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. As more and more clubs became professional the ad-hoc fixture list of FA Cup, inter-county, and 'friendly' matches was seen by many as an unreliable stream of revenue, and ways were considered of ensuring a consistent income.A Scottish draper and 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 Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Preston North End, West Bromwich Albion and to the secretary of Aston Villa about the formation of a football league.The first meeting was held at Anderson's Hotel in London on 23 March 1888 on the eve of the FA Cup Final with the name of the Football League being settled at a further meeting on 17 April at Manchester's Royal Hotel. The first season of the Football League began a few months later on 8 September with 12 member clubs.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.The early years of the League saw the addition of more clubs, and a new Second Division was formed in 1892 with the absorption of the rival Football Alliance. The bottom clubs of the lower division were required to apply for re-election to the League at the end of each season. Automatic promotion and relegation for two clubs was introduced after the League expanded to two divisions of eighteen in 1898; this came into effect when the previous system of test matches between the bottom two clubs of the First Division and the top two clubs of the Second Division was brought in to disrepute when Stoke and Burnley colluded in the final match to ensure they were both in the First Division the next season.
The original logo of The Football LeagueAston Villa and Sunderland dominated the early years of the game, but after a few years other northern clubs began to catch up, with the likes of Newcastle United and Manchester United joining the League and having success. Liverpool won the first of their record 18 League titles in 1901. It was not until the early years of the 20th century that southern clubs such as Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur established themselves in the League, and there would be a further wait until 1931 before a southern club, Arsenal, would win the League for the first time.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. The following year, 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 postwar growth, the League entered into a prolonged period of relative stability with few changes in the membership, although there were changes on the pitch. A new offside law in 1925 reducing the number of opponents between the player and the goal from three to two led to a large increase in goals. Numbers on shirts were introduced in 1939 and white balls in 1951. The first floodlit game was played between Portsmouth and Newcastle United in 1956, opening up the possibility of midweek evening matches.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.A new cup competition open to all the members of the League, the Football League Cup, 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 of the bigger clubs, the competition became firmly established in the footballing calendar.Substitutes were first allowed for injured players in 1965, and for any reason the next year.Beginning with the 1976-77 season, clubs finishing level on points began to be separated according to goal difference (the difference between goals scored and goals allowed) rather than goal average (goals scored divided by goals allowed). This was an effort to prevent overly defensive play encouraged by the greater advantage in limiting goals allowed. In the event that clubs had equal points and equal goal differences, priority was given to the club that had scored the most goals. There has been only one season, 1988-89, when this level of differentiation was necessary to determine the League champion, and this was the occasion of one of the most dramatic nights in League history, when Arsenal beat Liverpool 2-0 at Anfield in the last game of the season to win the League on this tiebreaker.
The logo of The Football League from 1988 until 2004Another important change was made in 1981, when it was decided to award three points for a win instead of two, a further effort to increase attacking football. In a similar vein, playoffs to determine promotion places were introduced in 1987 so that more clubs remained eligible for promotion closer to the end of the season, and at the same time to aid in the reduction over two years of the number of clubs in the First Division from 22 to 20. At the same time, automatic promotion and relegation between the Fourth Division and the Football Conference was introduced for one club, replacing the annual application for re-election to the League of the bottom four clubs and linking the League to the developing National League System pyramid. Emblematic of the confusion that was beginning to envelop the game, the number of clubs at the top of the league would return to 22 for the 1991-92 season, before once more dropping to 20 for 1995-96. The issues creating the uncertainty in the game all centered on money.The increasing influence of money in English football was evident with such events as the first £1m transfer in the game, that of Trevor Francis from Birmingham City to Nottingham Forest in February 1979. The first £2million player was Tony Cottee (West Ham United to Everton, July 1988). Prior to the formation of the FA Premier League, the highest transfer fee paid was £2.9million for the transfer of Dean Saunders from Derby County to Liverpool during the 1991 close season. The first £3million player was Alan Shearer, who moved from Southampton to Blackburn Rovers in July 1992, the summer prior to the first Premier League season.The first few seasons of the Premier League saw the record fee paid by English clubs broken almost every season, a practise that resumed in the first few years of the twenty-first century. The record rose to £3.75million in June 1993 (Roy Keane, Nottingham Forest to Manchester United), £5million in July 1994 (Chris Sutton, Norwich City to Blackburn Rovers), £7million in January 1995 (Andy Cole, Newcastle United to Manchester United), £7.5million in June 1995 (Dennis Bergkamp, Inter Milan to Arsenal), £8.5million in July 1995 (Stan Collymore, Nottingham Forest to Liverpool), £15million - world record - in July 1996 (Alan Shearer, Blackburn Rovers to Newcastle United), £19million in May 2001 (Ruud van Nistelrooy, PSV Eindhoven to Manchester United), £28.1million in July 2001 (Juan Sebastian Veron, Lazio to Manchester United) and the record since July 2002 has been the £29million that Manchester United paid Leeds United for Rio Ferdinand. The creation of the Premier League, therefore, has seen the record fee paid by English clubs broken 10 times in its first 10 seasons. Alan Shearer's £15million record lasted nearly five years in England, although his worldwide record was broken within a year. Rio Ferdinand's record has so far lasted nearly three years.The League's cup competitions have different sponsors (see English football sponsorship for more information).The other major source of money, and by far the most important one, is television. The 1980s saw competition between terrestrial broadcasters for the rights to show League matches, but the arrival on the scene of satellite broadcaster British Sky Broadcasting (Sky TV), eagerly searching for attractive programming to build its customer base and willing to pay huge sums, changed the picture entirely. The League's top tier clubs had been agitating for several years to be able to keep more of the League's revenue for themselves, threatening to break away and form their own league if necessary. In 1992 the threat was realised as the First Division clubs left to establish the FA Premier League and signed a contract for exclusive live coverage of their games with Sky TV. The FA Premier League agreed to maintain the promotion and relegation of three clubs with the Football League, but the Football League was now in a far weaker position - without its best clubs and without the clout to negotiate high revenue TV deals. This problem was exacerbated with the collapse in 2002 of ITV Digital, holder of TV rights for the Football League, which cost League clubs millions of pounds in revenue.The new, slimmed down League, 70 clubs until 1995 and 72 clubs since, renamed its divisions to reflect the changes. The old Second Division became the new First Division, the Third Division became the Second Division, and the Fourth Division became the Third Division. The financial health of its clubs has become perhaps the highest League priority due to the limited resources available. However there are some promising signs for the future, as the League plans to announce new initiatives beginning with the 2004-05 season, coinciding with the start of a new sponsorship agreement with Coca-Cola. The first of these changes was a rebranding of the League with the renaming of the First Division to the Championship, the Second Division to League One and the Third Division to League Two.The Football League's collection is held by the National Football Museum.
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