List of football clubs in England by competitive honours won
The European governing body UEFA was founded in 1954, and created their first competition, the European Cup, the next year. It was expanded and renamed in 1992 as the UEFA Champions League. Liverpool hold the English record, with five wins. Parallel to UEFA, various officials created the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup in 1955, but this competition was disbanded when UEFA created the replacement tournament the UEFA Cup in 1971, renamed the UEFA Europa League in 2009. The English record number of Europa Leagues is three, also held by Liverpool. Another competition absorbed into the UEFA Cup, in 1999, was the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup, which was created in 1960 and featured the winners of national knockout competitions. The winners of this competition played the European Cup winners in the UEFA Super Cup, starting in 1972 but was recognised by UEFA in 1973, which now features the winners of the Champions and Europa Leagues. The International Football Cup, also known as the UEFA Intertoto Cup, started in 1961, was a competition for clubs not participating in the European Cup, UEFA Cup, and Cup Winners Cup. UEFA officially recognised it in 1995, and discontinued it in 2008, with the Europa League expanded to accommodate Intertoto clubs. UEFA and CONMEBOL also created an intercontinental competition in 1960 with the Intercontinental Cup, featuring representatives from both associations. In 2000, the international governing body FIFA created the FIFA Club World Cup and in 2004 the Intercontinental Cup was merged with it. Manchester United are the only English club to win either intercontinental competition, winning each once.
Northern England
In 1883 Blackburn Olympic, a team composed mainly of factory workers, became the first Northern team to win the FA Cup, and the next year Preston North End won an FA Cup match against London-based Upton Park. Upton Park protested that Preston had broken FA rules by paying their players. In response, Preston withdrew from the competition and fellow Lancashire clubs Burnley and Great Lever followed suit. The protest gathered momentum to the point where more than 30 clubs, predominantly from the North, announced that they would set up a rival British Football Association if the FA did not permit professionalism. A schism was avoided in July 1885 when professionalism was formally legalised in English football. The Football League was founded in 1888, and marked its independence from the London-based Football Association (FA) by establishing headquarters in Preston – the League retained a Northern identity even after it accepted several Southern teams into its ranks. Organised women's football followed as the workforces of majority-female factories of Northern England in the First World War entered the 1917–18 Tyne, Wear & Tees Munition Girls Cup – the world's first women's football tournament. However, the FA did not support women's football and banned it altogether in 1921. Intense local derbies between neighbouring teams mean that there is less of a North–South rivalry than in some other sports.
Many of the powerhouses of English football came from the North – as of the 2017–18 season, of the 120 top-flight league titles since 1888, 80 (67%) have been won by teams based north of Crewe. Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and, since 2001, Manchester City are among the mainstays of the Premier League, while teams like Blackburn Rovers, Middlesbrough, Newcastle United and Sunderland have had more inconsistent runs in recent years, regularly being promoted and relegated from the top flight. Northern England is also the birthplace of the largest proportion the country's top players – as of Euro 2016, 537 Northerners had played for the England team, compared to 266 Midlanders and 367 Southerners, and 15 of the 23 man squad for the 2018 World Cup were born in the region.