History of the Football League and How It Became the EFL
How twelve clubs in England invented league football in 1888, what the competition grew into, and where the history of the Football League ends as the EFL.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished EFL & Promotion19 min read
- Founded
- 1888
- Founder members
- 12
- First champions
- Preston North End
- Renamed EFL
- 2016
On 2 March 1888, a draper from Perthshire who ran a shop in Birmingham posted a letter. William McGregor was a director of Aston Villa, and his complaint was mundane: friendly matches kept being cancelled, gate receipts were unpredictable, and a club that had paid professionals since the Football Association legalised payment in 1885 could not budget for a season made up of fixtures that might not happen. His proposal was that ten or twelve clubs should agree to play each other home and away, on fixed dates, every year.
That letter produced the Football League, and the Football League produced the idea of league football — a competition decided over a season rather than a knockout, with a table, a champion and, eventually, promotion and relegation. Almost every domestic competition in the world descends from a meeting held in a Fleet Street hotel to solve an English clerical problem about scheduling.
Anderton's Hotel, the Royal Hotel and the naming of the thing
The first meeting took place at Anderton's Hotel on Fleet Street on 23 March 1888, timed for the eve of the FA Cup final so that club officials would already be in London. The principle was agreed there. The detail was settled at the Royal Hotel in Manchester on 17 April, where the twelve member clubs were confirmed and the competition acquired its name.
McGregor wanted something plain. "Association Football Union" was rejected on the grounds that it sounded too much like rugby union, and the members settled on The Football League — a name so unadorned that for a century it needed no qualifier. Harry Lockett of Stoke became the first secretary. McGregor chaired it.
What they had created was narrower than it sounds. There was no promotion, no relegation, and no second division to be promoted from. Membership was by election, which meant the twelve clubs were both the competition and its electorate. A club that finished bottom did not go down; it applied to the others to be allowed to stay, and it usually was.
The competition was also explicitly a competition of professional clubs. The FA had legalised professionalism in 1885 after a long argument dominated by Lancashire clubs paying Scottish players to move south, and the League was the institutional consequence of that decision. Amateur football continued alongside it, and the two traditions coexisted uneasily for decades. If you want the parallel story of the knockout competition that predates all of this, the history of the FA Cup begins in 1871 and explains why a league was needed in the first place.
Why a league, when the FA Cup already existed
The Cup had been running for seventeen years by 1888 and it was the sport's showpiece. It was also, from a treasurer's point of view, useless. A club knocked out in the first round had no more Cup matches and no more Cup income, and everything else on the calendar was a friendly arranged by correspondence and abandoned when something better came along.
Three problems, all financial. Fixtures were unreliable, so gate income was unpredictable. Attractive opponents could not be guaranteed, so the biggest crowds could not be planned for. And professional players had to be paid every week regardless of whether the club had a match.
A league solved all three at once. Twenty-two fixed dates. Every other member club, home and away. A table that made the middle of the season matter, because a club sixth in November had something to play for that a club knocked out of the Cup in November did not.
The innovation that made it durable was less obvious and more important: the League committed clubs to play each other whether they wanted to or not. A friendly could be declined. A League fixture could not. That obligation is the reason the competition survived its first decade, and it is still the load-bearing element of the modern EFL's regulations — a club that fails to fulfil a fixture faces sanction, and always has.
- 12Member clubs
- 22League matches per club
- 2Points for a win
- 0Preston league defeats
The completed record of the inaugural season. Preston North End also won the FA Cup that year without conceding a goal.
The twelve founder members and the map they drew
Six clubs from Lancashire, six from the Midlands, and nothing from anywhere else. No London club, no club from the south coast, none from the north-east, none from Yorkshire. That geography was not snobbery; it was where professional football existed. The cotton towns and the Black Country had the wage economy, the railways and the crowds.
| Club | County in 1888 | A fixed landmark in its League history |
|---|---|---|
| Accrington | Lancashire | Resigned in 1893 and was wound up in 1896 |
| Aston Villa | Warwickshire | Won the League title six times before the First World War |
| Blackburn Rovers | Lancashire | First League title in 1911-12 |
| Bolton Wanderers | Lancashire | Played in the first Wembley FA Cup final in 1923 |
| Burnley | Lancashire | League champions in 1920-21 and 1959-60 |
| Derby County | Derbyshire | League champions in 1971-72 and 1974-75 |
| Everton | Lancashire | First League title in 1890-91 |
| Notts County | Nottinghamshire | Founded in 1862, the oldest of the twelve |
| Preston North End | Lancashire | First champions, unbeaten in the league in 1888-89 |
| Stoke | Staffordshire | Failed re-election in 1890 and returned in 1891 |
| West Bromwich Albion | Staffordshire | FA Cup winners in 1888, the season before the League began |
| Wolverhampton Wanderers | Staffordshire | League champions three times in the 1950s |
Preston won the first championship without losing a league match and took the FA Cup in the same season without conceding a goal in the competition. The nickname attached to them — the Invincibles — was earned in a division of twelve, which is a smaller achievement than the phrase now implies and a larger one than the sneer allows, because they did it in the first year, against the best professional sides in England, with no template to copy.
