English Football Champions List: Every League Title Winner
The English football champions list from Preston North End in 1888-89 to 2025-26, counted club by club, with the title runs, long waits and tie-breaks.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Records & History27 min read
- First championship
- 1888-89
- Championships to 2025-26
- 127
- Different champion clubs
- 24
- Record total
- 20, held jointly
On the evening of 19 May 2026, Manchester City drew 1-1 at Bournemouth and a championship was settled in north London without a ball being kicked there. Arsenal had beaten Burnley 1-0 at the Emirates the day before. City's dropped points put them out of reach with a match left, and Arsenal were champions of England for the fourteenth time, twenty-two years after the thirteenth.
It was the 127th title awarded since the Football League began in 1888, and it left the list as follows. Liverpool and Manchester United have twenty championships each. Arsenal are third with fourteen, Manchester City have ten, Everton nine, Aston Villa seven, and Chelsea and Sunderland six apiece. Twenty-four clubs in all have finished top of the English top division, beginning with Preston North End in 1888-89, and the First Division titles won before 1992 stand on exactly the same footing as the Premier League titles won since. Those totals are correct to the end of the 2025-26 season. One of them changes every May.
English league titles by club as the count stood in May 2026
Eight clubs hold 92 of the 127 championships. The other sixteen share 35 between them, and five of those sixteen have a single title to their name.
The top of the list has been a two-club argument for half a century, though not always the same two. Aston Villa set the early mark with six titles by 1910. Sunderland matched it in 1936, Arsenal matched it in 1948 and then took the record outright with a seventh in 1953. Liverpool and Manchester United both reached seven in the 1960s, Liverpool went clear with a ninth in 1976, and for the next thirty-three years nobody was level with them. United drew alongside on eighteen in 2009, went past with a nineteenth in 2011 and added a twentieth in 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson's last season. Liverpool's nineteenth came in 2020 and their twentieth in April 2025, in Arne Slot's first year at Anfield.
So the record is shared, and the two clubs who share it reached twenty by opposite routes. Eighteen of Liverpool's titles came before the Premier League existed. Thirteen of United's have come since.
Arsenal's position in third is older than it looks. Thirteen of their fourteen were won by 2004, which means the gap to the two leaders was seven for more than two decades and is now six. Manchester City's ten is the opposite case: two titles before 2012, then eight in the thirteen seasons that followed.
Everton's nine is the most by any club that has not won the Premier League. Sunderland's six were all won before the Second World War, and the club has not finished in the top two of the top division since 1936. Chelsea had one title before 2005 and have won five from that year on. Read as a table of current strength the list is misleading. Read as a record of who was strong and when, it is the most compact history of English football there is.
For a wider count that adds cups and European trophies to league titles, see our piece on the most successful English football club, where the order at the top is argued over rather more.
One championship under two names: how the record treats 1992
In 1992 the twenty-two clubs of the Football League First Division resigned from the League together and formed the FA Premier League. They took the top division with them. The same clubs played each other home and away for the same prize, promotion and relegation with the division below carried on without interruption, and the FA continued to sanction the competition. What changed was who ran it and who sold its television rights.
That is why nobody serious counts the two eras separately when the question is who has been champions of England. The Football League's 1991-92 champions, Leeds United, began 1992-93 as defending champions of the new league. Manchester United's first Premier League title in 1993 was described at the time, correctly, as their first championship for twenty-six years, a sentence that only makes sense if 1967 and 1993 belong to one list.
Clubs treat it the same way. The honours boards at Old Trafford and Anfield each say twenty. Arsenal's says fourteen. No club lists "First Division titles" and "Premier League titles" as different honours in the way it would separate the FA Cup from the League Cup.
Where the two-list view does exist
The Premier League keeps its own competition records, and those begin in August 1992. On that narrower count Manchester United have thirteen titles, Manchester City eight, Chelsea five, Arsenal four, Liverpool two, and Blackburn Rovers and Leicester City one each. Thirty-four seasons, seven clubs. It is a legitimate record of one competition, and it is the one broadcasters reach for, which is how the idea took hold that English football began in 1992. Our guide to how the Premier League differs from the old First Division covers what actually changed that summer and what did not.
