Premier League Winners, List of Champions, History & Format Explained

Find out about the format and history of the Premier League

The Premier League is the top tier of England's football pyramid, with 20 teams battling it out for the honour of being crowned English champions.

Home to some of the most famous clubs, players, managers and stadiums in world football, the Premier League is the most-watched league on the planet, with matches being shown in 920 million homes in 189 countries.

The league takes place between August and May and involves the teams playing each other home and away across the season, a total of 380 matches.

Three points are awarded for a win, one point for a draw and none for a defeat; the team with the most points at the end of the season win the Premier League title.

The teams who finish in the bottom three places of the Premier League table at the end of the season are relegated to the English Football League (EFL) Championship, the second tier of English football.

The three relegated teams are replaced in the Premier League by three clubs promoted from the Championship — those who finish in first and second places and therefore gain automatic promotion, and another team who emerge as winners of the end-of-season playoffs.

sir-alex-ferguson-lifts-premier-league-trophy-2012-2013-200716 — Manchester United have won the Premier League title 13 times

If any teams finish with the same number of points in the Premier League table, their positions are determined by goal difference ("GD") — the number of goals scored for each team (denoted by "GF" or "F" as column headers) minus the number of goals scored against them ("GA" or "A").

If points and goal difference are both equal, the next criteria used to determine positions in the table is the number of goals scored for the team ("GF"), followed by the most points collected in the head-to-head matches between the tied clubs, and then who scored most the most away goals in the head-to-head matches.

Since the Premier League began in 1992, there have been seven different winners of the league title: Manchester United, Blackburn Rovers, Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City, Leicester City and Liverpool. Man Utd have had the most success, with 13 titles in the 34 seasons so far.

Man City have the Premier League record for the biggest winning margin, when they finished 19 points ahead of second-placed Man Utd in 2017/18.

The narrowest winning margin of +8 goal difference came in 2011/12 when Sergio Aguero's goal, deep into stoppage time on the final day of the season, gave Man City the title in the most dramatic of Premier League finishes.

Arsenal are the only club to have played all of their matches in one Premier League season without losing any of them. That incredible feat was achieved under manager Arsene Wenger in 2003/04, when they won the title by 11 points from Chelsea. The team became known as "the Invincibles."

Click here for more Premier League facts and figures.

leicester-city-premier-league-champions-2015-2016-trophy-lift.jpg — Leicester City won the Premier League in the incredible 2015/16 campaign

A total of 51 clubs have played in the Premier League, with Luton Town being the latest to make their debut, in 2023/24.

Six clubs are "ever-present", having been in the Premier League for every season since the competition was formed: Arsenal, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Man Utd and Tottenham Hotspur.

The teams who finish in the top four of the Premier League qualify for the next season's UEFA Champions League.

But in 2025/26, the Premier League earned a fifth Champions League spot — as it did in 2024/25 for the first time.

This is because England (i.e. the Premier League) again claimed one of two European Performance Spots (EPS) available through UEFA’s coefficient table, which measures how clubs from each country perform as a collective across European competitions.

Two places in the UEFA Europa League are given to English clubs.

The first is given to the highest-ranked team who have not yet qualified for Europe - in 2025/26 this was sixth-placed AFC Bournemouth.

The other is initially given to the FA Cup winners, but if a team win that competition AND finish in a Champions League spot, the Europa League place instead goes to the next-highest Premier League club.

In 2025/26, Man City won the FA Cup while also qualifying for the Champions League, so seventh-placed Sunderland received the spare Europa League spot.

The EFL Cup winners qualify for the UEFA Conference League. But, again, if they also qualify for a better European competition, then the Conference League place goes to the next-highest team in the table.

In 2025/26, Man City won the EFL Cup, so the Conference League spot went to eighth-placed Brighton & Hove Albion.

Premier League champions

Click on a team to discover more about their Premier League title win in our season reviews:

Click here for more Premier League history.