Premier League Champions: The Full History of Winners
Every winner since 1992 and what it took — the full Premier League champions history, the points totals, the closest races and England's wider title count.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Premier League19 min read
- First season
- 1992/93
- Clubs to have won the title
- 7
- Most titles by one club
- 13
- Highest winning points total
- 100
Ninety-three minutes and twenty seconds had gone at the Etihad Stadium on 13 May 2012 when Sergio Aguero took a return pass from Mario Balotelli and hit it past Paddy Kenny. Manchester United had already finished their match at Sunderland and their players were on the pitch, believing they had won a twentieth English championship. Both clubs ended the season on 89 points. City took the title on goal difference, the only time the Premier League has been settled that way, and the ten minutes between those two final whistles are the most concentrated the English title race has ever been.
The competition that produced that afternoon began in 1992, when the First Division clubs broke away from the Football League to form the FA Premier League and negotiate their own broadcasting deal. Everything that has happened since — the concentration of titles in a handful of clubs, the rising points bar, the two winners nobody expected — sits on top of a championship that goes back to 1888 and that the Premier League inherited rather than invented. What follows is the roll of winners, the numbers behind them, and where they fit into the longer English record.
The roll of champions
Manchester United won eight of the first eleven seasons. That is the fact the whole list is built around, and it explains why the honours board looks so lopsided.
| Season | Champions |
|---|---|
| 1992/93 | Manchester United |
| 1993/94 | Manchester United |
| 1994/95 | Blackburn Rovers |
| 1995/96 | Manchester United |
| 1996/97 | Manchester United |
| 1997/98 | Arsenal |
| 1998/99 | Manchester United |
| 1999/2000 | Manchester United |
| 2000/01 | Manchester United |
| 2001/02 | Arsenal |
| 2002/03 | Manchester United |
| 2003/04 | Arsenal |
| 2004/05 | Chelsea |
| 2005/06 | Chelsea |
| 2006/07 | Manchester United |
| 2007/08 | Manchester United |
| 2008/09 | Manchester United |
| 2009/10 | Chelsea |
| 2010/11 | Manchester United |
| 2011/12 | Manchester City |
| 2012/13 | Manchester United |
| 2013/14 | Manchester City |
| 2014/15 | Chelsea |
| 2015/16 | Leicester City |
| 2016/17 | Chelsea |
| 2017/18 | Manchester City |
| 2018/19 | Manchester City |
| 2019/20 | Liverpool |
| 2020/21 | Manchester City |
| 2021/22 | Manchester City |
| 2022/23 | Manchester City |
| 2023/24 | Manchester City |
| 2024/25 | Liverpool |
Seven clubs in total. Two of them have won it once. The distribution is the most concentrated of any of Europe's large leagues over the same period, and the concentration has come in two distinct eras rather than one continuous run — United's dominance from 1992 to 2013, and Manchester City's from 2017 onwards, with Chelsea, Arsenal, Blackburn, Leicester and Liverpool taking the seasons in between and around them.
Why the early points totals look strange
The Premier League did not start with twenty clubs. Its first three seasons were played with twenty-two, which meant a 42-match programme and a maximum available of 126 points. From 1995/96 the competition was reduced to twenty clubs and 38 matches, and every total from that point on is measured against a different ceiling.
This is the single most common error in arguments about the strongest champions. Manchester United's 92 points in 1993/94 came from 42 matches; Manchester City's 100 in 2017/18 came from 38. Comparing them directly tells you nothing, and converting one to the other by ratio is not much better, because the shape of a 42-game season with two more opponents in it is different from a 38-game season with two fewer.
Three points for a win had already been in place in England since 1981, so at least that variable is stable across the whole Premier League era. The reduction to twenty clubs is the break in the series, and any table of title-winning totals should be read with 1992/93, 1993/94 and 1994/95 set aside.
Blackburn Rovers' 89 points in 1994/95 is the highest-scoring championship of the 42-game format after United's 92, and it was enough by a single point.
Where the winning bar has moved
For most of the Premier League's first two decades, high eighties won you the title and low nineties won it comfortably. The bar has been pushed upward twice, and both pushes came from the same place.
The first push came under José Mourinho at Chelsea. The 95 points taken in 2004/05 broke the record for a 38-game season and the fifteen goals conceded that year remain the fewest in a Premier League campaign. That side did not score prolifically by later standards; it simply refused to lose, and it reset what a title-winning season was expected to look like.
The second push came from Manchester City in 2017/18, when they became the first club in the history of the English top flight to reach 100 points in a season. That team also scored 106 league goals, the highest in a Premier League season, which is what separates it from the Chelsea model — it won the arithmetic at both ends.
