Some will disagree with this geographic categorisation, but for the purpose of this article, ‘the North’ begins at Sheffield. Stoke City are included in the Midlands and Watford counts as being in London, as it’s inside the city’s M25 orbital motorway. Clubs such as Ipswich Town, Portsmouth and Southampton, Reading, Swansea City and Cardiff City are grouped together in a category outside the North, Midlands and London.
There is a gap on the map. Stare at the 2024-25 Premier League’s geographic make-up and you cannot help but notice that from Newcastle United, in England’s northernmost city, it’s a long way south until you find another club in the division.
Last season’s relegation of Burnley means that, down the west side of the Pennine ridge which splits the North, it is 125 miles from Newcastle to Manchester City. With Sheffield United also relegated in May and Leeds United losing the Championship play-off final to Southampton a week later, down the east side, it’s 160 to Nottingham Forest, who are not even in the North — they’re in the Midlands.
The whole of Yorkshire, England’s largest county, is absent from this edition of the Premier League. Beyond Manchester, Lancashire is empty.
For the first time in the history of a 20-team Premier League, there are only five clubs from the traditional ‘North’ — Everton, Liverpool, Manchester City, Manchester United and Newcastle. Rewind to season 2008-09 and there were 11 northern clubs in the Premier League’s 20. In addition to the five above, we had Sunderland, Middlesbrough, Blackburn Rovers, Hull City, Bolton Wanderers and Wigan Athletic.
Back then, 55 per cent of the Premier League was northern. Now it’s 25 per cent.
That statistical high of 55 per cent was part of a six-season sequence in which the North’s top-flight participation was never less than 50 per cent. This was commented upon rarely because it was taken for granted. From Preston North End being the first winners of the old First Division in 1889, there has been a sense of northern ownership of the professional game.
No London club played in the top division until Woolwich Arsenal in 1904 and no London club were league champions until Arsenal (having moved across the River Thames from Woolwich) won it in 1931. That season, 14 of the 22 clubs in the division were in the North, including Grimsby Town — on the coast in Lincolnshire, but further north than Sheffield. When Portsmouth became the second southern club to be champions, in 1949, 13 of the division’s 22 clubs were in the North. It’s how it was.
But last season, five of the Premier League’s top 10 were London clubs and the three immediately below were Brighton, Bournemouth and Fulham, another side from the capital. There has been a south coast revival featuring Brighton and Bournemouth, and this season Southampton return, too.
Sheffield United bid farewell to the Premier League following defeat at Newcastle in April (Ian MacNicol/Getty Images)
Northern scarcity is not unprecedented: in 1983-84, only four clubs (18 per cent) — Liverpool (champions), Everton, Manchester United and Sunderland — were from the North in a 22-club division dominated by the Midlands. But by the time of the first Premier League season, 1992-93, the North was back up to 10 of the 22.
Manchester United won that inaugural Premier League and, even since 2008-09, 12 of the 16 titles have been claimed by the cities of Manchester and Liverpool. Go back further and, of the last 40 league title winners of England, those cities have produced 27. Last season, City were champions again, Mancunian neighbours United won the FA Cup and Liverpool won the Carabao Cup.
So it will sound peculiar to some to ask the question of whether the North and the Premier League have an issue and whether England’s football geography is moving south.
And these are questions, not assertions: is there a southern shift? Is there a northern city/town parallel?
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July 13: York City v Sheffield United.
It is the day before England face Spain in the final of Euro 2024 and World In Motion by New Order is played as the teams emerge at York’s Community Stadium, built in 2021. It is unseasonably cold, but the crowd response is warm. England’s appetite for football just grows.
Sheffield United are part of ‘The Northern Question’. Relegated from the Premier League in May, they lost 28 of their 38 matches last season; one 8-0 at home to Newcastle in September, one 6-0 at home to Arsenal in March. Yet they were allotted 1,977 tickets for this pre-season friendly, their first of the summer, and sold all of them. Manager Chris Wilder is suitably impressed: “The love of football is as big as it’s ever been in the North.”
Plus, Wilder’s team won the game. “And it’s always nice to be involved in that,” he says.
Wilder insists the appetite for football in the North remains strong (Alex Dodd – CameraSport via Getty Images)
But Sheffield isn’t winning.
With United’s civic rivals, Wednesday, finishing 20th in the Championship and barely avoiding instant relegation back to the third tier, it means another year’s absence of top-division matches in a city that is part of English football’s origin story. As Daniel Gray wrote: “More than any other place, Sheffield explains how English football began.” Gray’s 2013 book, Hatters, Railwaymen And Knitters, was subtitled ‘Travels Through England’s Football Provinces’.
English football, however, is different now — even from 2013. Then, three of the Southern ‘disruptors’ — Bournemouth, Brighton and Brentford — had never been in the Premier League; today, they are established members of it.