One trap for anyone searching for a first division winners list. The Football League kept the name "First Division" for its own top tier, which from 1992 was the second level of English football, and used it until the rebrand to the Championship in 2004. Newcastle United in 1993 and Sunderland in 1999 were First Division champions in that later sense. Neither title is a championship of England, and neither appears on the list below.
All twenty-four champions of England, grouped by titles held
Twenty-four names, in five tiers. Four clubs have ten or more. Four have between six and nine. Six clubs have three or four, five have two, and five have exactly one.
| Club | Titles | First title | Most recent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liverpool | 20 | 1900-01 | 2024-25 |
| Manchester United | 20 | 1907-08 | 2012-13 |
| Arsenal | 14 | 1930-31 | 2025-26 |
| Manchester City | 10 | 1936-37 | 2023-24 |
| Everton | 9 | 1890-91 | 1986-87 |
| Aston Villa | 7 | 1893-94 | 1980-81 |
| Chelsea | 6 | 1954-55 | 2016-17 |
| Sunderland | 6 | 1891-92 | 1935-36 |
| Newcastle United | 4 | 1904-05 | 1926-27 |
| Sheffield Wednesday | 4 | 1902-03 | 1929-30 |
| Blackburn Rovers | 3 | 1911-12 | 1994-95 |
| Huddersfield Town | 3 | 1923-24 | 1925-26 |
| Leeds United | 3 | 1968-69 | 1991-92 |
| Wolverhampton Wanderers | 3 | 1953-54 | 1958-59 |
| Burnley | 2 | 1920-21 | 1959-60 |
| Derby County | 2 | 1971-72 | 1974-75 |
| Portsmouth | 2 | 1948-49 | 1949-50 |
| Preston North End | 2 | 1888-89 | 1889-90 |
| Tottenham Hotspur | 2 | 1950-51 | 1960-61 |
| Ipswich Town | 1 | 1961-62 | 1961-62 |
| Leicester City | 1 | 2015-16 | 2015-16 |
| Nottingham Forest | 1 | 1977-78 | 1977-78 |
| Sheffield United | 1 | 1897-98 | 1897-98 |
| West Bromwich Albion | 1 | 1919-20 | 1919-20 |
Some of the dates in the right-hand column are striking on their own. Newcastle United's four titles were all won in a twenty-two-year stretch that ended in 1927. Huddersfield Town's three came in consecutive seasons and there has been nothing since. Preston North End won the first two championships ever contested and have never won another, which makes theirs the longest unbroken wait on the list: every season since 1890.
The list has also stopped growing. Between 1888 and 1978, twenty-three different clubs won the title, a new name every three or four seasons. In the forty-eight seasons after Nottingham Forest's win, only Leicester City were added. The account of how Leicester City won the Premier League is partly an account of how unlikely a twenty-fifth name has become.
- Ten or more titles, 4 clubs64titles
- Six to nine titles, 4 clubs28titles
- Three or four titles, 6 clubs20titles
- Two titles, 5 clubs10titles
- One title, 5 clubs5titles
Titles held by clubs in each band at the end of 2025-26. The four clubs with ten or more account for just over half of every championship ever awarded.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Ten or more titles, 4 clubs | 64titles |
| Six to nine titles, 4 clubs | 28titles |
| Three or four titles, 6 clubs | 20titles |
| Two titles, 5 clubs | 10titles |
| One title, 5 clubs | 5titles |
The season-by-season roll, from Preston North End to the Premier League years
The roll falls into four blocks, and the breaks between them are the two world wars and the change of organiser in 1992. Sheffield Wednesday appear under that name throughout, although the club was officially The Wednesday until 1929 and won three of its four titles as such.
1888-89 to 1914-15: the North and the Midlands
| Season | Champions | Season | Champions |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1888-89 | Preston North End | 1902-03 | Sheffield Wednesday |
| 1889-90 | Preston North End | 1903-04 | Sheffield Wednesday |
| 1890-91 | Everton | 1904-05 | Newcastle United |
| 1891-92 | Sunderland | 1905-06 | Liverpool |
| 1892-93 | Sunderland | 1906-07 | Newcastle United |
| 1893-94 | Aston Villa | 1907-08 | Manchester United |
| 1894-95 | Sunderland | 1908-09 | Newcastle United |
| 1895-96 | Aston Villa | 1909-10 | Aston Villa |
| 1896-97 | Aston Villa | 1910-11 | Manchester United |
| 1897-98 | Sheffield United | 1911-12 | Blackburn Rovers |
| 1898-99 | Aston Villa | 1912-13 | Sunderland |
| 1899-1900 | Aston Villa | 1913-14 | Blackburn Rovers |
| 1900-01 | Liverpool | 1914-15 | Everton |
| 1901-02 | Sunderland |
Twenty-seven seasons, ten champions. Aston Villa and Sunderland won ten of the first twenty-two between them, and Villa's 1896-97 side added the FA Cup to become the second club, after Preston, to do the Double.
