The competition was founded as the English Premier League on 20 February 1992 following the decision of First Division clubs to withdraw from the English Football League.
However, teams can still be promoted in and out of the EFL Championship.
The Premier League has benefited from lucrative TV rights sales to Sky, with combined TV rights worth around £3.1 billion a year from 2019 to 2020, with Sky and BT Group securing domestic rights to broadcast 128 and 32 games respectively.
The Premier League is a corporation governed by chief executive Richard Masters, with member clubs serving as shareholders.
Clubs were distributed £2.4 billion in central payment revenue in 2016/17, with a further £343 million distributed in solidarity payments to EFL clubs.
The Premier League is the most popular sports league in the world, broadcast in 212 territories in 643 million homes, with a potential television audience of 4.7 billion.
In the 2018–19 season, the average attendance at Premier League matches was 38,181, second highest in the German Bundesliga with 43,500, while the combined attendance for all matches was the highest of any association football league at 14,508,981, with the most
As of 2023, the Premier League is ranked first in the UEFA coefficient rankings for European competitions over the past five seasons, ahead of Spain's La Liga.
The English top flight has the second highest number of European Cup/UEFA Champions League titles, with a record six English clubs having won a total of fifteen European Championships.
Since the creation of the Premier League in 1992, 51 clubs have competed: 49 English and two Welsh clubs.
Seven of them won the title: Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Arsenal, Blackburn Rovers, Leicester City and Liverpool.
Only two of them won three titles in a row, and only six clubs avoided relegation: Arsenal, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur.
Despite significant success in Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s, the late 1980s marked a low point for English football.
Stadiums fell into disrepair, fans suffered from poor conditions, hooliganism was rampant and English clubs were banned from European competition for five years following the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985.
The Football League First Division, the highest level of English football since 1888, was lagging behind.