Football

Football is the national sport of England, and as such has an important place within English national life. The sport is almost always referred to simply as football; it is unusual for it to be called soccer and it is only referred to as "association football" in very limited circumstances. Any unqualified reference to football in an English context should be read as a reference to association football rather than to any other member of the football family of sports. The only other members of this family played to any great extent in England belong to the rugby football sub-family, and are usually referred to as rugby. The title and remainder of this article refers to football in its English sense.

Kicking ball games are described in England since at least 1280. England can boast the earliest ever documented use of the English word "football" (1409) and the earliest reference to football in French (1314). A description of an exclusively kicking ball game from Nottinghamshire in the fifteenth century bears similarity to football. There is good evidence for refereed, team "foteball" games being played in English public schools since at least 1581.^[1] The modern global game of football was first codified in 1863 in London by the English Football Association, the oldest football association in the world. The modern passing game is believed to have been innovated in London in the early 1870s.^[2][3] England is home to the oldest association football clubs in the world (dating from at least 1857), the world's oldest competition (the FA Cup founded in 1871) and the first ever football league (1888). For these reasons England is considered the home of the game of football. ^[4]

League system

The Football League, established in 1888 by Aston Villa director William McGregor, was the first professional football league in the world. Since its founding, however, many other leagues have been founded in England. Over recent 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. There are around 40,000 clubs registered with the FA - this is 11,000 more than any other country; even without taking relative population into account, England has more football clubs than any other country in the world.^[5]

The Premier League

The Premier League was founded in 1992 after England's top clubs broke away from the Football League in a successful effort aimed at increasing their income at the expense of clubs in the lower divisions. Links with The Football League were maintained, and each season the bottom three clubs are relegated from the Premier League and replaced by three from the Championship.

The Football League

Although the oldest league in the world, The Football League now ranks second in the hierarchy of English football after the split of England's top clubs in 1992 to form the FA Premier League. The Football League has 72 member clubs evenly divided among three divisions, currently named the Championship, League One and League Two.

The English football league system

Below the Football League is what is commonly known as "non-League football". This term is confusing, as it refers to those clubs outside the (Football) League, although they still play in organised league competitions. In recent years, the top few levels have been consolidated into the National League System, operated by the FA. Most clubs in the Conference National division are fully professional, the remainder are semi-professional.

There is automatic promotion and relegation between League Two and Conference National, and for several levels below the Conference, although this becomes more irregular further down the league system. The non-League system is often known as the "pyramid", because the number of leagues at each level begins to increase as you go down through the levels, with each league covering a smaller geographic area.