1919-20 to 1938-39: Huddersfield, then Arsenal
| Season | Champions | Season | Champions |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1919-20 | West Bromwich Albion | 1929-30 | Sheffield Wednesday |
| 1920-21 | Burnley | 1930-31 | Arsenal |
| 1921-22 | Liverpool | 1931-32 | Everton |
| 1922-23 | Liverpool | 1932-33 | Arsenal |
| 1923-24 | Huddersfield Town | 1933-34 | Arsenal |
| 1924-25 | Huddersfield Town | 1934-35 | Arsenal |
| 1925-26 | Huddersfield Town | 1935-36 | Sunderland |
| 1926-27 | Newcastle United | 1936-37 | Manchester City |
| 1927-28 | Everton | 1937-38 | Arsenal |
| 1928-29 | Sheffield Wednesday | 1938-39 | Everton |
1946-47 to 1991-92: the last forty-six First Division seasons
| Season | Champions | Season | Champions |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1946-47 | Liverpool | 1969-70 | Everton |
| 1947-48 | Arsenal | 1970-71 | Arsenal |
| 1948-49 | Portsmouth | 1971-72 | Derby County |
| 1949-50 | Portsmouth | 1972-73 | Liverpool |
| 1950-51 | Tottenham Hotspur | 1973-74 | Leeds United |
| 1951-52 | Manchester United | 1974-75 | Derby County |
| 1952-53 | Arsenal | 1975-76 | Liverpool |
| 1953-54 | Wolverhampton Wanderers | 1976-77 | Liverpool |
| 1954-55 | Chelsea | 1977-78 | Nottingham Forest |
| 1955-56 | Manchester United | 1978-79 | Liverpool |
| 1956-57 | Manchester United | 1979-80 | Liverpool |
| 1957-58 | Wolverhampton Wanderers | 1980-81 | Aston Villa |
| 1958-59 | Wolverhampton Wanderers | 1981-82 | Liverpool |
| 1959-60 | Burnley | 1982-83 | Liverpool |
| 1960-61 | Tottenham Hotspur | 1983-84 | Liverpool |
| 1961-62 | Ipswich Town | 1984-85 | Everton |
| 1962-63 | Everton | 1985-86 | Liverpool |
| 1963-64 | Liverpool | 1986-87 | Everton |
| 1964-65 | Manchester United | 1987-88 | Liverpool |
| 1965-66 | Liverpool | 1988-89 | Arsenal |
| 1966-67 | Manchester United | 1989-90 | Liverpool |
| 1967-68 | Manchester City | 1990-91 | Arsenal |
| 1968-69 | Leeds United | 1991-92 | Leeds United |
The left-hand column is the most open period the championship has known. From 1947 to 1969 the title went to twelve different clubs in twenty-three seasons. The right-hand column is Liverpool's: eleven titles in the eighteen seasons from 1972-73.
1992-93 to 2025-26: the Premier League
| Season | Champions | Season | Champions |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1992-93 | Manchester United | 2009-10 | Chelsea |
| 1993-94 | Manchester United | 2010-11 | Manchester United |
| 1994-95 | Blackburn Rovers | 2011-12 | Manchester City |
| 1995-96 | Manchester United | 2012-13 | Manchester United |
| 1996-97 | Manchester United | 2013-14 | Manchester City |
| 1997-98 | Arsenal | 2014-15 | Chelsea |
| 1998-99 | Manchester United | 2015-16 | Leicester City |
| 1999-2000 | Manchester United | 2016-17 | Chelsea |
| 2000-01 | Manchester United | 2017-18 | Manchester City |
| 2001-02 | Arsenal | 2018-19 | Manchester City |
| 2002-03 | Manchester United | 2019-20 | Liverpool |
| 2003-04 | Arsenal | 2020-21 | Manchester City |
| 2004-05 | Chelsea | 2021-22 | Manchester City |
| 2005-06 | Chelsea | 2022-23 | Manchester City |
| 2006-07 | Manchester United | 2023-24 | Manchester City |
| 2007-08 | Manchester United | 2024-25 | Liverpool |
| 2008-09 | Manchester United | 2025-26 | Arsenal |
Thirty-four seasons and seven champions, against twelve champions in the twenty-three seasons after the war. The season-by-season detail of this last block, with runners-up and margins, is in our history of Premier League winners.
