Cup

The Football League organises two knock-out 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 Premier League clubs, with the winner eligible to participate in the UEFA Europa League. The Football League Trophy is for clubs belonging to League One and League Two of the Football League. The Football League celebrated its 100th birthday in 1988 with a Centenary Tournament at Wembley between 16 of its member clubs.

The Football League

The Football League, also known as the npower Football League for sponsorship reasons, is a league competition featuring professional association football clubs from England and Wales. Founded in 1888, it is the oldest such competition in world football. It was the top level football league in England from its foundation in the 19th century until 1992, when the top 20 clubs split away to form the Premier League.
The Football League has been associated with a title sponsor since 1983. As this sponsor has changed over the years the league has been known in turn as the Canon League, the Today League, the Barclays League, the Endsleigh League, the Nationwide Football League and the Coca-Cola Football League, until the present sponsor npower was adopted in 2010, contracted until 2013.
Since 1995 it has had 72 clubs evenly divided into three divisions, which are known as The Championship, League One, and League Two. Promotion and relegation between these divisions is a central feature of the League and is further extended to allow the top Championship clubs to exchange places with the lowest placed clubs in the Premier League, and the bottom clubs of League Two to switch with the top clubs of the Football Conference, thus integrating the League into the English football league system. Although primarily a competition for English clubs, one club from Wales also takes part, while in the past Swansea City, Wrexham, Newport County, Merthyr Town and Aberdare Athletic have been members.
The Football League is also the name of the governing body of the league competition, and this body also organises two knock-out cup competitions, the Football League Cup and the Football League Trophy.
The operations centre of The Football League is located in Preston, while its commercial office is in London. It was formerly based in Lytham St. Annes, after its original spell in Preston.

Competition

The Football League's 72 member clubs are grouped into three divisions: the Football League Championship, Football League One, and Football League Two (previously 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 defeat. 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 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.

History

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.[citation needed] As more and more clubs became professional the ad-hoc fixture list of FA Cup, inter-county, and ordinary matches was seen by many as an unreliable stream of revenue, and ways were considered of ensuring a consistent income.
A 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 committee of his own club, Aston Villa, as well as to those of Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Preston North End and West Bromwich Albion, Stoke F.C. suggesting the creation of a league competition that would provide a number of guaranteed fixtures for its member clubs each season. His idea may have been based upon a description of a proposal for an early American college football league, publicised in the English media in 1887 which stated: "measures would be taken to form a new football league.... [consisting of] a schedule containing two championship games between every two colleges composing the league"[6][7]
The first meeting was held at Anderson's Hotel in London on 23 March 1888 on the eve of the FA Cup Final. The Football League was formally created and named in Manchester at a further meeting on 17 April at the Royal Hotel. Although the hotel is long gone, the site is marked with a commemorative red plaque on The Royal Buildings in Market Street. The first season of the Football League began a few months later on 8 September with 12 member clubs from the Midlands and North of England: (Accrington, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Derby County, Everton, Notts County, Preston North End, Stoke F.C., (renamed Stoke City in 1928),[8] West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers ).
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.
In 1890 Stoke were not re-elected to the league, and were replaced for the 1890–91 season by Sunderland, who won it in their second, third and fifth year. Stoke were (re-)elected for the 1891–92 season, along with Darwen, to take the league to 14 clubs.
Preston North End, Aston Villa and Sunderland dominated the early years of the game; in the first fourteen seasons the only other clubs to win (single) league titles were Everton, Sheffield United and Liverpool.

Play-offs

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.
This format was also changed in 1999 and was changed from a promotion competetion to also a cup game as both sides receive a cup and match medals for taking part as both sides can progress to the next level like such cups as The FA Cup and league cup.
The format was first introduced in 1987, after the decision was made to reduce the top flight from 22 to 20 clubs over the next two seasons; 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 1989, 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 first season of this arrangement saw the final being contested in home and away legs. 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 from 1990 onwards the final was 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. A proposal to have six teams rather than four competing for the final place was defeated at the league's AGM in 2003.

20th Century

After a few years other northern clubs began to catch up, with the likes of Newcastle United, Manchester United joining the League and having success. From 1900, Aston Villa (1899–1900, 1909–10), Liverpool (1900–01, 1905–06), Sunderland (1901–02, 1912–13), The Wednesday (1902–03, 1903–04), Newcastle United (1904–05, 1908–09), Manchester United (1907–08, 1910–11) and Blackburn Rovers (1911–12, 1913–14) all won two titles prior to the outbreak of World War 1, while Everton added a second title to their much earlier success in the last season, 1914–15.
It was not until the early years of the 20th century, and the expansion of both Leagues to 20 clubs (in 1905), that further southern clubs such as Chelsea and Clapton Orient (1905), Fulham (1907), and Tottenham Hotspur (1908) established themselves in the League. There would be a further wait until 1931 before a southern club, Arsenal, would win the League for the first time.
Unlike most other Leagues in Europe no single English club managed to remain an ever present in the division during the one hundred and four years of its existence as the top division in the country. Everton comes closest, missing just four seasons through relegation and remain the only club in England to have played over one hundred top flight seasons. Everton and their city rivals Liverpool also share the record of being the only two clubs in England never to have gone more than a quarter of a century without being crowned champions.

Post-World War I

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. On resumption West Bromwich Albion (1919–20) and Burnley (1920–21), both original 12 clubs, won their first-ever titles (in Albion's case their only title to date).
In 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 post-war growth, the League entered into a prolonged period of relative stability with few changes in the membership, although there were changes on the pitch. In 1925, a new offside law reduced the number of opponents between the player and the goal from three to two, leading to a large increase in goals, and numbers on shirts were introduced in 1939.
Between 1923 and 1926, Huddersfield Town achieved the first feat of winning three consecutive league titles (and never won another one though they finished as runners-up for the following two years). This was equalled by Arsenal between 1932 and 1935, during a period from 1930 to 1938 in which they won five titles out of eight.
Manchester City (1936–37) became the only other club to be added to the list of Football League winners prior to the outbreak of World War II; the fourteenth club to achieve the feat since 1888-89.

Post-World War II

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.
Clubs to win their first League titles in the quarter-century following World War II were Portsmouth (1948-49 & 1949-50), Tottenham Hotspur (1950-51 & 1960-61), founder members of the League Wolverhampton Wanderers (1953–54, 1957-58 & 1958-59), Chelsea (1954–55), Ipswich Town (1961–62) and Leeds United (1968–69).
Tottenham Hotspur became the first club in the 20th Century to win the League and F.A. Cup 'Double' in 1960-61, a season after Wolverhampton Wanderers had come within a whisker of achieving the feat themselves (Wolves won the 1959-60 F.A. Cup and were runners-up to Burnley in the League by a single point.)
Post-World War II changes in league football included the use of white balls in 1951 and the first floodlit game (played between Portsmouth and Newcastle United) in 1956, opening up the possibility of midweek evening matches.
By far the biggest change for league clubs during this era was a new cup competition open to all the members of the League, the Football League Cup, which 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 other big clubs, the competition became firmly established in the footballing calendar, although it was not until the dawn of the 1970s that all 92 Football League clubs regularly participated in the competition season after season.
Substitutes (1 per team per match) were first allowed for injured players in 1965, and for any reason the next year.