertainty in the game all centered on money.
The increasing influence of money in English football was evident with such events as the first £1m transfer in the game, that of
Trevor Francis from
Birmingham City to
Nottingham Forest in February
1979.The first £2million player was Tony Cottee (West Ham United to Everton, July 1988). The first £3million player was Alan Shearer (Southampton to Blackburn Rovers, July 1992).
The first few seasons of the Premier League saw the record fee paid by English clubs broken almost every season, a practise that resumed in the first few years of the twenty-first century. The record rose to £3.75million in June 1993 (Roy Keane, Nottingham Forest to Manchester United), £5million in July 1994 (Chris Sutton, Norwich City to Blackburn Rovers), £7million in January 1995 (Andy Cole, Newcastle United to Manchester United), £7.5million in June 1995 (Dennis Bergkamp, Inter Milan to Arsenal), £8.5million in July 1995 (Stan Collymore, Nottingham Forest to Liverpool), £15million - world record - in July 1996 (Alan Shearer, Blackburn Rovers to Newcastle United), £19million in May 2001 (Ruud van Nistelrooy, PSV Eindhoven to Manchester United), £28.1million in July 2001 (Juan Sebastian Veron, Lazio to Manchester United) and the record since July 2002 has been the £29million that Manchester United paid Leeds United for Rio Ferdinand. The creation of the Premier League, therefore, has seen the record fee paid by English clubs broken 10 times in its first 10 seasons. Alan Shearer's £15million record lasted nearly five years in England, although his worldwide record was broken within a year. Rio Ferdinand's record has so far lasted nearly three years.
Since
1983 the League has accepted lucrative sponsorships for its main competition. Below is a list of sponsors and the League's name under their sponsorship:
*1983-1986:
Canon (Canon League)
*1986-1987:
Today newspaper (Today League)
*1987-1993:
Barclays Bank (Barclays League)
*1993-1996:
Endsleigh Insurance (Endsleigh League)
*1996-2004:
Nationwide Building Society (Nationwide Football League)
*2004-2007:
Coca-Cola (Coca-Cola Football League)
The League's cup competitions have different sponsors (see
English football sponsorship for more information).
The other major source of money, and by far the most important one, is television. The
1980s saw competition between terrestrial broadcasters for the rights to show League matches, but the arrival on the scene of satellite broadcaster
British Sky Broadcasting (Sky TV), eagerly searching for attractive programming to build its customer base and willing to pay huge sums, changed the picture entirely. The League's top tier clubs had been agitating for several years to be able to keep more of the League's revenue for themselves, threatening to break away and form their own league if necessary. In
1992 the threat was realised as the First Division clubs left to establish the
FA Premier League and signed a contract for exclusive live coverage of their games with Sky TV. The FA Premier League agreed to maintain the promotion and relegation of three clubs with the Football League, but the Football League was now in a far weaker position - without its best clubs and without the clout to negotiate high revenue TV deals. This problem was exacerbated with the collapse in
2002 of
ITV Digital, holder of TV rights for the Football League, which cost League clubs millions of pounds in revenue.
The new, slimmed down League, 70 clubs until
1995 and 72 clubs since, renamed its divisions to reflect the changes. the old Second Division became the new First Division, the Third Division became the Second Division, and the Fourth Division became the Third Division. The financial health of its clubs has become perhaps the highest League priority due to the limited resources available. However there are some promising signs for the future, as the League plans to announce new initiatives beginning with the
2004-
05 season, coinciding with the start of a new sponsorship agreement with
Coca-Cola. The first of these changes was a rebranding of the League with the renaming of the First Division to the Championship, the Second Division to League One and the Third Division to League Two.
The Football League's collection is held by the
National Football Museum.
Current Clubs
Below are listed the member clubs of the Football League for the
2006-07 season. There are 24 clubs in each division. Note: The 20 Premier League clubs are not included as they are no longer part of the league; however it is still common practice to refer to them along with the 72 Football League clubs as the 92 league clubs.
Former Clubs
This list does not include clubs currently playing in the
FA Premier League, all of which were formerly members of the Football League.
Note:
R indicates that the club was relegated from the Football League.
B indicates that the club was forced out of the League via bankruptcy.
