Every Football League and Premier League club, every season from 1888-89 to 2024-25, placed on a map by where it plays, sized by its home crowd and coloured by where it finished. Lancashire and the Midlands at the start, the slow rise of London, the great post-war crowds, the long fall to the 1980s and the towns that lost their league club along the way.
Football's map of England has been redrawn several times. When the Football League kicked off in September 1888 its twelve clubs came from just two places: six from Lancashire and six from the Midlands. London had no league club at all until 1893-94, and no league champion until 1930-31. In 2024-25 seven of the twenty Premier League clubs were from London, and the old mill towns that founded the game have mostly slipped down the divisions or out of the league altogether.
To see how it happened I rebuilt the final table of every league season from all 210,019 league matches since 1888 and joined each club's average home league crowd for every season it has been recorded. The map below puts the 147 clubs that have played in the league where they play. Press play, or drag the slider, and watch the big clubs move.
Positions: final tables rebuilt from every match in engsoccerdata (2022-23 from openfootball). Crowds: average home league gate, from englishfootballleaguetables.co.uk. Circles sit at each club's present or last ground. No crowds for 2020-21 (played behind closed doors) or 2021-22 (missing from the source), so those seasons show every club at one size.
The first league season drew about 635 thousand people to its 132 matches. By 1913-14, the last full season before the First World War, the league had grown to 40 clubs and 12.4 million paying spectators. After the war it grew again, to 88 clubs in four divisions by 1923, and in the first seasons after the Second World War it reached a height it has never matched: 41.2 million in 1948-49, an average of 22,318 a match across all four divisions.
Total league crowd, every season
Sum over clubs of average home league gate times home league matches. Gaps: the two world wars, 2020-21 (no crowds) and 2021-22 (no data). Tap the chart to send the map to that season.
Then the long decline. Television, cars, other things to do on a Saturday, crumbling grounds, hooliganism and a run of disasters: crowds fell in 27 of the next 37 seasons, to 16.5 million in 1985-86, 60% below the peak. The average top-flight crowd that season was 19,581. The recovery began in 1986-87, before Hillsborough, the all-seater grounds that followed it and the Premier League, and it has kept going: 20.6 million in 1992-93, 36.4 million in 2024-25. Only 6 seasons, from 1947-48 to 1952-53, saw more people at league matches than last season.
The recovery has been top-heavy, though less than you might think. The average Premier League crowd has nearly doubled since 1992 (21,136 to 40,430), but the top flight's share of all league spectators, 42%, is close to what it was in 1948-49 (43%). The other three divisions drew 21.1 million last season against 23.3 million at the peak.
In the league's first quarter century, before 1915, the North held 62% of all top-flight places and the Midlands most of the rest; London and the South held 6%. The North won 21 of the 27 titles before the First World War and the Midlands the other 6. Since 2010 the North's share of top-flight places has fallen to 36% and the South's, London included, has risen to 43%. In 2024-25 the Premier League had 7 London clubs, 4 from the rest of the South, 4 from the Midlands and 5 from the North.
Who holds the top-flight places
Share of top-flight clubs each season by area (ONS regions: North is the North East, North West and Yorkshire and the Humber; Midlands is East and West Midlands; South is the East, South East and South West). Hover for a season.
The titles tell a slightly different story, because the North's great city clubs never went away: of all 126 champions, 87 came from the North, 21 from London, 15 from the Midlands and 3 from the rest of the South. Since 2000-01 the North has won 17 of 25 titles, every one of them for Manchester or Liverpool. What the North has lost is depth: the Lancashire and Yorkshire towns that used to fill the top flight. Weighted by crowds, the centre of the top flight has moved about 78 km south since the first era, from the edge of the Peak District near Chapel-en-le-Frith to near Market Bosworth in Leicestershire.
Area shares by era
Top-flight places, all league crowds and titles, by area and era.
The club with the biggest average home crowd has changed hands less often than the title. Everton drew the biggest crowds in the league's first decade, then Aston Villa, then Newcastle and Chelsea traded places before the First World War. Arsenal held it through the 1930s. After the war it moved around Newcastle, Tottenham, Arsenal, Everton and the two Manchester and Merseyside giants, and since 1993-94 it has belonged every recorded season to Manchester United, who have had the biggest crowd in 56 seasons in all. The biggest average of all was 75,826 at Old Trafford in 2006-07.