Three in a row, and the one run of four
Herbert Chapman built the first two sides to win three consecutive championships and was not in charge at the end of either run.
At Huddersfield Town he won the title in 1924 and 1925, then left for Arsenal that summer. Cecil Potter took the same squad to the third in 1926. At Arsenal, Chapman won the league in 1931 and again in 1933, and died of pneumonia in January 1934, midway through the second season of the three. Joe Shaw saw out that season as caretaker and George Allison managed the third title in 1935. Two hat-tricks of championships designed by one man, finished by three others.
Nobody did it again for nearly fifty years. Liverpool won in 1982 and 1983 under Bob Paisley and in 1984 under Joe Fagan, whose first season also brought the League Cup and the European Cup. Manchester United then did it twice under one manager, from 1999 to 2001 and from 2007 to 2009, making Ferguson the first man to manage a side through all three seasons of such a run.
Each of those five runs stopped at three. Huddersfield finished second to Newcastle United in 1927. Arsenal dropped to sixth in 1936. Liverpool were runners-up to Everton in 1985. United came third in 2002 and missed a fourth in 2010 by a single point, finishing on 85 to Chelsea's 86.
Manchester City are the exception. Under Pep Guardiola they won in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, the third of those with the FA Cup and the Champions League alongside it, and became the first club in 136 years of league football to be champions four seasons running. The sequence ended in 2025, when they finished third and Liverpool took the title.
Set the fours and threes against how common a simple retention has been. Preston, Sunderland, Aston Villa twice, Sheffield Wednesday twice, Liverpool three times, Portsmouth, Wolves, Chelsea and both Manchester clubs have all won back-to-back titles and gone no further. Defending the championship once is hard. Doing it twice has happened six times in 127 seasons.
The longest waits between championships
Blackburn Rovers won the league in 1914, three months before the outbreak of war, and did not win it again until 1995. Eighty-one years is the longest gap between two titles for any club. The second longest is rarely mentioned in the usual shortlists, which tend to stop at clubs still winning things: Aston Villa went seventy-one years from 1910 to 1981.
| Club | Title before the wait | Title that ended it | Years between |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blackburn Rovers | 1913-14 | 1994-95 | 81 |
| Aston Villa | 1909-10 | 1980-81 | 71 |
| Chelsea | 1954-55 | 2004-05 | 50 |
| Manchester City | 1967-68 | 2011-12 | 44 |
| Manchester United | 1910-11 | 1951-52 | 41 |
| Burnley | 1920-21 | 1959-60 | 39 |
| Liverpool | 1989-90 | 2019-20 | 30 |
| Manchester United | 1966-67 | 1992-93 | 26 |
| Arsenal | 2003-04 | 2025-26 | 22 |
The table is not a complete ranking below thirty years. Sheffield Wednesday waited twenty-five years from 1904 to 1929, Everton twenty-four twice (1891 to 1915 and 1939 to 1963), Liverpool twenty-four from 1923 to 1947 and Sunderland twenty-three from 1913 to 1936. Every one of those except Everton's first had a world war inside it.
What ended each one is a short history of how titles are won.
Blackburn's was ended by an owner. Jack Walker, a local steel magnate, funded the signings of Alan Shearer and Chris Sutton and the appointment of Kenny Dalglish, and the club was promoted in 1992 and champions three years later. They lost 2-1 at Anfield on the final afternoon and won the league anyway, because Manchester United could only draw at West Ham.
Villa's ended with one of the smallest squads ever to win a championship. Ron Saunders used fourteen players across the whole of 1980-81.
