In the 1991–92 season, following two years of widespread speculation about the leading clubs of English football forming a breakaway league from the Football League, the 22 clubs competing in the First Division resigned en masse from the Football League, forming a new top-level competition, The FA Premier League, overseen by the FA, largely to capitalise upon their status as the biggest and most wealthy clubs in the country, and negotiate more profitable television rights.
The new league came into force for the 1992–93 season. The Football League was consequently reorganised, with the Second, Third and Fourth Divisions renamed as the First, Second and Third Divisions respectively. Thus, the First Division, while still the top level of the Football League, became the second level of the entire English football league system with the top clubs inheriting the promotion play-off system from the old Second Division. The Premier League was reduced to 20 teams after the 1994–95 season.
The Premier League has been won by seven clubs in its 30 seasons, with Manchester United winning on 13 occasions. They have set many precedents in the process, becoming the first team to win a second double of the league title and FA Cup in 1996 (their first double being won in 1994), and in 1999 they won a unique treble of the league title, FA Cup and European Cup. English clubs have also won European tournaments since being permitted to compete after the Heysel disaster, the first English team to win the UEFA Champions League being Manchester United in 1999.
The 2008 final, for the first time, was played between two English teams, Manchester United and Chelsea. Manchester United won the final in Moscow on penalties after a 1–1 draw.
The early Premier League years saw the transfer record fee in English football broken many times in a relatively short period of time, and rise at a rate barely comparable with even that of the late 1970s. The biggest fee paid by an English club during the Football League era was the £2.9million paid by Liverpool for Dean Saunders in July 1991. The national record was broken the following summer when Blackburn Rovers paid £3.3million for Alan Shearer.
The national record was broken again in June 1993 when Manchester United signed Roy Keane for £3.75million. Blackburn then broke the national record in the 1994 close season by signing 21-year-old Norwich City striker Chris Sutton for £5million. In 1995, the record fee was broken three times in the space of six months. At the turn of the year, Andy Cole arrived at Manchester United in a deal worth £7million.
After the season's end, Arsenal paid £7.5million to Inter Milan for Dutch forward Dennis Bergkamp, but Bergkamp had just spent days with his new club when Liverpool paid £8.5million for Nottingham Forest striker Stan Collymore. A year later, Alan Shearer became the most expensive player not only in England but in the world when he left Blackburn Rovers to sign for Newcastle United in a £15million deal.
This fee, however, remained unsurpassed for more than four years. Premier League clubs have been increasingly successful at attracting foreign players, particularly since the removal of the limit on fielding players from common market countries in the mid-1990s.
The first decade of the premier league was dominated by Manchester United, who won the championship in 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 1999, 2000 and 2001, and then won again in 2003 and in 1999 completed a continental treble. After a hiatus during which United manager Alex Ferguson rebuilt his squad, United went on to win further titles in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011 and 2013. The first team to interrupt Manchester United’s early dominance were Blackburn Rovers, who won the title by a single point in 1995.
They had only returned to the top flight of English football in 1992, in time for the new league's formation, after a 26-year exile, bankrolled by the wealth of steel baron owner Jack Walker, who had enabled Blackburn to compete for some of the best players in English football; however, following their title success, their performances declined. Under Arsène Wenger, Arsenal have so far been Premier League champions three times: in 1998, 2002 and 2004.
On the first two occasions, they completed the double of the league title and FA Cup, while on the third occasion, they won the title without losing a single league game all season. Chelsea made history in 1997 when they won the FA Cup under Dutch manager Ruud Gullit, the first foreign manager to win a major trophy in English football. They won the European Cup Winners' Cup and League Cup a year later under Gullit's successor Gianluca Vialli, who added a further FA Cup in 2000.
Chelsea's biggest successes, however, have come since the arrival of new Russian owner Roman Abramovich in June 2003 and the appointment of Portuguese coach José Mourinho as manager 12 months later. Mourinho was in charge for more than three years until his sudden departure from the club in September 2007, before returning for a second spell as manager six years later (which lasted two years before getting sacked in December 2015).