What the recent totals have done to the runners-up position is the more remarkable statistic. Liverpool's 97 points in 2018/19 is the highest total ever recorded by a club that did not win the English league, and it was beaten by a single point. Nine of the top ten totals in the competition's history would have won almost any season of the 1990s. Losing a title with 97 points would have been unthinkable in 1997.
The lowest bar, and the season it happened in
Manchester United won the 1996/97 title with 75 points, the lowest total to win a 38-match Premier League season. Nobody else got above the high sixties; three clubs finished on 68. It was not a great season and United were not a great side that year, and the honest reading is that they were the least bad team in a division where everyone else was worse.
Seventy-five would not have won any of the four seasons that followed it, and it is 25 points short of the highest total ever recorded. That range is the single clearest illustration of how much the competitive shape of English football has changed since the mid-1990s — the gap between the weakest and strongest championships is roughly a third of a season's available points.
Leicester City's 81 in 2015/16 sits above 1996/97 and below everything else that has won a title since 2000, which tells you something about the season it happened in as well as about Leicester.
Winning margins tell a similar story from the other end. Manchester City finished 19 points clear in 2017/18, the largest gap between first and second in Premier League history; Manchester United's 18-point margin in 1999/2000 is the next. Both of those seasons were effectively over by March, and both were followed by seasons in which the same club won by a fraction.
Streaks are the third measure worth knowing. City's run of eighteen consecutive league victories during 2017/18 set the record for the English top flight, and it has since been matched rather than beaten. A run of that length is worth 54 points on its own, which is most of the way to a mid-table finish.
The narrowest races
Four Premier League titles have been decided by a single point or less, and only one of them was settled by goal difference.
| Season | Margin | How it finished |
|---|---|---|
| 2011/12 | Goal difference | City and United level on 89, decided in stoppage time on the final day |
| 1994/95 | 1 point | Blackburn lost at Anfield; United could only draw at West Ham |
| 1998/99 | 1 point | United beat Tottenham at Old Trafford on the final afternoon |
| 2018/19 | 1 point | City won all of their closing fixtures to hold off 97-point Liverpool |
The tiebreaker order in the Premier League runs goal difference first, then goals scored, and only after both of those does the competition's rulebook contemplate anything else. That order matters more than it looks: had 2011/12 been level on goal difference as well, City would still have taken it on goals scored, and the mechanics of what happens if every separator is exhausted are set out in Premier League tiebreakers.
England has form here from before 1992. The First Division championship of 1988/89 came down to Arsenal needing to win at Anfield by two goals on the final night of the season and getting the second in injury time, with the two clubs finishing level on points and goal difference and Arsenal ahead on goals scored. That is the only English championship ever decided on the third separator.
The clubs that came closest without winning
A list of champions leaves out the more interesting half of most seasons. Three clubs have finished second in the Premier League without ever winning it, and a couple of those near misses are better remembered than several of the titles.
Newcastle United held a lead in double figures at the turn of the year in 1995/96 and finished second to Manchester United. Kevin Keegan's side attacked relentlessly, conceded in a way that eventually caught up with them, and produced the most quoted television interview in the competition's history in the process. Newcastle finished second again the following season.
Liverpool's 2018/19 campaign is the statistical extreme. Ninety-seven points, one defeat all season, and second place. No club in the history of English league football has taken more points without winning the championship, and the reason is simply that Manchester City took 98. It would have won every other Premier League season bar one.
Arsenal's near misses come in a different shape. Second in 2015/16 to Leicester, second in 2022/23 after leading for a large part of the season — and, going further back, a run of second-place finishes in the 1990s and 2000s while United were winning. The club's three titles understate how often they were in it.
The three are Aston Villa, who were runners-up in the competition's first season, Newcastle in the mid-1990s, and Tottenham Hotspur in 2016/17. Villa and Spurs both hold First Division championships from earlier eras, so their honours boards are not empty; Newcastle's four English titles all date from the first half of the twentieth century. That distinction between the two records catches a lot of people out, and it is the reason the wider English count matters.
A second-place finish carries real money and a Champions League place, which is the practical consolation the table offers. It does not go on the honours board, and the guard of honour is formed by rather than for you.
First-time champions and what they had in common
Four clubs won their first Premier League title after 1992: Blackburn Rovers, Chelsea, Manchester City and Leicester City. Only Leicester's was a first English championship of any kind — Blackburn had won the First Division twice before the First World War, and Chelsea and City had each won it in the twentieth century.
Blackburn's 1994/95 side was assembled with Jack Walker's money, managed by Kenny Dalglish, and built around a strike partnership of Alan Shearer and Chris Sutton that cost more than any club outside the biggest in England would have contemplated spending. It worked once and then unwound quickly.