Accrington's exit is the cautionary tale. Relegated in 1893 under the newly created two-division structure, offered a place in the Second Division, the club refused it as beneath them and resigned. Three years later it was gone. The name returned to the League in 1921 as Accrington Stanley, a different club entirely, which resigned mid-season in 1962 and folded four years after that; the current club, reformed in 1968, worked back up through non-league football and rejoined the League in 2006. Three clubs, one town, one name, a hundred and eighteen years.
The Second Division, test matches and the invention of promotion
The League doubled in 1892 by absorbing its rival. The Football Alliance had been running since 1889 with many of the clubs that had failed to get into the League, and the merger created a Second Division of twelve while the First expanded to sixteen.
That immediately posed a question nobody had needed to answer before: how does a club move between divisions? The answer, for six seasons, was test matches. The bottom clubs of the First Division played the top clubs of the Second in end-of-season deciders, and the winners took the higher places. It was the play-off system a century early, and it worked until it did not.
The end came on 30 April 1898. Stoke and Burnley met in a test match knowing that a draw would put both of them in the First Division. The match finished goalless, and by all contemporary accounts neither side made any serious attempt to score. The League abolished test matches that summer and introduced automatic promotion and relegation: two up, two down, decided by league position and nothing else.
That decision is the single most consequential rule change in the history of English football. It established that a club's division is earned annually on the field rather than granted by a vote, and it is the reason the English pyramid works as it does — the full structure of which is set out in the guide to the English football pyramid. Promotion by merit is not a universal principle in world sport. In England it has been non-negotiable since 1898, and the closer any proposal comes to touching it, the more ferociously it is resisted.
The number of places has moved. Two up and two down between the top two divisions lasted until 1973-74, when it became three and three. Play-offs arrived in 1986-87 and put a fourth club into contention without adding a fourth automatic place, an arrangement explained in detail in the guide to how the Championship play-offs work.
Re-election, and the clubs the League voted out
Below the promotion and relegation zones sat a different mechanism, and it lasted far longer than it should have. Clubs finishing at the foot of the lowest division did not go down, because until 1986-87 there was nowhere for them to go. They applied for re-election, and the other member clubs voted.
In practice, incumbency almost always won. Non-league clubs applied year after year and were rejected in favour of the very clubs they had outperformed, on the reasoning that an established member deserved another chance. That produced decades of quiet stagnation at the bottom of the League and a permanent grievance in the Southern League and the Northern Premier League.
Occasionally the vote went the other way, and when it did it changed a club's history permanently.
| Year | Voted out | Elected in its place |
|---|---|---|
| 1960 | Gateshead | Peterborough United |
| 1970 | Bradford Park Avenue | Cambridge United |
| 1972 | Barrow | Hereford United |
| 1977 | Workington | Wimbledon |
| 1978 | Southport | Wigan Athletic |
Hereford's election in 1972 followed the most famous non-league Cup run of the era. Wimbledon's in 1977 began a rise that ended with an FA Cup at Wembley eleven years later. The system was capricious and it was defended for a century on the grounds that stability mattered more than fairness — which was a real argument, honestly made, and wrong.
Automatic promotion and relegation between the League and the Conference began in 1986-87. Lincoln City were the first club to go down that way and Scarborough the first to come up. Lincoln returned the following season, which rather made the point that the trapdoor could swing both ways. The modern route from non-league into the EFL is covered in the guide to non-league clubs that reached the Football League.
Expansion south, and the two Third Divisions
For its first three decades the League was a northern and Midlands institution with a few southern exceptions. Woolwich Arsenal became the first southern member in 1893. Chelsea were elected in 1905 having never played a competitive match, on the strength of a stadium and an ambition.
The real change came after the First World War. In 1920 the League absorbed the Southern League's First Division wholesale to create a Third Division, and a year later added a Third Division North, at which point the existing Third became the Third Division South. English league football now had a national footprint and a regionalised bottom tier, which kept travel costs manageable for small clubs in an era when a Tuesday night in Torquay meant a day of trains.
Membership at the point each structural change took effect, not a continuous year-by-year series.
Show the numbers
| Item | Member clubs |
|---|---|
| 1888 | 12 |
| 1892 | 28 |
| 1920 | 66 |
| 1923 | 88 |
| 1950 | 92 |
Ninety-two became the number. From 1950-51 the League ran with ninety-two member clubs, and although the competition has since split in two, the top four tiers of English football still add up to ninety-two — twenty in the Premier League and seventy-two in the EFL. It is one of the few figures in the English game that has survived every reorganisation thrown at it.
