The founding of the Football League

The Football League is the model that many domestic league competitions have followed. A fixed set of clubs join the league at the start of a season, play each other home and away in a round-robin schedule, score points for wins and draws, and finish in a table of positions. The team at the top are the champions; the teams at the bottom may be relegated.

That model did not exist in association football before 1888. Football had cup competitions, friendly matches and informal regional fixtures, but it had no national league. The Football League's founding in April 1888 introduced a single shape for organising the football season that remains recognisable in many domestic leagues.

English football in the 1880s was a confusing mix of competitions. The FA Cup, founded in 1871, was a knockout competition and gave most clubs only a small number of guaranteed matches. Beyond the cup, clubs arranged friendly matches one at a time, usually weeks or months in advance. If an opposing club was knocked out of the cup or arranged a more attractive friendly elsewhere, fixtures could be cancelled with little notice.

For the new professional clubs, this was a serious problem. Paying players required steady gate receipts, and gate receipts required steady fixtures. Cancelled matches meant lost revenue. Clubs in the more competitive northern game found themselves running professional operations on the basis of a fixture list that could collapse at any moment.

William McGregor was a Perthshire-born draper who had moved to Birmingham and become a director of Aston Villa. By early 1888 he was concerned that the existing fixture system was making professional football unsustainable. In March that year, he wrote to four other leading clubs — Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Preston North End and West Bromwich Albion — proposing that 10 or 12 of the best professional clubs should agree to play each other home and away across a fixed schedule.

The proposal was straightforward. The clubs would play each other twice a season, on dates agreed in advance, and the results would be tallied to produce a champion. McGregor's letter was discussed at a meeting in London in March, and a second meeting in Manchester in April finalised the details. The Football League was formally founded at that Manchester meeting, on 17 April 1888.

The 12 founding clubs of the Football League were Accrington, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Derby County, Everton, Notts County, Preston North End, Stoke, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers. They were concentrated in Lancashire and the Midlands, with no clubs from London, the south, the north-east, Yorkshire or Sheffield.

The reasons for the geographical limit were practical. Travel was expensive, and a wider league would have meant long railway journeys for regular fixtures. The most competitive professional clubs at that point were concentrated in Lancashire and the Midlands, and the FA Cup-focused traditions of southern football meant fewer southern clubs had yet committed to a full professional model. The Football League's reach grew quickly in the years that followed.

The first Football League season began in September 1888 and finished in April 1889. Each club played the other 11 twice — once at home, once away — for a total of 22 matches. Preston North End, led by William Sudell, won the league without losing a single match across the season, and also won the FA Cup that year without conceding a goal. The Preston side became known as "the Invincibles" and remained the only club to win a top-flight English league season unbeaten until Arsenal repeated the feat well over a century later.

The early Football League used two points for a win and one for a draw. That scoring system — two points for a win — survived in English football for nearly a hundred years before being replaced with three points for a win in 1981. The basic mechanics of the league table, however, have been the same since 1888.

By 1892, the Football League had outgrown its original 12 clubs. A rival competition, the Football Alliance, was absorbed that year and the Football League added a second division. From 1893, promotion and relegation were introduced through end-of-season test matches between clubs near the bottom of the First Division and clubs near the top of the Second Division. Automatic promotion and relegation came later, but the basic principle of movement between divisions became part of English league football from this period.

The league grew further in the years that followed. A Third Division was added in 1920, followed by a regional North/South third-tier structure from 1921. In 1958, the regional third divisions were reorganised into national Third and Fourth Divisions. Southern clubs began to join from the 1890s onwards; by the early twentieth century, the Football League included clubs from across England. Welsh clubs also joined the Football League — Cardiff City and Swansea Town became Football League members in the years after the First World War.

Domestic championships and league competitions soon developed elsewhere, including in Scotland, Argentina, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy and Germany. Not all copied the English model exactly at first, but the idea of regular domestic competition between organised clubs spread quickly.

The Football League itself underwent a major change in 1992, when the top division broke away to form the Premier League. The Football League continued below the top division and rebranded as the EFL — the English Football League — in 2016. The basic shape of a fixed group of clubs playing a round-robin season with promotion and relegation between divisions, however, remains close to the shape that William McGregor proposed in 1888.