The Northern Football Alliance is a football competition based in the Northeast of England and Cumbria. It has three divisions headed by the Premier Division, which sits at step 7 (or level 11) of the National League System. Under a sponsorship agreement it is billed as the Pin Point Recruitment Northern Football Alliance.
The top club in the Premier Division is eligible for promotion to the Northern League Division Two. The top clubs in the First and Second Divisions get promoted to the Premier and First Divisions respectively. The bottom club in the Second Division may get relegated to either the North Northumberland League Division One, or the Tyneside Amateur League Division One, depending on which is more geographically appropriate.
The Northern Football Alliance was founded in 1890 as a single league, with a membership of seven teams. In 1926 it became the Second Division of the North Eastern League, but it split away again in 1935. It disbanded in 1964 due to lack of membership, but reformed just one season later, in 1965–66.
In 1988 the Northern Amateur League and the Northern Combination League combined with the Northern Football Alliance (all under the name Northern Football Alliance) to create a three-division format, which still exists today, currently with 48 member teams.
Read more about Northern Football Alliance: Champions (1890–1988), Divisional Champions (1988-date)
Famous quotes containing the words northern, football and/or alliance:
“I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“... in the minds of search committees there is the lingering question: Can she manage the football coach?”
—Donna E. Shalala (b. 1941)
“An alliance is like a chain. It is not made stronger by adding weak links to it. A great power like the United States gains no advantage and it loses prestige by offering, indeed peddling, its alliances to all and sundry. An alliance should be hard diplomatic currency, valuable and hard to get, and not inflationary paper from the mimeograph machine in the State Department.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)