Sheffield, meanwhile, England’s ninth-largest population conurbation, has not produced England’s champions since the most recent of Wednesday’s four titles in 1930. Aspirational modern managers speak of making ‘new history’ and at Bournemouth, Brighton and Brentford, they have. As well as geographically, there is a contrast in achievement.
Wednesday’s old history and old, vast stadium, Hillsborough, mean they will always be a significant club. But robust? Optimistic? Those are other questions.
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Wednesday were part of the original Premier League, having finished third in the last First Division in 1991-92 behind champions Leeds and second-placed Manchester United — an all-northern podium. They were then seventh in the inaugural Premier League and stayed there — they had Chris Waddle and European football and few doubts about their status.
But Wednesday were relegated in 2000 and, despite several changes of ownership and the employment of 18 permanent managers since, a club of national stature has never made it back.
Waddle and Manchester United’s Eric Cantona during a Premier League game between Wednesday and Manchester United (Graham Chadwick/EMPICS via Getty Images)
Their city rivals have been in and out of the Premier League more frequently. Like Wednesday, United were in the inaugural season and have been back on three occasions, but only once have they stayed up — Wilder’s 2019-20 innovative version, who finished ninth. Now they are back in the Championship.
Paul Jewell was the first of those 18 Wednesday managers charged with getting the club back to where they and their fans feel they belong. At the time, it was a sentiment he agreed with — he left fellow Yorkshire side Bradford City, who he had taken into the Premier League, to go to Wednesday in the division below.
“I remember driving up to Hillsborough thinking, ‘Wow, I’m going to be manager here’,” Jewell recalls. “It was an iconic ground — obviously aside from the tragedy. FA Cup semi-finals were always held there, the scale of it. Clubs like Sheffield Wednesday have a certain something. Leeds United have it.”
That certain something — size, history, fanbase, potential — looks different today than in 2000.
Then, Bournemouth and Brentford were in the third tier, Brighton in the fourth, but that trio’s rise has coincided with clubs from the towns and smaller cities of the North, Burnley aside, failing recently to sustain a Premier League position. The south coast and south London clubs — the latter’s Crystal Palace have been in the Premier League since 2013 — have been powered by a combination of investment and intelligence.
Jewell’s son, Sam, was part of the recruitment revolution at Brighton and has since been lured to Chelsea.
When Sam showed him around Brighton’s new training ground, Paul says “it was like walking into Hollywood”, and while searching for answers to The Northern Question, which he agrees is a “puzzle”, Jewell Senior alights on infrastructure and the psychology of the modern player as a possible piece of an overall answer.
“The training ground is of paramount importance these days,” Jewell says. “‘Less fashionable’ clubs, supposedly, have ploughed money they’ve got from being in the Premier League into facilities and they’re getting the benefits. There are lots of teams who are less historic than Sheffield Wednesday but who have become more attractive — Bournemouth, Brighton, Leicester — and they have all moved their facilities on and invested in their infrastructure.
“When things started to go wrong at Leeds, they sold off some of their training ground.”
Bournemouth are currently constructing a new £35million ($44.7m) training complex, following the examples of Brighton and Leicester City. Brentford have revamped theirs, Fulham have bought land to expand their Motspur Park base, and Palace have built a Category 1 academy across the road from their main first-team facility.
Jewell celebrates promotion with Bradford City in 1999 (Matthew Ashton/EMPICS via Getty Images)
Jewell, who took two northern clubs — Bradford and Wigan — into the Premier League and kept them there, says: “When I used to get players to Wigan, the first place I’d take them was the stadium. I wouldn’t take them to the training ground until they’d signed, really. Same at Bradford. We just didn’t have the facilities.
“Players now expect state-of-the-art. A lot have come from academies, and players generally only go to the stadium once a fortnight. The training ground is their work environment.”
Jewell, born in 1964, has a generational awareness of English football history, but he understands the here and now, too. The fresh, 21st-century histories possessed by the likes of Brighton and Brentford matter.
“I don’t mean to sound disrespectful,” he says, “but you could hardly conceive Brentford, Brighton and Bournemouth being bigger than Leeds or Sheffield Wednesday. Yet Leeds lose players to Bournemouth. Could you imagine Eddie Gray (a Leeds hero of the 1960s and 1970s) going to Bournemouth?
“It just shows how football has moved on. There are young players coming from other countries who have never known Bournemouth to be anything other than a Premier League club. Clubs who think they’ve got a big name, a big history (but are no longer in the top flight)? A 22-year-old player isn’t going to be aware of that. You can’t sell them history.”