Chelsea's fifty years closed at Bolton on 30 April 2005, with two Frank Lampard goals in José Mourinho's first season and 95 points on the board by the end. Manchester City's forty-four closed three minutes and twenty seconds into stoppage time on 13 May 2012, when Sergio Agüero's goal against Queens Park Rangers took the title from Manchester United on goal difference.
Liverpool's thirty-year wait ended in an empty ground. The 2019-20 season was suspended in March because of the pandemic and resumed behind closed doors in June; the title was confirmed on 25 June 2020 when Chelsea beat City at Stamford Bridge, with seven Liverpool matches still to play. And Arsenal's twenty-two years ended in May 2026, after three successive seasons as runners-up under Mikel Arteta.
A wait only gets onto this table by ending. Preston's has run since 1890, Sheffield United's since 1898, Newcastle's since 1927 and Sunderland's since 1936, and none of those can be given a length.
Titles settled by goal average and goals scored before 1992
For most of the Football League's first nine decades, clubs level on points were separated by goal average: goals scored divided by goals conceded. It rewarded a tight defence more than a free-scoring attack, since conceding one fewer moved the figure further than scoring one more. Four championships were decided by it, and a fifth by the method that replaced it.
1923-24, Huddersfield Town over Cardiff City. Both finished on 57 points. Huddersfield had scored 60 and conceded 33, an average of 1.818. Cardiff's 61 and 34 gave 1.794. On the final day Cardiff drew 0-0 at Birmingham, where Len Davies had a penalty saved, and Huddersfield beat Nottingham Forest 3-0. The cruelty is in the arithmetic. Under goal difference the two sides would have been level on plus 27, and Cardiff, with one more goal scored, would have been champions. No club from outside England has come closer.
1949-50, Portsmouth over Wolverhampton Wanderers. Level on 53 points. Portsmouth beat Aston Villa 5-1 on the last day and retained the title with an average of 1.947 to Wolves' 1.551.
1952-53, Arsenal over Preston North End. Level on 54. Arsenal had to beat Burnley at Highbury on a Friday evening after Preston had finished their programme, won 3-2, and took the title by roughly a tenth of a goal.
1964-65, Manchester United over Leeds United. Level on 61. United's 89 goals for and 39 against gave them a comfortable margin over a Leeds side in its first season back in the top division.
Goal average was dropped after 1975-76 and goal difference used from the following season, partly because subtraction is easier to follow from the terraces than division. That change set up the closest finish of all.
1988-89, Arsenal over Liverpool. The match at Anfield on 26 May 1989 had been postponed after the Hillsborough disaster and was the last of the season. Liverpool led by three points. Arsenal needed to win by two clear goals, which would leave the clubs level on 76 points and level on a goal difference of plus 37, and give Arsenal the title on goals scored, 73 to 65. Alan Smith scored early in the second half. Michael Thomas scored the second in stoppage time.
- Goal average, to 1975-76Goals scored divided by goals conceded. It settled the championships of 1924, 1950, 1953 and 1965.
- Goal difference, from 1976-77Goals scored minus goals conceded. It decided the 2011-12 Premier League title.
- Goals scoredUsed when goal difference is also level. It gave Arsenal the 1988-89 title at Anfield.
- Head-to-head recordAdded by the Premier League from 2019-20: points in the matches between the tied clubs, then away goals in those matches.
- Play-offA single match at a neutral ground if the clubs still cannot be separated and the title, relegation or a European place depends on it.
The order of tie-breakers used in the English top division in each period. The Premier League stages are those set out in its handbook since the 2019-20 season.
The Premier League era has produced one title decided this way. In 2011-12 both Manchester clubs finished on 89 points and City won with a goal difference of plus 64 against United's plus 56. The current order of criteria is set out in full in our guide to how the Premier League splits clubs level on points.
Champions in their first season after promotion
Five clubs have won the Second Division and the First Division in consecutive seasons, or near enough.
Liverpool were the first, promoted as Second Division champions in 1905 and champions of England in 1906. Everton did the same in 1931 and 1932, with Dixie Dean scoring heavily in both. Tottenham Hotspur went up in 1950 and won the league in 1951 playing Arthur Rowe's push-and-run football, a style of short passes and immediate movement that First Division defences had not met before. Ipswich Town, managed by Alf Ramsey, won the Second Division in 1961 and the First in 1962, in what was the club's first ever season at the top level. Nottingham Forest are the odd ones out, because they were not even champions of the division below: Brian Clough's side came up in third place in 1977 and won the league by seven points a year later.
