The Northern Premier League, is one of the regional English football leagues which sits directly below the Football Conference featuring semi-professional and amateur clubs. Geographically, the league covers all of Northern England, and the northern areas of the Midlands. Originally just one division, a second division was added in 1987: Division One. This new division was split twenty years later (2007) into Division One North and Division One South.
Together with the Southern League and the Isthmian League it forms level 7–8 of the English football league system. It has various regional feeder leagues at level 9 and, due to restructuring, from 2005 onwards its champions/playoff winners have been promoted to the Conference North division rather than the Conference National as was previously the case. It is, however, also possible for these teams to be promoted to the Conference South.
Due to title sponsorship deals, the league has been billed under various names, including a sixteen year spell as the Unibond League, the longest such deal in world football. When this deal ended in 2010, a new deal was announced which will see the competition billed as the Evo-Stik League until at least the 2014-15 season.
Read more about Northern Premier League: History, Current Structure, Previous Winners
Famous quotes containing the words northern and/or league:
“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)
“I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best—it’s all they’ll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money—provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don’t need it.”
—Peter De Vries (b. 1910)