In England's football pyramid, a village club could in theory reach the Premier League
English football is one giant ladder. Nearly 5,300 clubs fielding more than 7,000 teams sit in linked leagues, bound by promotion and relegation. Win enough, meet the ground and finance rules, and a side playing on a local park could in principle climb all the way to the Premier League. In some crowded regions the ladder has more than twenty rungs.
The model dates to 1888, when the Aston Villa director William McGregor created the Football League, the world's first association football league. Its twelve founders came half from Lancashire, including Preston and Blackburn, and half from the Midlands, and they were the clubs that had backed professionalism.
Today the Premier League, with 20 clubs, forms the summit. Beneath it the English Football League runs three divisions of 24: the Championship, League One and League Two. Until 1992 those 92 clubs all belonged to a single Football League, which is why teams outside it are still called non-League. All 92 are full-time professional outfits, and so is the fifth tier, the National League, the lowest division covering the whole country.
From there the pyramid widens. Two regional divisions sit at level six, then three big leagues covering the north, the south and the south-east, then 16 sub-regional leagues, each with more below. The six tiers under League Two form the National League System, supervised by the Football Association. Levels below 11 have no official definition, and the separate women's pyramid has ten tiers.
Not everyone is inside. Sunday league football, the amateur game played by thousands, stands entirely apart, with no promotion routes, though ambitious clubs sometimes switch into pyramid leagues. The system also reaches past England's borders, with five Welsh clubs and teams from Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man taking part. In 2014 the FA floated a new division between the EFL and National League featuring reserve sides of big clubs, then dropped the idea.
Source: English football league system
