The Premier League

The Premier League is contested by 20 clubs each season. Every club plays the other 19 twice — once at home, once away — for 38 matches in total. Three points are awarded for a win, one for a draw, and none for a defeat. The club with the most points at the end of the season is the champion. The clubs finishing in the bottom three positions are relegated to the Championship, the second tier, and replaced by three clubs promoted up from the Championship.

The Premier League is a separate competition from the three divisions below it. It operates as an independent organisation that runs its own commercial and broadcast deals, and it has been the top of English football since 1992, when it was created from a breakaway of the 22 clubs in the old First Division of the Football League. Despite the separate organisation, the Premier League is connected to the rest of the English pyramid by promotion and relegation in the same way the divisions below it are connected to each other.

The season runs from mid-August to late May. Each club plays most weekends, with extra midweek matches scheduled around domestic cups, European competitions and international breaks. Across the season, every club plays every other club twice — once at home and once away — across 38 matchweeks. The fixture list is arranged around cup ties, European commitments, international breaks, policing requirements and broadcast selections, so it does not simply mirror the first half of the season in reverse. Most matches are played on Saturdays, with selected matches on Fridays, Sundays and Monday evenings for television.

At the end of the season, the league table is decided first by points. If clubs are level on points, they are separated by goal difference, then goals scored, then head-to-head record, then away goals scored in those head-to-head matches. If clubs still cannot be separated where the title, relegation places or European qualification are affected, a play-off at a neutral venue can be used — though this has never happened in the Premier League era.

The three Premier League clubs finishing in the bottom three positions at the end of the season are automatically relegated to the Championship. There are no relegation play-offs in the Premier League — the bottom three drop straight down. The clubs that replace them come up from the Championship: the top two finishers are promoted automatically, and the third promotion place is decided by a four-team play-off between the clubs finishing third to sixth, with a final at Wembley.

The financial gap between the Premier League and the Championship is large. Premier League clubs receive significantly more television and commercial revenue than Championship clubs, and a season of relegation typically costs a club tens of millions of pounds in lost income. To soften the drop, the Premier League pays "parachute payments" to relegated clubs for the following two or three seasons, although the system is regularly debated as either a necessary support or an unfair advantage for recently-relegated clubs in the Championship.

The top four Premier League finishers usually qualify automatically for the Champions League league phase the following season. England can receive a fifth Champions League place when its clubs rank among UEFA's top two associations for performance in European competitions over the previous season. The next-best finishers below the Champions League places qualify for the Europa League and Conference League, with the FA Cup winner and EFL Cup winner also receiving European places.

The exact distribution of places varies each year depending on whether the cup winners have already qualified through their league finish and whether England receives an extra Champions League place through UEFA's coefficient system. If a cup winner has already qualified through the league, the European place usually passes down to the next-best Premier League finisher not already qualified. In a typical season, several Premier League clubs qualify for Europe, but the exact number depends on cup winners, league positions and UEFA's rules for that season.

The top division of English football was contested as the Football League First Division from 1888 to 1992. In May 1992, the 22 clubs in the First Division broke away from the Football League to form the new FA Premier League, in part to take direct control of their television and commercial deals. The breakaway clubs took the top-flight status with them, leaving the Football League as the second-tier competition. The first Premier League season was 1992-93, won by Manchester United.

The competition has stayed at 20 clubs since the 1995-96 season, after reducing from the initial 22. Most of the Premier League era's history has been dominated by a small group of clubs, with Manchester United dominating the 1990s and 2000s, Chelsea and Manchester City taking over in turn, and Liverpool and Arsenal as regular challengers throughout. Television revenue has grown enormously across the period — the Premier League is now the highest-revenue football league in the world, ahead of La Liga, the Bundesliga and other major continental rivals.