Premier League
When referring to the Premier League, it is often referred to as the English Premier League or the EPL (its formal name is The Football Association Premier League Limited). It is the highest level in the English football league system. It is contested by 20 teams and runs on a promotion and relegation system in conjunction with the English Football League (EFL). In each season, which runs from August to May, each club plays 38 matches (playing all 19 other teams both home and away). The majority of the games are held on Saturday or Sunday afternoons.
The FA Premier League was established on February 20, 1992, after the decision of teams in the Football League First Division to break away from the Football League, which had been in existence since 1888, to take advantage of a lucrative television rights deal with Sky Sports. During the three-year period from 2019 to 2020, the league's accumulated tv rights deals are worth around £3.1 billion annually, with Sky and BT Group gaining domestic broadcast rights to 128 and 32 games, respectively. The Premier League is an organization, and its chief executive, Richard Masters, is liable for its administration, with the member clubs acting as shareholders in the organisation. During the 2016–17 season, clubs received £2.4 billion in central payment earnings, plus an additional £343 million in solidarity payments to English Football League (EFL) teams.
There are 643 million households with a potential TV viewership of 4.7 billion people watching the Premier League, making it the most viewed sports league in the world. It is aired in 212 countries and is seen by 643 million people. According to the Premier League, the average game crowd was 38,181, second only to the German Bundesliga's 43,500, while the total attendance across all matches was 14,508,981, making it the greatest of any association football league. The majority of stadiums are almost completely full. As of 2021, the Premier League is ranked first in the UEFA coefficients, which evaluate leagues based on their results in European tournaments over the previous five seasons. English clubs have won a total of fourteen European trophies, second only to Spanish clubs in the amount of UEFA Champions League/European Cup wins won by their respective teams.
Since the Premier League's start in 1992, fifty teams have participated in it, forty-eight of which are English and two of which are Welsh. Seven of them have won the Premier League: Manchester United (13), Chelsea (5), Manchester City (5), Arsenal (3), Blackburn Rovers (1), Leicester City (1), and Liverpool (1).