The regional Third Divisions were replaced in 1958 by national Third and Fourth Divisions, formed by taking the top halves of the two regional sections into the Third and the bottom halves into the Fourth. That reform ended the era in which a club's opponents were determined by which side of the Pennines it sat on, and it produced the four-division shape most people still picture when they think of the Football League.
Two wars, and how the competition came back
Competitive football stopped twice. In 1915 the League completed the 1914-15 season under heavy public criticism and then suspended, with regional wartime competitions filling the gap until 1919.
The second suspension was more abrupt. The 1939-40 season began on 26 August 1939 and was abandoned after three matches when war was declared on 3 September. Those three rounds were expunged from the record — a player who scored in them has no League goal to show for it, which remains a small statistical injustice that surfaces whenever anyone compiles an all-time list.
Wartime football was regionalised, guest players were permitted, and the results carry no official standing. When the League resumed in 1946-47 it did so with exactly the divisions and exactly the clubs of 1938-39, seven years later, as though the intervening period had been a very long summer. That decision was administratively simple and sporting nonsense, and nobody at the time proposed anything else.
The resumption produced the largest crowds English football has ever seen. Attendances across the four divisions in the immediate post-war seasons reached levels never approached since, driven by a public with money, few alternatives and an appetite for a Saturday afternoon out. The peak did not last, and the long decline that followed shaped every commercial decision the League took from the 1960s onwards.
One structural quirk of the war years deserves recording. Several clubs did not survive the interruption intact — grounds were requisitioned, some were bombed, and players scattered into the services. Clubs that lost their ground for the duration played wherever they could, and a handful never fully recovered their pre-war position. The League's decision to restore the 1938-39 divisions therefore reinstated a hierarchy that no longer reflected the strength of the clubs in it, and the first few post-war seasons produced some of the sharpest movement between divisions the competition had seen.
The 1960s brought the League's own answer to the fixture calendar's spare capacity. Alan Hardaker, secretary from 1957 to 1979 and the most powerful administrator the competition ever had, launched the Football League Cup in 1960-61 as a midweek knockout for member clubs under the new floodlights. It was resisted by several of the largest clubs, who entered late or not at all in its early years, and it only became universal once a place in European competition was attached to winning it. That competition still runs, under a succession of sponsors' names, and its modern shape is explained in the guide to the Carabao Cup format.
The maximum wage, the retain-and-transfer system, and 1961
From 1901 the League capped what a club could pay a player. The maximum wage began at £4 a week and rose slowly across six decades, reaching around £20 a week by the end of the 1950s — a good working wage, and a fraction of what the best players generated.
Alongside it ran the retain-and-transfer system, which was the harder of the two restrictions. A club held a player's registration after his contract expired. It could refuse to release him, refuse to pay him, and refuse to let him sign elsewhere, indefinitely. A footballer out of contract was not a free man in any ordinary sense.
The wage cap fell first. The Professional Footballers' Association, under Jimmy Hill, threatened strike action and the League conceded in January 1961. Within weeks Johnny Haynes at Fulham was reported to be earning £100 a week, his chairman Tommy Trinder having said publicly that Haynes was worth it and then been held to it.
Retain-and-transfer took two more years and a courtroom. George Eastham, refused a move by Newcastle United, took the system to the High Court, and in 1963 Justice Wilberforce ruled it an unreasonable restraint of trade. The judgement did not abolish transfer fees, and the modern system of registrations and contracts grew out of what replaced it. But the principle that a club could own a man's working life outright died in that courtroom, and the balance of power in English football has been shifting towards players ever since.
The long tail of 1961 and 1963
Neither reform produced its consequences immediately. Clubs continued to hold registrations under a modified system, and it took until the late 1970s for genuine freedom of contract — a player's right to move when his contract ended, with a fee determined by tribunal rather than by the selling club's whim — to be conceded in England. The European dimension arrived later still, through a Belgian case decided in 1995 whose effect on English clubs is set out in the guide to Bosman and free transfers.
The economic effect on the League was profound and slow. With the cap gone, wages became the main variable cost of running a club, and the clubs with the largest crowds could outbid the rest for the best players in a way the maximum wage had prevented for sixty years. Competitive balance in the First Division narrowed over the following decades, which is one reason the title changed hands among a shrinking pool of clubs from the 1970s onwards. The maximum wage had been an accidental levelling device, and nobody appreciated that until it was removed.