In the interim, Chelsea were managed by seven different managers over the course of six seasons, but continued to win trophies on a regular basis. Since Abramovich's takeover of Chelsea, the West London club has been Premier League champions five times, FA Cup winners four times, and League Cup winners three times, and has also won the European Cup and the Europa League (formerly the UEFA Cup).
Manchester City, bankrolled since August 2008 by wealthy Arab owners, ended their 35-year wait for a major trophy by winning the FA Cup in 2011, and then won their first league title in 44 years the following season, both under the management of Italian coach Roberto Mancini. His Chilean successor Manuel Pellegrini became the first non-European manager to win a major trophy in English football when he guided City to the Premier League title and the League Cup in 2014.
Further titles followed under Spanish coach Pep Guardiola, along with further domestic trophies, including a domestic treble, and in 2023 the European Cup. After narrowly avoiding relegation the previous season, outsiders Leicester City won an unprecedented league title in 2016, having never previously won the top flight title. The winning squad was worth just one-tenth of that of Manchester City's.
For much of the premier league era Liverpool struggled to recapture their form of the previous decades and did not win a league championship until 2020 though in the meantime they won other domestic trophies, the UEFA Cup and two further European Cups. Leeds United, the last champions of English football before the creation of the Premier League, played in the first 12 seasons of the Premier League, peaking at third place in 2000, before being relegated in 2004 in the midst of a serious financial crisis which was the direct result of heavy spending on players in the previous few seasons and a failure to net the extra revenue that successful challenges for domestic and European silverware would have brought them.
They would not return to the Premier League until more than a decade later, guided by Marcelo Bielsa to champions of the 2020/2021 EFL championship season.
Since the creation of the Premier League, a number of England's leading clubs have relocated to new stadiums. After several smaller clubs adopted this approach rather than update their ageing homes in the late 1980s and early 1990s, newly promoted Middlesbrough became the first top flight club to relocate to a new stadium when they moved into the Riverside Stadium for the 1995–96 season, ending a 92-year residence of Ayresome Park.
Two years later, Middlesbrough's north-east rivals Sunderland left their historic Roker Park home for the new 42,000-seat Stadium of Light (which has since been expanded to hold nearly 50,000 seated fans) on the banks of the River Wear. Also in 1997, Derby County, Stoke City and Bolton Wanderers all moved into new all-seater stadiums.
A number of clubs that initially chose to convert their existing homes into all-seater stadiums went on to relocate to new stadiums to gain a larger capacity from the turn of the 21st century, particularly those that had progressed throughout the league and attracted a higher demand for tickets since the early 1990s. Southampton relocated to St Mary's Stadium in 2001 after more than 100 years at The Dell, with their new 32,000-seat stadium holding more than twice as many fans as their previous home had during its final years, as an all-seater stadium.
Leicester City relocated to the Walkers Stadium (now known as the King Power Stadium) in 2002 after 111 years at Filbert Street. Having originally decided to stay at Maine Road, which was redeveloped to hold 35,000 seated fans by 1995, Manchester City moved into the City of Manchester Stadium (built for the previous year's Commonwealth games) at the start of the 2003–04 season.
Arsenal had converted Highbury into an all-seater stadium capable of holding just under 39,000 fans by 1993, but within five years the club's owners had decided that such a capacity was inadequate and, after local residents objected to any expansion of Highbury (parts of which were listed structures) and a bid to buy Wembley Stadium from the Football Association was rejected, decided to build a new stadium at nearby Ashburton Grove.
Their new stadium, the Emirates Stadium, was completed in time for the 2006–07 season, holding more than 60,000 spectators. West Ham United moved from the Boleyn Ground into the ~60,000 capacity Olympic Stadium at the end of the 2015–16 season.
The beginning of the new century also saw the construction of a new national stadium at Wembley. The old Wembley Stadium had been converted to an all-seater format by 1989, but its capacity was reduced to 78,000 from its previous capacity of 100,000. By the mid-1990s, plans were afoot for the refurbishment or complete reconstruction of the stadium. The eventual plan was for the old stadium to be demolished and a completely new 90,000-seat stadium to be built in its place.
The old stadium finally closed in October 2000, and it was anticipated that the new stadium would be completed in 2003, but a series of delays meant that demolition of the old stadium did not take place for two years after the last game was played, and the new Wembley was not opened until March 2007.