Ipswich and Forest are the two that still astonish. Ramsey's team was built around two forwards, Ray Crawford and Ted Phillips, and a withdrawn winger whose position opponents had not worked out how to mark. A season later they had, and Ipswich finished seventeenth. Forest went the other way and won the European Cup in each of the next two years.
Nobody has done it since 1978. The closest approaches were third-place finishes by promoted Newcastle United in 1993-94 and Nottingham Forest in 1994-95, and fifth by Ipswich in 2000-01. Leicester City's title came in their second season up, Leeds United's 1992 championship in their second, and Blackburn's in their third.
The reason is not mysterious. In 1961 a share of every league gate still went to the visiting club, a promoted side signed players under a wage structure the maximum wage had only just stopped compressing, and met opponents whose squads were not much deeper than its own. A promoted club now arrives with a fraction of the revenue of the sides at the top and usually measures success by finishing seventeenth. Our guide to how promoted clubs survive a first Premier League season explains the size of that gap in practical terms.
Former champions now outside the top division
Roughly half of the twenty-four champion clubs are outside the Premier League in any given season, and which half changes with every promotion and relegation, so this page does not list them. The longer absences are the settled part.
Preston North End have not played a top-division match since 1961. The founders' champions, the first Double winners, the club for whom Tom Finney played his entire career, have been outside the top flight for longer than most of their supporters have been alive. Sheffield Wednesday were last there in 2000. Huddersfield Town, relegated in 1972, returned for two seasons between 2017 and 2019 and went back down. Portsmouth won the FA Cup in 2008, went into administration and were playing in the fourth tier by 2013.
When one title becomes the whole story
For the clubs with a single championship, that season tends to sit at the centre of everything the club says about itself.
Ipswich Town have a statue of Ramsey outside Portman Road and another of Sir Bobby Robson, but it is 1962 that makes them one of twenty-four. Nottingham Forest's 1978 title is slightly overshadowed by what it led to, and Forest are the only club in Europe to have won the European Cup more times than their own domestic league. West Bromwich Albion's 1920 side scored 104 goals and won by nine points; the club has not finished first since. Sheffield United's title is the oldest of the five, won in 1898 with William Foulke, a goalkeeper remembered as much for his size as his saves, behind the defence.
Leicester City's is the only one of the five within living memory for most supporters, and the only one won under three points for a win, in a twenty-club division, against opponents with several times their wage bill. The other four are history. Leicester's is still an argument about what is possible.
How two world wars broke the English champions list
The gaps in the roll are eleven seasons wide in total, and Everton sit on the edge of both.
The Football League played on through 1914-15 after war had been declared, to considerable public criticism, and Everton won the title by a single point from Oldham Athletic. The League then suspended its national competition. Regional tournaments ran from 1915 to 1919 with guest players and reduced crowds, and none of them is counted as a championship. Four seasons were lost. Everton therefore remained the reigning champions of England until West Bromwich Albion won the first post-war title in the spring of 1920, by which time the First Division had been enlarged from twenty clubs to twenty-two.
The second break was messier. Everton had won the league again in 1938-39. The 1939-40 season kicked off as normal in late August, three rounds of matches were played, and Blackpool were top with three wins when war was declared on 3 September. The season was abandoned and its results struck from the records, so the appearances and goals from those three matches do not count in anyone's official totals.
The FA Cup returned first, in 1945-46, with two-legged ties to help clubs rebuild their finances. The League followed in August 1946 using the abandoned 1939-40 fixture list. That first peacetime season ran into one of the worst winters of the century, postponements pushed it into June, and Liverpool, having finished their own programme, had to wait for Stoke City to lose at Sheffield United on 14 June 1947 before they knew they were champions.
Everton, then, were title holders from 1915 to 1920 and again from 1939 to 1947. Nobody has held the championship for longer while playing fewer matches in defence of it.
Where the titles have gone by region
No club from south of Birmingham won the Football League in its first forty-two years.