Chelsea in 2004/05 followed the same shape at a larger scale, with Roman Abramovich's purchase of the club in 2003 followed by Mourinho's arrival and a squad rebuilt in two windows. Manchester City's 2011/12 title came four years after the Abu Dhabi takeover of 2008, on roughly the same timeline.
Leicester is the outlier and always will be. The 2015/16 side under Claudio Ranieri won with a low share of possession, a counter-attacking structure that nobody in England had a settled answer for, and a squad assembled largely from the divisions below and from other clubs' discards. There is no pattern that Leicester belongs to. That is why the season is still discussed, and why it is unlikely to be repeated in a competition whose revenue distribution has grown more stratified since.
Three of the four first-time winners bought their way there over several seasons. One did not. Any theory of how English titles are won has to account for both.
Managers with the most English top-flight titles
Sir Alex Ferguson won 13 Premier League titles with Manchester United, every one of the club's total, across a managerial career at Old Trafford that ran from 1986 to 2013. No manager in English football has come close to that number in the top division.
Bob Paisley won six First Division championships with Liverpool between 1975 and 1983, which was the record before Ferguson. Pep Guardiola reached six Premier League titles with Manchester City by the end of the 2023/24 season. José Mourinho and Arsène Wenger both won three, Mourinho's split between two spells at Chelsea and Wenger's all with Arsenal.
Wenger's first, in 1997/98, made him the first manager from outside Britain and Ireland to win the English league championship. That threshold now looks like an artefact of a different era, given how many of the titles since have gone to Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch and Portuguese managers.
The gap in the list is more striking than anything in it. No English manager has ever won the Premier League. The last Englishman to win the English top flight was Howard Wilkinson, with Leeds United in 1991/92, the final season of the old First Division — which means that as the Premier League was being created, an English manager had just won the championship for what would turn out to be the last time in more than thirty years. The FA's coaching pathway and the reasons for that gap are a subject in themselves; our guide to the FA coaching badges pathway covers the qualifications side of it.
Defending a title, and failing to
Manchester City won four consecutive Premier League titles between 2020/21 and 2023/24, the first club in the history of the English top flight to win four in a row. Before that the record for consecutive English championships stood at three, shared by Huddersfield Town in the 1920s, Arsenal in the 1930s, Liverpool in the early 1980s and Manchester United, who did it twice within the Premier League era.
Retaining is rarer than the recent run suggests. Between 1992 and 2017, only Manchester United and Chelsea managed back-to-back titles at all.
The collapses are more instructive than the successes. Blackburn Rovers were champions in 1994/95 and relegated from the Premier League within four seasons. Leicester City won in 2015/16 and were relegated in 2022/23, seven years later. Chelsea won the 2014/15 title and finished mid-table the following season, having been in the top four in April and out of the European places by the end of it.
There is no single mechanism behind any of them, but there is a common thread worth naming: a title won by a squad operating well above its structural resources is extremely difficult to build on, because the squad's value rises, the wage bill follows it, and the recruitment that produced the overperformance in the first place no longer works at the prices the club now faces. The financial machinery behind that is set out in PSR rules explained and in the cost of relegation from the Premier League.
Titles settled on the final day at English grounds
The Premier League's rule that all final-round fixtures kick off simultaneously exists precisely so that a title cannot be won or lost by a club that already knows the other result. It has produced several of the competition's defining afternoons.
14 May 1995: Blackburn lost 2-1 at Anfield and won the championship anyway, because Manchester United could only draw at Upton Park. Kenny Dalglish learned that his side were champions while standing on the pitch at the ground where he had spent his playing career.
13 May 2012 at the Etihad, described above. 11 May 2014 at the same stadium, when City beat West Ham to finish two points clear of Liverpool. 12 May 2019 at the Amex in Brighton, where City came from behind to hold off a Liverpool side who had taken 97 points. 22 May 2022 at the Etihad again, City two goals down to Aston Villa with just over quarter of an hour left and champions by the end of it.
- Simultaneous kick-offEvery fixture in the final round starts at the same time so no club plays knowing another result.
- Trophy positionedThe Premier League holds two identical trophies so one can be present at each ground where the title could be won.
- Ribbons attachedRibbons in both contenders' colours are on hand, and the wrong set is removed once the outcome is settled.
- Full-time confirmationThe competition confirms the champions once every relevant fixture has finished.
- PresentationA podium is built on the pitch and the trophy is presented to the captain in front of the home supporters.
- Medals issuedMedals go to players who have met the league's minimum appearance threshold for the season.
- Guard of honourAt the champions' next away fixture, and at any remaining home one, the opposition may line up to applaud them onto the pitch.
The standard sequence used by the Premier League. Details of presentation vary by ground and are agreed with the host club in advance.