NB: League and
FA Cup Double winners are
highlighted in bold.
1888-1892
|
The original logo of the Football League |
When the Football League was first established, all clubs played in just one division:
1892-1920
In
1892 the Football League absorbed the rival
Football Alliance, meaning it now had enough clubs to form another division. The existing division was renamed the First Division and the new division was called the Second Division.
1920-1921
In
1920 the Football League admitted the clubs from the first division of the
Southern League (the Southern League continued with its remaining clubs) and
Grimsby Town, who had failed to be re-elected to the Second Division the season before and been replaced by
Cardiff City (of the Southern League). The clubs were placed in the new Third Division:
1921-1958
After just one season under the old format, the League expanded again. This time it admitted a number of clubs from the north of England to balance things out, as the last expansion brought mainly clubs from the south. The existing Third Division was renamed the Third Division South, and the new division was named the Third Division North. Grimsby Town transferred to the new northern division. Both divisions ran in parallel, with clubs from both Third Divisions being promoted to the national Second Division at the end of each season:
1958-1992
For the beginning of the
1958-
59 season, national Third and Fourth Divisions were introduced to replace the regional Third Division North and Third Division South:
1992-2004
|
The logo of the Football League from 1988 until 2004 |
Following the breakaway of the clubs in the First Division to form the
FA Premier League, the Football League no longer included the top clubs in England. The Second Division was renamed Division One, the Third Division became Division Two, and the Fourth Division became Division Three.
2004-present
In
2004, the Football League renamed its divisions: the First Division became the Football League Championship, the Second Division became Football League One and the Third Division became Football League Two.
Titles by club
Due to the breakaway of the Premier League in 1992, winning the Football League title no longer makes a team the top tier champions of English football. The following table splits wins between those before and after that date, and also shows both the total number of top flight titles won by each club, and the total number of league titles won from 1889 to 2005. It is sorted by number of top flight titles, which is a more significant measure of a club's success over its history than the number of Football League titles won - the top few English football clubs will probably never win the Football League again.
|
Championship Play-off final 2006. (Leeds vs. Watford) |
The Football League Play-Offs are used as a means of determining the final promotion place from each of the league's three divisions. This is a way of keeping the possibility of promotion open for more clubs towards the end of the season.
The format was first introduced in
1987; initially, the play-offs involved the team finishing immediately above the relegation places in a given division and the three teams who finished immediately below the promotion places in the division below - essentially one team was fighting to keep their place in the higher division while the other three teams were attempting to take it from them. In
1990, this was changed—instead of teams from different divisions playing each other, the four teams below the automatic promotion places contested the play-offs. The four teams play off in two semi-finals and a final, with the team winning the final being promoted. Originally the semi-finals and the final were all two-legged home-and-away affairs, but the final was later changed to a one-off match (usually at
Wembley or, during its rebuilding, the
Millennium Stadium). It is in this format that the play-offs continue today.
Controversy
For all the excitement they generate, the play-off concept causes significant controversy, due to a team that has proved itself the third best in its division over the course of a season having to play a two legged semi-final and a one-off final against teams it has theoretically already beaten, in order to win promotion. This is especially the case for the team that finishes third in the table, who will have invariably been many points ahead of the chasing pack, and often pushing for automatic promotion, only to then lose out in the play-offs. It is all the worse for those in the division below the
FA Premier League given the amounts of money involved in gaining promotion; the
Football League Championship play-off final has often been called "the richest game of football in the world" due to the money on offer through gaining promotion.
Play-Off Winners
1: Due to financial irregularities, Swindon were prevented from taking their place in the top division, which was awarded to the losing finalists,
Sunderland.
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Premiership-Football League gulf*
Football League 100 Legends*
Sports league attendances*
English football league structure (simplified)*
The National Football Museum: holder of the Football League Collection
*
St. Mary's Church, Handsworth: last resting place of the League's founder
*
Up... and down: English football clubs who have experienced both success and disappointment in the extreme
*
Football DataCo*
The Football League official website*
RSSSF Football League archive, 1888-*
The Real Fans - Unofficial Fansite{| class="toccolours" style="margin:0 auto; width:47em;"
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