The competition was founded by twelve clubs from Lancashire and the Midlands, six from each, and for a generation the title moved between those two regions and the North East. Of the twenty-seven championships before 1915, ten went to Lancashire clubs, eight to Sunderland and Newcastle United, six to Aston Villa and three to Sheffield. Most professional clubs in the South played in the Southern League, whose top division was absorbed into the Football League as the new Third Division only in 1920.
Arsenal broke it in 1930-31. They were the first London champions and the first from the South of any kind, and they followed it with four more titles in the decade. Portsmouth took the championship to the south coast in 1949 and 1950, Tottenham and Chelsea added to London's count in the 1950s, and Ipswich remain the only champions from East Anglia.
The North West's share is the dominant fact. Seven clubs from the region, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Everton, Blackburn, Burnley and Preston, hold 66 of the 127 titles, more than half. And the concentration has increased. From 1972-73 to 2025-26 the championship was won by a North West club in 37 seasons out of 54. Take out Arsenal and Chelsea, who have eleven between them, and the rest of the country has six titles in that period: Leeds United twice, and one each for Derby County, Nottingham Forest, Aston Villa and Leicester City. None of the six has come since 2016.
The North East has not had a champion since Sunderland in 1936. Yorkshire has had three since the war, all Leeds. For supporters who follow the rivalries those numbers sit behind, the North West derby between Liverpool and Manchester United is in a literal sense a meeting of forty of the 127.
Two points, 42 matches and 22 clubs: reading totals across eras
Liverpool won the league with 68 points in 1979 and with 99 in 2020. The two seasons were far closer in quality than those totals suggest.
Three things have changed underneath the numbers. A win was worth two points until 1980-81 and has been worth three since. The division has been as small as twelve clubs and as large as twenty-two, so a season has contained anything from 22 matches to 42. And the tie-breakers, as described above, have changed twice. A points total from one era cannot be read against one from another without converting it.
The size of the division moved like this: twelve clubs at the start, fourteen from 1891, sixteen from 1892, eighteen from 1898, twenty from 1905 and twenty-two from 1919. It stayed at twenty-two until 1987, dropped to twenty-one for one season and twenty for three, went back to twenty-two in 1991 and has been twenty since 1995.
How to convert a two-point season
Take the champions' wins, draws and defeats. Give three points for each win and one for each draw. Divide by the matches played to get points per game, which removes the difference in season length. Multiply by 38 if a modern-equivalent total is wanted.
| Champions | Season | Matches | Record (W-D-L) | Points won | At three for a win | Points per game |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Preston North End | 1888-89 | 22 | 18-4-0 | 40 | 58 | 2.64 |
| Tottenham Hotspur | 1960-61 | 42 | 31-4-7 | 66 | 97 | 2.31 |
| Leeds United | 1968-69 | 42 | 27-13-2 | 67 | 94 | 2.24 |
| Liverpool | 1978-79 | 42 | 30-8-4 | 68 | 98 | 2.33 |
| Chelsea | 2004-05 | 38 | 29-8-1 | 95 | 95 | 2.50 |
| Manchester City | 2017-18 | 38 | 32-4-2 | 100 | 100 | 2.63 |
| Liverpool | 2019-20 | 38 | 32-3-3 | 99 | 99 | 2.61 |
Two results fall out of that table. Converted and scaled to 38 matches, Liverpool's 1978-79 season is worth about 89 points, strong but well short of the totals of the last decade, which says something real about how far the top of the division has pulled away from the bottom. And the best points-per-game rate in the history of the English championship still belongs to the very first champions. Preston's 2.636 edges Manchester City's 2.632 in the hundred-point season, by the width of a rounding error and across 129 years.
Conversion has limits, and they should be stated. A draw was worth half a win under two points and is worth a third of one under three, so teams in 1969 had less reason to chase a late winner than teams do now. Leeds drew thirteen matches in winning that title. A modern side level with ten minutes left behaves differently, and no arithmetic recovers that. The Premier League's own record totals are covered in our guide to the most points in a Premier League season, and more of the game's history sits on the England hub and in our wider football coverage.
What the conversion does establish is narrower and still useful. Twenty titles won mostly over 42 matches at two points a win, and twenty won mostly over 38 at three, are the same achievement counted in the same unit: one season, finished first. That is the only number on this page that needs no adjustment.