Tales of the unexpected unearths the Heathrow Agreement to save football

Sometimes when you go looking for something, looking for when and why something happened in football, you end up somewhere very different. The Premier League is very different to the other four of the top five levels in English football.

One of those major differences is the number of clubs and therefore the number of league matches played. The Premier League has 20 clubs and each of them play 38 league matches a season, whilst the Championship, League One, League Two and the National League all have 24 clubs in each of them playing 46 league games each.

None of that was news to me. Like the Premier League, both La Liga and Serie A also have 20 clubs.

Ligue 1 did have 20 clubs but it reduced to 18 from the 2023/24 season onwards. The Bundesliga increased from 16 to 18 clubs in 1965 and has stayed that way since, apart from a temporary measure when they increased to 20 for the 1991/92 season to integrate East German clubs after reunification.

Many of you though will remember when the top tier of English football had 22 clubs and they played 42 matches each. It was when I checked back to see exactly which season it became 20 clubs in the English top tier that things went a bit strange.

Where I don't remember this sequence at all. This is how many clubs were in the English top tier each season across a ten year period: 22 - 1986/87 21 - 1987/88 20 - 1988/89 20 - 1989/90 20 - 1990/91 22 - 1991/92 22 - 1992/93 22 - 1993/94 22 - 1994/95 20 - 1995/96 I knew that at some point the English top tier had reduced from 22 clubs to 20 but I have absolutely no recollection of that sequence of seasons.

Where across a decade it went from 22 to 21 to 20, then back up to 22 before falling once again to 20. As a Newcastle United fan I was watching NUFC play 46 matches in each of the 1989/90, 1990/91, 1991/92 and 1992/93 seasons in the second tier.

So maybe that in part is why I don't really remember the bit when it jumped back from 20 to 22 in the top tier. Speaking of not remembering stuff, I know I wasn't that old when they happened, but I don't recall the Chester Report or the Heathrow Agreement at all.

Everybody thinks the Premier League was when greed first really became the big driving force in English football but it happened long before that. In the domestic cups, the FA Cup and League Cup, clubs share the gate receipts after expenses are deducted for the cost of putting the match on, plus a percentage of gate money/ticket sales goes into the competition prize money pot.