How many football clubs are in England?
19097669#90
A 2006 poll found that association football was the most popular sport in the UK. In England 320 football clubs are affiliated to The Football Association (FA) and more than 42,000 clubs to regional or district associations. The FA, founded in 1863, and the Football League, founded in 1888, were both the first of their kind in the world. In Scotland there are 78 full and associate clubs and nearly 6,000 registered clubs under the jurisdiction of the Scottish Football Association. Two Welsh clubs play in England's Football League, one in the Premier league, and others at non-league level, whilst the Welsh Football League contains 20 semi-professional clubs. In Northern Ireland, 12 semi-professional clubs play in the IFA Premiership, the second oldest league in the world.
British people
564674#1
The exact number of clubs varies from year to year as clubs join and leave leagues, fold or merge altogether, but an estimated average of 15 clubs per division implies that more than 7,000 teams of nearly 5,300 clubs are members of a league in the English men's football league system.
English football league system
600364#54
The English Football League, established in 1888 as The Football League by Aston Villa director William McGregor and renamed "English Football League" in 2016, was the first professional football league in the world. Since its founding, however, many other leagues have been founded in England. Sunday leagues are played each weekend by clubs, the study made by the FA sees to this. Over the years there has been an increasing effort to link all these leagues together in a Pyramidal structure allowing promotion and relegation between different levels. The primary motivation for this drive is to maintain the possibility that any club in England may dream of one day rising to the very top, no matter what status they currently hold. In a study made by FIFA in 2006 there are around 40,000 clubs registered with the FA, which is 11,000 more than any other country, the closest being the Brazilian Football Confederation who have 29,000 registered clubs. Even without taking relative population into account, England has more football clubs than any other country in the world.
Football in England
9573784#11
English football has a league system which incorporates thousands of clubs, and is topped by four fully professional divisions. The elite Premier League has 20 teams and is the richest football league in the world. The other three fully professional divisions are the run by the English Football League, the oldest league in the world, and include another 72 clubs. Annual promotion and relegation operates between these four divisions and also between the lowest of them and lower level or "non-League" football. There are a small number of fully professional clubs outside the top four divisions, and many more semi-professional clubs. Thus England has over a hundred fully professional clubs in total, which is considerably more than any other country in Europe.
Sport in England
600364#69
Many club sides have youth teams. The top level of youth football is the Premier Academy League, founded in 1997, which is for all Premier League and Football League clubs that have Academy sides. The league, which currently has 40 clubs, is divided into four groups each with ten teams. The winners of each group contest the end-of-season play-offs to decide the league champions.
Football in England
600364#0
Association football is the most popular sport in England, where the first modern set of rules for the code were established in 1863, which were a major influence on the development of the modern Laws of the Game. With over 40,000 association football clubs, England has more clubs involved in the code than any other country as well as the world's first club (Sheffield F.C.), the world's oldest professional association football club (Notts County F.C), the oldest national governing body (the Football Association), the first national team, the oldest national knockout competition (the FA Cup) and the oldest national league (the English Football League). Today England's top domestic league, the Premier League, is one of the most popular and richest sports leagues in the world, with six of the ten richest football clubs in the world.
Football in England
47793743#3
The club competed in the FA Cup in 1873, losing to Uxbridge F.C. in the first round, but did not enter the competition after that year.In 1891, an article in "Fores's Sporting Notes" reviewed a copy of the 1874 "Football Annual" and commented on how clubs have come and gone over time. The 1874 annual listed less than 200 football clubs in all of England, and by 1891 the author asked "what has become of such old giants as the Gitanos, Harrow Chequers, Pilgrims, and Woodford Wells."
Gitanos F.C.
4496150#11
Football in England developed a very different system from the North American one, and it has been adopted for football in most other European countries, as well as to many other sports founded in Europe and played across the world. The features of the system are:European football clubs are members both of a league and of a governing body. In the case of England, all competitive football clubs are members of The Football Association, while the top 20 teams also are members of the Premier League, a separate organization. The 72 teams in the three levels below the Premier League are members of still another body, the English Football League. The FA operates the national football team and tournaments that involve teams from different leagues (except the EFL Cup, operated by the English Football League and open to its own teams and those in the Premier League). In conjunction with FIFA and other countries' governing bodies, it also sets the playing rules and the rules under which teams can sell players' contracts to other clubs.
Professional sports league organization
15331397#3
Lower down in the hierarchy of English football are many other competitions, not included in the tables on this page. These include competitions run by the above national governing bodies, but organised for clubs ineligible for higher competitions. For example, the Texaco Cup, EFL Trophy, and Anglo-Italian Cups. Regional competitions are organised by County Football Associations. Most clubs founded in the early years of English football used to play in county competitions, although those that still participate generally field youth or reserve sides. Many county cups are now contested by lower or regional division clubs.
List of football clubs in England by competitive honours won
680546#0
Non-League football describes football leagues played outside the top leagues of a country. Usually it describes leagues which are not fully professional. The term is primarily used for football in England, where it describes football played at a level below that of the Premier League (20 clubs) and the three divisions of the English Football League (EFL; 72 clubs). The term "non-League" was commonly used well before 1992 when the top football clubs in England all belonged to The Football League (from 2016, the EFL); all clubs who were not a part of The Football League were therefore 'non-League' clubs. The term can be confusing as the vast majority of non-league football clubs in England play in a type of league. Currently, a non-League team would be any club playing in the National League and below and therefore would not play in the EFL Cup.
Non-League football
1053423#15
The English football league system includes hundreds of interlinked leagues, consisting of thousands of divisions. The Premier League is at the top, followed by The Football League and then the Football Conference, where the structure starts to become regional and includes the Northern Premier League, the Southern League, the Isthmian League and many more besides. The Welsh clubs of Cardiff City, Colwyn Bay, Merthyr Tydfil, Newport County, Swansea City and Wrexham play in the English system. Chester City, who played in The Football League until they dissolved in 2010, had a stadium that straddles the Welsh border, with the Club offices in England but the pitch actually in Wales.
Football in the United Kingdom