page_title: Northern England
section_title: Football
hierarchical_section_title: Northern England / Sport / Football
caption_attribution_description: A coffin representing Preston North End F.C.'s relegation season of 2010/2011 is carried towards the Trades Hall in Bamber Bridge, near Preston, Lancashire on 24th July 2011. Hundreds of fans and locals attended the procession and the event was covered by local media. The coffin procession is held when Preston North End are relegated or promoted. The tradition began in 1948 after a greengrocer in Bamber Bridge packed a coffin full of vegetables and buried it following Preston’s relegation to Division Two. Preston North End are a professional football club. They were founder members of the English Football League in 1888 and were the first ever English football champions. They were also the first team to win 'The Double' of the league and FA Cup in 1889.
context_page_description: Northern England, also known as the North of England or simply the North, is the northern part of England, considered as a single cultural area.
  Northern England is bordered by the Midlands to the south. It extends from the Anglo-Scottish border in the north to near the River Trent in the south, although precise definitions of its southern extent vary. Northern England approximately comprises three statistical regions: the North East, North West and Yorkshire and the Humber. These have a combined population of around 14.9 million as of the 2011 Census and an area of 37,331 km². Northern England contains much of England's national parkland but also has large areas of urbanisation, including the conurbations of Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Teesside, Tyneside, Wearside, and South and West Yorkshire.
  The region has been controlled by many groups, from the Brigantes, the largest Brythonic kingdom of Great Britain, to the Romans, to Anglo-Saxons and Danes. After the Norman conquest in 1066, the Harrying of the North brought destruction.
context_section_description: The first football club in the UK was Sheffield F.C., founded in 1857. Early Northern football teams tended to adopt the Sheffield Rules rather than the Football Association Rules, but the two codes were merged in 1877. Many of the innovations of Sheffield Rules are now part of the global game, including corners, throw-ins, and free kicks for fouls.
  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 2019–20 season, of the 122 top-flight league titles since 1888, 82 (67%) have been won by teams based north of Crewe. Everton, Liverpool, Manchester United and 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, as well as 14 of the 2019 Women's World Cup squad, were born in the region.
caption: Preston North End fans 'mourn' relegation with the long-running Burial of the Coffin ceremony.
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