By the late 1880s, English football had a problem. Professionalism had been legal since 1885, so clubs now had wages to pay — but their fixture lists were chaotic. Friendly matches were arranged and cancelled at short notice, and a single cup defeat could leave a team with nothing to play for. Clubs needed a reliable income, and supporters needed regular matches to watch.
William McGregor's letter
The solution came from William McGregor, a Scottish-born draper who was a director of Aston Villa. In March 1888 he wrote to several leading clubs suggesting that ten or twelve of the most prominent clubs in England should combine to arrange home and away fixtures every season. The response was enthusiastic, and after meetings in London and Manchester, the Football League was formally founded in April 1888.
The original twelve
The founder members all came from the North and the Midlands, the heartlands of professional football: Accrington, Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Burnley, Derby County, Everton, Notts County, Preston North End, Stoke, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers. No southern clubs joined, as most of them were still amateur.
The first matches were played on 8 September 1888. Surprisingly, the league had not yet decided how to rank its teams. Only during the season did the clubs agree a points system: two points for a win and one for a draw.
The Invincibles
That first season belonged to one club. Preston North End, led by the ambitious Major William Sudell, had assembled a team of skilful professionals, many of them recruited from Scotland. They played the passing game beautifully, and nobody could beat them.
Preston finished the 22-game league season unbeaten, with 18 wins and 4 draws, and took the title by 11 points. They then won the FA Cup without conceding a single goal in the competition, beating Wolverhampton Wanderers 3–0 in the final. It was the first league and cup "double" in history, and it earned them a nickname that has stayed with them ever since: the Invincibles.
No other team would go through an English top-flight league season unbeaten for more than a century, until Arsenal did it over 38 games in 2003–04.
A model for the world
The Football League grew quickly. A Second Division was added in 1892, and southern clubs eventually joined as professionalism spread. The format McGregor proposed — every team playing every other team home and away, with points deciding the champion — became the standard model for football leagues across the world.
When the top clubs broke away to form the Premier League in 1992, the Football League continued with the divisions below. Now known as the English Football League, it remains the oldest professional football league in the world.