Luis Sinisterra is one of several players who have moved from Leeds to Bournemouth (Robin Jones – AFC Bournemouth/AFC Bournemouth via Getty Images)
Trying to pinpoint why the North has gone from having 11 Premier League teams in 2008 to 10 in 2010, nine in 2011, eight in 2016, seven in 2019, six in 2022 and five in 2024 requires a specific, practical explanation. Or so it seems.
Among some, there is a broader feeling that England as a country has swung southwards over the past 40 years; that there has been a ‘Londonization’ of the economy, political power and culture. In 2021, the Northern Powerhouse Partnership (NPP) think-tank found the median full-time salary in London was £37,500 compared to £29,000 in the North; £20billion was found to build the Elizabeth train line across the middle of London, while the HS2 rail project from the capital to Manchester and Leeds was cancelled.
“You would expect the largest number of clubs to be centred on the areas with the greatest population, so in that sense, it’s no surprise London has so many Premier League clubs,” says NPP’s chief economist Andrew McPhillips. “At the same time, that might make you ask a question about Sheffield or Bristol (in the south west). So it’s not just as simple as population. It’s a hard question to answer.
“In terms of raising finance, clubs in London and the south east probably benefit from being able to find additional revenue streams, such as corporate hospitality. As great as Burnley Football Club is, the town doesn’t have endless businesses that can go and spend thousands on a corporate hospitality day. For a global brand like Manchester United or Liverpool, that’s less of an issue.
“But if you’re in Bradford, Middlesbrough or Huddersfield, for example, whose clubs have flirted with the Premier League and fallen away again, I wonder if that access to additional revenue plays a part and that will reflect the make-up of your local economy.
“What’s changed over the last 30 years or so is that you could have a rich individual who could sustain a club in a northern town, whereas now you might get lucky and have a year or two in the Premier League if things go in your favour. But you can’t sustain that based on one relatively successful person, in local terms. It takes billionaires, doesn’t it?”
Jack Walker’s millions helped Blackburn compete at the top end of the Premier League in the 1990s (Tony Harris – PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images)
Wages — and the overall finance to pay superior salaries — have and will always be a key determining factor in a club’s outcome. It is not necessarily geographic: this season marks the 30th anniversary of Blackburn’s Premier League triumph, a title built by Jack Walker — the kind of local businessman to whom McPhillips refers.
But in 1994, Manchester City, for example, were owned by former City player turned entrepreneur Francis Lee and were valued at £8million. Today, City are an Abu Dhabi state asset with income of £712m in their last set of accounts.
Walker would not have been able to take on the modern Manchester City and it is obvious that foreign ownership has changed English football. Geographically, however, it has occurred countrywide, from Bournemouth up to Newcastle.
Dave Whelan was a comparable Lancashire business figure to Walker and he put his money into Wigan, but he was also a realist.
Frank Barlow is a Sheffield man, a former player for United and an ex-Wednesday coach. He has also been No 2 at other northern clubs — Hull, Bradford and Wigan. “Dave Whelan used to say that if you have a club in London, say Fulham, who want a player, then to get that player to come to Wigan you have to offer something — and that something is money,” Barlow says. “That’s not wrong by the player; he’s a professional, it’s his job.
“It definitely happens: if a club in the North and one in London offer the same salary, the player will go to London. Ask any northern manager.
“So it’s like running a car. If you’ve got an Aston Martin, you’ve got to inject a lot of fuel to keep going. To stay in the Premier League requires large injections of cash and it might only keep you where you are. Where does that cash come from?”
Barlow, 77, grew up in an era when, he says, Sheffield and South Yorkshire in general were “vibrant”.
“I don’t want to run Sheffield down, but if you look at the northern cities, a lot of the town centres have gone. There’s a valley near the M1 which, when I first started at Sheffield United, was one constant stream of iron and steelworks, industry. Look there now and it’s almost all gone. With the pits gone, it just knocked the stuffing out of the whole social fabric.
“I’m not saying it stops people going to the match — both Sheffield clubs get great support — but it’s a constant fight. London didn’t dominate then the way it does now.”
Sheffield United endured a miserable return to the Premier League last season (Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
Both Barlow and McPhillips say access to funding is easier in the capital. “There’s a certain amount of money available to you there,” Barlow says.
McPhillips offers another possible factor.
“If we move away from football for a minute and ask why London is so desirable as a place for so many businesses, it is because of access to talent, highly-skilled people,” he says. “Does Brentford’s proximity to other Premier League clubs mean they can pick up people who have been exposed to how you manage and progress these big clubs? Whereas if you are Bradford, is there anybody nearby who you can attract? London’s football ecosystem means there are more people who can exchange skills and knowledge and move between clubs.”
Yet it must be said that, as with Brighton and Tony Bloom, Brentford have grown into a Premier League club under the smart stewardship of a wealthy local fan in Matthew Benham. Had either man been born in Bolton or Hull, they would surely have been able to orchestrate a similar rise there.
