The English Premier League is the world’s most popular football league and most-watched sports league. It is the top tier of the English Football League hierarchy. The league consists of twenty teams that compete in a total of 38 matches in a home-and-away format. Promotion and relegation are also implemented, with three clubs promoted to the Premier Level and three teams demoted to the lower league. August through May is the season of the English Premier League.
Where It All Began
The English Premier League started on February 20, 1992, when teams in the first division decided to secede from the Football League, formed in 1888, to capitalize on lucrative television rights deals. And oh boy, did they make the right move! BT Group and Sky Sports paid a combined 1 billion pounds for the rights to broadcast all matches during the 2013-14 season. Premier League struck a five-year, $5.96 billion broadcast rights agreement with the United Kingdom in 2018. Sky Sports, Amazon, and BT Sports together pay $1.98 billion every season, while international broadcasters collectively pay $1.85 billion.
Doing Pretty Well
The Premier League is the world’s most-watched sports league, with matches broadcast in 212 countries to 643 million households and potential television viewership of 4.7 billion. For the 2018-19 season, the average attendance at stadiums was 38,181. The attendance on match days was only second to that of the German league, the Bundesliga. However, the season’s aggregate attendance of 14,508,981 is the biggest in any league. In terms of UEFA coefficients, the league is rated second in Europe, only behind Spain’s La Liga.
The league is home to some of the world’s, fiercest, greatest, and most valuable sports franchises. The clubs, which range from Liverpool, Manchester United, and Arsenal to Manchester City and Chelsea, are household names on every continent. The league is often regarded as the only one in football that has five to six championship challengers each season, making it one of the most fascinating leagues to watch.