Three points for a win, and the reforms of the 1980s
The Football League was the first major competition in the world to award three points for a win, from the 1981-82 season. The reasoning was explicit: two points for a win and one for a draw made a goalless draw a rational outcome for both sides, and the League wanted to make winning worth more than twice as much as not losing. The rest of world football followed over the next fifteen years, and FIFA adopted it for the World Cup in 1994.
A related reform had already landed in 1976-77, when goal average — goals scored divided by goals conceded — was replaced by goal difference. Goal average rewarded a mean defence; goal difference rewards attacking. Both changes pushed in the same direction, and both were made by administrators who had watched attendances fall through the 1970s and concluded that the football itself was part of the problem.
The 1980s were the League's worst decade and its most reformist. Attendances kept falling. Hooliganism dominated the coverage. The Bradford City fire and Heysel, both in 1985, and Hillsborough in 1989, made stadium safety the central question in the English game, and Lord Justice Taylor's final report in 1990 required all-seater grounds in the top two divisions.
Commercially, the League changed shape. Sponsorship arrived in 1986-87, with the Today newspaper the first title sponsor and Barclays following the year after. The Associate Members' Cup, ancestor of the modern EFL Trophy, began in 1983-84 to give the lower two divisions a competition of their own. Play-offs arrived in 1986-87. And the Heathrow agreement of 1985 handed the First Division clubs a larger share of income and more voting power, which bought peace for a few years and set the precedent for everything that followed.
The breakaway of 1992 and what it left behind
The Football League had run English football's top division for 104 years. It stopped in 1992, and the reason was television.
Broadcast income was distributed across all four divisions. The First Division clubs argued that they generated it and should keep more of it. The FA, which had its own long rivalry with the League and saw an opportunity to reclaim primacy over the professional game, published the Blueprint for the Future of Football in 1991 and endorsed a top division operating separately. The First Division clubs resigned their League membership, and the FA Premier League played its first season in 1992-93 with twenty-two clubs, reduced to twenty from 1995-96.
- 1888Twelve clubs form the Football League, a single division decided over 22 matches.
- 1892The Football Alliance is absorbed and a Second Division is created, with test matches deciding movement between them.
- 1898Test matches are abolished after a notorious goalless draw, and automatic promotion and relegation begin.
- 1920 to 1921The Southern League's top division becomes a Third Division, and a Third Division North is added the year after.
- 1958The two regional Third Divisions are replaced by national Third and Fourth Divisions.
- 1992The First Division clubs resign to form the FA Premier League, leaving the Football League with three divisions.
- 2004The divisions are renamed the Championship, League One and League Two.
- 2016The competition rebrands as the English Football League.
The sequence of major reorganisations. Each step is a documented change to the competition's structure.
What was left behind was a competition of seventy-two clubs that renamed its divisions upwards — the old Second became the First, the Third became the Second, the Fourth became the Third — and spent the next decade working out what it now was. The comparison between the modern top flight and the division it replaced is worked through in the guide to the Premier League and the old First Division.
The financial consequence was a gap that has widened in every broadcast cycle since. The League's answer was to negotiate solidarity and parachute arrangements with the Premier League, mechanisms that exist precisely because the 1992 split created a revenue cliff between the first and second tiers that no sporting merit could bridge.
From the Football League to the EFL
Two rebrands followed. In 2004 the divisions were renamed: the Championship, League One and League Two, replacing First, Second and Third. The logic was commercial — "Division Two" sounded like what it was, and the League wanted names that could be sold — and supporters grumbled for about two seasons and then adopted them completely.
In 2016 the competition itself was rebranded as the English Football League, with a new identity across all three divisions and the League Cup and the Trophy folded into it. The organisation is headquartered in Preston, which is a pleasing accident of geography given that Preston North End won the first championship.
The modern EFL runs three divisions of twenty-four clubs playing forty-six league matches each, the Carabao Cup, the EFL Trophy and the play-offs. The 46-game season is itself an inheritance from the expansions of the 1920s and the reorganisation of 1958, and the reasons it has resisted every attempt at reduction are set out in the guide to why the Championship plays 46 games.
What the founding still determines
Three things from 1888 have never been undone. Clubs are obliged to fulfil their fixtures. Membership carries a vote, which is why EFL rule changes require a majority of member clubs rather than a decision from a boardroom. And the competition is decided over a full season of home and away matches rather than a knockout, which is the format McGregor's letter proposed and every serious league in the world has copied.
What has been undone is the assumption underneath all of it — that the clubs playing in the competition are also the people who own and govern it. The 1992 breakaway ended that at the top, and the arguments about independent regulation that have run through English football since are, at bottom, arguments about who inherited McGregor's authority. The oldest clubs in the country, several of them founder members, are still playing. Their story from the pre-League years is told in the guide to the oldest football clubs in England, and the rest of the site's football coverage sits at /sports/football.