The best-supported club each season
Highest average home league gate in each season with crowd data. Hover for the club and crowd.
113 towns and cities have had a league club at some point; 74 have one in 2025-26. That leaves 39 towns that lost league football and have not got it back. Some went early: Darwen, Bootle, Northwich, Loughborough, Gainsborough and Glossop, who spent one season, 1899-00, in the top flight. Others went in the 1920s and 1930s, when the northern and southern third divisions turned over fast: Merthyr Tydfil, Aberdare, Ashington, Durham, Nelson, Stalybridge. And 20 have gone since 2000, among them Bury, expelled in 2019 after 114 seasons, Rochdale, Hartlepool, Southend, Scunthorpe and, most recently, Carlisle and Morecambe. Barnet and Oldham, promoted back into League Two for 2025-26, are not on the list; Carlisle and Morecambe, relegated at the end of 2024-25, are.
The 39 towns
Towns with a league club in some season and none in 2025-26, most recent first. Best: highest finish (division and position).
| Town | Club(s) | Seasons | Last | Best |
|---|
A few have come back after long absences, which is why they are not on the list: Barrow, out of the league from 1972 to 2020, Newport County, Aldershot (a new club after the old one folded in 1992), Wrexham and Stockport County.
Search any club in the map above to see its whole history as a sparkline. Every club has a peak, and they are spread across the whole history of the league. Of the 103 clubs with at least twenty league seasons, 10 had their best decade, by average league position, in the 1890s and 10 are in it now. Preston's was the first, the Invincibles of 1888-89. Huddersfield won three titles in a row in the 1920s; Portsmouth won two straight after the Second World War; Wolves, Burnley, Ipswich and Derby were champions in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and Nottingham Forest went from 3rd in the second tier in 1976-77 to champions the next season.
Best decade, by club
Decade with the best average league position (at least three seasons in it), for the 103 clubs with twenty or more league seasons. Hover a bar for the clubs.
In 1948-49 Hull City, in the third tier, drew bigger crowds than 9 of the 22 top-flight clubs.
Tables. Every final league table from 1888-89 to 2024-25 was rebuilt from match results in James Curley's engsoccerdata package (210,019 matches, with 2022-23, missing from the package, filled from openfootball's results). Two points for a win until 1980-81 and three from 1981-82; ties broken by goal average until 1975-76 and goal difference after; points deductions applied; 2019-20 in the third and fourth tiers decided on points per game as the league did. Records expunged when clubs left mid-season (Wigan Borough 1931-32, Accrington Stanley 1961-62) are left out, and Leeds City's 1919-20 matches are credited to Port Vale, who took them over. The rebuilt tables were checked against known champions and final places in more than fifty seasons. League position on the map is the club's place in the whole league: the number of clubs in higher divisions plus its position, so 1 is the champion and 92 bottom of the fourth tier.
Crowds. Average home league gates per club and season come from englishfootballleaguetables.co.uk, which compiles them from many sources; I matched its club names to engsoccerdata's season by season, allowing for old names such as Small Heath, Newton Heath and The Wednesday. 5 names could not be matched, and all five are clubs whose records were expunged. Early gates, especially before 1925, are estimates, often from newspaper reports, and should be read as orders of magnitude. The total crowd is each club's average times its home league matches; cup and play-off matches are not counted. There are no crowds for 2020-21, played behind closed doors, and none for 2021-22, which is missing from my copy of the source.
Places. Each club is drawn at its present or last ground (from engsoccerdata), not at every ground it has played at, so Arsenal is in Islington even in 1893, when Woolwich Arsenal played in Plumstead. Areas are ONS regions; Chester, whose stadium straddles the border, counts as English. A town is the place a club stands for, so the London clubs share one town, London.
What this is not. League position and crowd are only two ways of being big. Cup runs, money, fame abroad and history are not here, and Welsh clubs are only those that played in the English league.