Right, so I am now three years into maintaining an all time league table for the entirety of the English Football League - covering all four main divisions over every single league season - since the very first in 1888/89 right up until the present day. You can find my previous three posts on this project here if you want a trip down memory lane: 2019, 2020, 2021

Just like all previous instalments, I devised a scaling system whereby all points won in League 2 (or old Division Four) remain as they are, any points won in League 1 (old Division Three) are multiplied by 1.3, any points won in the Championship (old Division Two) are multiplied by 1.7, and any points won in the Premier League (old Division One) are multiplied by 2. Any points won in the National League or lower have been ignored. Also sticking around is the Points Per Season value (PPS), which I've used to indicate how efficient teams have been at earning their points over their respective histories.

I go into a lot more detail about why I chose this specific methodology in the original 2019 edition, so please check that out if you're confused as to why I've picked it. Admittedly its not perfect by any means, but I've come this far already, and I'm not too excited about the prospect of completely starting from scratch. However, I have made some additions to the process, but more on that later.

All league status is correct as to the end of the 2021-22 season (ie, Burnley, Watford, and Norwich are listed as Championship, Fulham and Bournemouth are Premier League etc). Clubs that are still in the play offs and therefore have their league status still yet to be decided are listed as such.

So, with all that out of the way, here's the updated English Football League table, from the start of the 1888-89 season to the end of 2021-22.

2022 Observations

• Liverpool have opened up a 93 point lead over Manchester United - the largest this gap has been since they took the top spot in 2020.

• Should both clubs have similar seasons next year, Manchester City will overtake Everton and become the 4th most successful Football League club.

• After spending 117 seasons together in league football, Wolverhampton Wanderers and Leicester City are now separated by just one point. No other still functioning clubs are this finely separated.

• Huddersfield Town are now the 30th team in history to make it above 10000 points after leapfrogging National League playoff contenders Notts County.

• Unsurprisingly given their fantastic season, Forest Green Rovers are the year's highest climbers, jumping a whopping 7 places into 126th. This is mostly because they were sat in a rich vein of defunct and non league clubs, but still impressive nonetheless.

• FC Halifax Town or Solihull Moors could potentially become the 146th team to play in the Football League, should one of them win the National League playoffs. If both are unsuccessful, 2022 will be the first year without at least one new Football League club since 2018.

• Durham City appear to be the former Football League club that have fallen the farthest, without going bust. This season they were relegated to the Wearside League, sitting at level 12 of the English football pyramid.

But wait, there's more!

Given the somewhat un-scientific nature of my multiplication figures for each division, in previous editions of this post I've had people suggest a different way of generating the table: average finishing position. Rather than multiply a team's points by division, how about assigning a number from 1 to 92 for each club based on where they finish at the end of the season (1 to 20 for Premier League, 21 to 44 for Championship, etc). Do this for every season of league football for each club, add these together and then divide by the number of seasons. In theory, this sounded great, until I ran into the issue of clubs like the original Accrington, who only played 5 Football League seasons in the late 1800s and went bust when it only had 1 division - meaning their average finishing position was higher than a lot of top tier mainstays.

To counter this, I decided to only focus on the current 92 Football League clubs, and rank them based on this process described above. This was relatively straightforward, the only small issue being to remember the number of teams in each division at a certain point (for example the top division alone has changed between 12, 14, 16, 20, 21, and 22 teams over its 123 year history). With that completed though, here is the historical average finishing position of the 92 Football League clubs that partook in the 2021/22 season:

This is something I'm planning on maintaining alongside my original table, updating it as teams get relegated/promoted from the Football League each year. At the moment I'm still happy with the old system, but I think its interesting to keep this one going too, and who knows how it may evolve as time goes on?

Once again I would like to thank the Football Club History Database, which is what made the original 2019 post possible. Even aside from being an incredibly useful tool for this project, its also a weirdly interesting rabbit hole to go down reading about obscure clubs throughout history.