Nowadays, 20 teams can seem like the perfect number of sides to be playing top-flight football in England. Looking across to the likes of Germany, where there are 18 teams playing in the Bundesliga each season, it is easy to see why that doesn’t allow for quite as competitive and busy a schedule as the Premier League’s 20 teams.
Whether you think that is a good thing may well be a matter of personal opinion, of course, but it remains true. Interestingly, though, the division didn’t always have 20 teams, with 22 included in the first few seasons. How, then, did we get here?
The Origins of the Premier League
In the early part of the 1990s, First Division clubs felt that they needed to be part of a radical restructuring of football to allow the game to flourish. A Founder Members Agreement to set out the basic principles behind the Premier League was signed on the 17th of July 1991, giving the new division commercial independence from the Football Association and the Football League. The 20th of February 1992 saw the 22 teams in the First Division resign en masse from the Football League, with the inaugural campaign of the new Premier League getting underway in the August.
Obviously, all of the teams that were in the First Division had to be part of the new league in order for it to work, so those 22 teams carried on over into the new top-flight. Those 22 teams were as follows:
- Arsenal
- Aston Villa
- Blackburn Rovers
- Chelsea
- Coventry City
- Crystal Palace
- Everton
- Ipswich Town
- Leeds United
- Liverpool
- Manchester City
- Manchester United
- Middlesbrough
- Norwich City
- Nottingham Forest
- Oldham Athletic
- Queens Park Rangers
- Sheffield United
- Sheffield Wednesday
- Southampton
- Tottenham Hotspur
- Wimbledon
The Reduction to 20 Teams
From the moment that the Premier League was conceived, it was always the intention to reduce it to 20 teams at some point. The idea behind the reduction was that it would allow for the promotion of excellence at both club and international level, as well as allow for the development of players. At the beginning of the Premier League, each team played 40 games apiece across a season that lasted for 462 games. That means that 82 games more were played in a campaign than is the case nowadays, asking a lot more of the players both physically and mentally.
The general belief was that reducing the number of football clubs that would be considered ‘elite’ would ensure that there wasn’t a dilution of talent. The 22 teams remained in the league for the first three iterations of it, with three teams relegated and three promoted for both the 1992-1993 campaign and the 1993-1994 season. At the end of the 1994-1995 one, however, four teams were relegated out of the Premier League, which were Crystal Palace, Norwich City, Leicester City and Ipswich Town. At the start of the following season, only two teams were promoted in the form of Middlesbrough and Bolton Wanderers.
A Good Decision?
Given the state of the Premier League nowadays, there is certainly an argument that the move to having just 20 teams instead of 22 was a good one. At the end of the 2024-2025 season, for example, the English top-flight was in a situation whereby six clubs had qualified for the following season’s Champions League, the most that had ever done so. That was on account of the fact that the division was given five places automatically on account of the strength of English teams’ performances in Europe previously, whilst Tottenham Hotspur defeated Manchester United in the Europa League.
A big part of the reason behind the decision to launch the Premier League was the desire for the teams to have control of their own financial earnings. The English transfer record, adjusted roughly for inflation, when there were still 22 teams in the top-flight stood at £13.9 million. During the summer transfer window of 2024, that record was broken more than 50 times. In other words, the teams that are part of the Premier League are amongst the richest in world football, with only powerhouses such as Real Madrid and Barcelona really coming close to the earnings of the English top-flight teams.
It is important to remember that European competition wasn’t as prevalent back when the Premier League launched as it is today. As a result, the teams weren’t as worried about how many games they had to play. Nowadays, however, player welfare is an important issue, which is why the likes of FIFA rebranding the Club World Cup to be a competition taking place every four years and requiring clubs to take part in it is a major worry for those responsible for looking after the people who play the actual football games. For the Premier League, the move to 20 teams looks wiser with each passing day.