The guard of honour is a convention rather than a rule. Nothing in the Premier League's regulations requires a club to form one, and clubs have declined, particularly where the champions are a rival. When it does happen it is arranged between the two clubs beforehand, not sprung on anyone.
The trophy, and the second one nobody sees
The Premier League trophy that has been lifted since the competition's early years was made by Asprey of London in 1993. Its design draws on the three lions associated with English football: two of them sit above the handles on either side, and the third is meant to be the captain himself as he raises it, which is the kind of conceit that could easily be insufferable and somehow is not.
There are two of them. The Premier League holds a second, identical trophy so that both can be in position on a final day where the title could be decided at either of two grounds — a piece of logistics that has been necessary more than once and that supporters generally only discover when someone mentions it on commentary.
Ribbons are attached in the champions' colours before the presentation, which is why both sets travel to a ground where the outcome is unresolved. Removing the losing set is a job somebody has to do quickly and privately.
The pre-1992 First Division trophy is a separate object with its own history, and the Football League continued to award its own championship trophy to the winners of the second tier. That distinction confuses people who see photographs of English clubs lifting a trophy that is not the Premier League's, and it is one of several reasons the pre- and post-1992 records are easier to keep straight than they look — a subject covered at length in the Premier League and the old First Division.
Medals, and who does not get one
Winning the league does not automatically produce a medal for everyone on the payroll. The Premier League sets a minimum appearance threshold, at five league appearances in the title-winning season, and players below it are not entitled to one as of right.
The league retains discretion to award additional medals on application from the champion club, which is the route used for a squad player who was injured for most of the season, or a young player who trained with the first team all year and made four appearances. Clubs do apply, and the applications are generally sympathetic.
Where this bites is on January signings, on goalkeepers who spent the season behind an ever-present, and on academy players given a debut in a dead rubber. A player can be present for every training session of a championship season and finish it with nothing to put in a cabinet, and clubs commonly commission their own medals or awards to cover the gap.
Managers and coaching staff receive medals, as does a defined group of club employees. The number is finite and the allocation is set by the competition rather than by the club, which is why the photographs of a full squad and staff on a podium involve rather more people than there are official medals in circulation.
Champions from outside the biggest cities
Blackburn and Leicester are the only Premier League champions from outside London, Manchester and Merseyside, and Blackburn is by some distance the smallest town to have won an English championship in the modern era.
Before 1992 the picture was broader. Huddersfield Town won three consecutive First Division titles in the 1920s. Preston North End were the first champions in 1888/89 and went unbeaten through that season, which is where the term Invincibles entered English football long before Arsenal's unbeaten 2003/04 season attached it to a Premier League side. Burnley won it twice. Derby County won it twice under Brian Clough and Dave Mackay. Ipswich Town won it in 1961/62 under Alf Ramsey, two years before he took the England job.
Nottingham Forest's 1977/78 championship remains the last time a club promoted from the second tier won the English title in their first season back up. Clough's side came up in 1976/77 and won the league the following year. Nothing remotely similar has happened since, and the financial structure of English football now makes it close to impossible — the gap in resources between a newly promoted club and an established Premier League side is examined in surviving a first season in the Premier League.
The narrowing is not a mystery and it is not entirely a matter of ownership wealth. Centralised broadcasting money is distributed unevenly by design, European qualification compounds the advantage of finishing high, and the clubs that finish high are the ones who qualify. The mechanism is set out in Premier League prize money.
Where these titles sit in England's longer record
The English championship has been contested since the Football League's first season in 1888/89. The Premier League is the current name for the top division of that competition rather than a separate competition, which is why the honours are cumulative and why club records combine both.
| Club | English top-flight titles |
|---|---|
| Liverpool | 20 |
| Manchester United | 20 |
| Arsenal | 13 |
| Manchester City | 10 |
| Everton | 9 |
| Aston Villa | 7 |
| Chelsea | 6 |
| Sunderland | 6 |
Liverpool's 2024/25 title was their twentieth English championship, drawing them level with Manchester United at the top of the all-time list. Eighteen of Liverpool's twenty came before the Premier League existed and thirteen of United's twenty came after it was created, which is a neat illustration of how completely the balance of English football shifted around 1992.
Arsenal's thirteen sit third and include championships from the 1930s, the 1970s, the 1990s and the 2000s, a spread no other English club can match. Everton's nine are the largest total of any club with no Premier League title.
For a reader trying to keep the two records straight, the rule is simple enough: a club's Premier League count starts in 1992/93 and its English championship count starts in 1888/89, and the second number always includes the first. Anyone quoting a figure without saying which they mean is usually quoting the one that suits their argument. The rest of the competition's records — scorers, appearances, awards — are gathered in our guides to Premier League all-time top goalscorers and the league's individual awards, with the wider England guides hub and the football section covering everything around them.