As Paul Jewell adds, Brighton had a plan: “There are certain clubs who know that if they go up it’s going to be brief, because it’s so tough. I’m desperate for Bradford to do well, but clubs like that need a three-, four- or five-year plan. Some clubs just hope. You need money, but you also need an identity — look at Swansea, they did it.
“Brighton have had foresight. Who’d have thought they would be in Europe? At Bradford and Wigan, when we were in the Premier League, I knew that the players who came to us had been touted first to 19 other clubs by their agents. To be fair to Brighton, they have said to players, ‘If you come to us, there’s a pathway and we won’t stand in your way if you want to go to Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool’. And they have — (Alexis) Mac Allister, (Moises) Caicedo, (Leandro) Trossard, the list goes on.
“At Wigan, we did something similar — Antonio Valencia goes to Manchester United, Pascal Chimbonda comes to us from (French club) Bastia and goes on to Tottenham. We said, ‘Listen, we might not be the biggest club, might not have the best history, but you’re going to get into our team and there’s a pathway to bigger and better than us’.
“Wrexham (the north Wales club now in the third tier after successive promotions) have had a lot of money pumped in, but they have a plan — they’ve bought players who can play a level above. I just think there’s not enough long-term planning.”
Wigan, with Whelan on the far right, lift the 2013 FA Cup (Anthony Devlin/PA Images via Getty Images)
Barlow agrees on Bloom and Benham —“There’s no reason for it not to happen (at northern clubs)” — though his overall tone is not optimistic. “The geographic shift is so marked at the moment and I can’t see it changing. It doesn’t stop the likes of Burnley getting there, but it’s one hell of a fight to stay there. Sustaining it is the bigger problem.
“Bournemouth? Looking from up here (in the north), I’d say that’s a wealthy place. Prosperous is the word and we don’t seem to have that up here.”
But prosperous is a description you hear of Yorkshire’s capital, York. York City, though, have never been in the top flight in their 102-year history and Daniel Gray, who grew up there supporting Middlesbrough (50 miles further north), says: “There’s a sort of contentment about York and York City. It’s pleasant.
“Certainly the centre of York is prosperous, and there’s a lot of people from the South buying properties in York, but it still has its troubles. It’s a small city, now 140,000, and it isn’t the case that there weren’t industries that gave birth to good football elsewhere because they were there in York — the railways, the chocolate factories.”
York, who finished 20th out of 24 in the National League — England’s fifth tier — last season, have been 51 per cent acquired by the Uggla family from Canada, who clearly see possibilities for the club and city, but it may take some time. Last week, the players were taken on a walking tour around York, an astute exercise in increasing understanding of local identity.
“When you look at one of those maps where the clubs are and there’s that gap, there’s something in that,” Gray says. “To have no Yorkshire club and to have only Newcastle in the Premier League, it does say something’s happened.
“I don’t think the divide is so much North and South as north-east, north-west. Trophies continue to pour into the north-west, whereas the endless support for clubs from fans east of the Pennines has never been fully rewarded. That’s as far down as Sheffield. It’s amazing we keep coming back, and in greater numbers than ever it seems.
“I’ve wrestled with this idea: is there something collective going on, or is it a series of bad ownerships? Are they more unified by individual bad ownership than by what happened with the coal mines, steel or whatever?”
York city centre, with the Minster cathedral in the background (Loop Images/Slawek Staszczuk/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Having York’s old ground, Bootham Crescent, renamed KitKat Crescent in a 2005 sponsorship deal is an example Gray produces of eccentric ownership decisions. Economically, Bradford entered administration in 2002, Leeds did the same in 2007 and received a 15-point deduction; Hull were close to liquidation in 2010 and, in 2020, Wednesday were deducted six points for breaching financial rules.
There are other examples of northern mismanagement and, while everyone speaks of the potential of Leeds as a club and Leeds, the city, their current manager Daniel Farke reminded us all in May that Leeds’ modern pedigree is not what many think.
“This club has had three seasons of Premier League football in 20 years,” he said. “It was a fantastic first season under Marcelo (Bielsa), but then two years of struggle and relegation, so it wasn’t an established Premier League side.”
Dave Baldwin agrees with this non-geographic assessment. ‘Geography as destiny’, the ‘death of distance’ and other philosophical theories are swept off the table when the former Burnley, Bradford, Huddersfield and, briefly, EFL chief executive considers The Northern Question.
Baldwin was part of the executive layer, ‘the team behind the Sean Dyche team’, who returned Burnley to the Premier League in 2016 and kept them there for six consecutive seasons. “Geography?,” Baldwin asks rhetorically. “I think it’s a fallacy.
“When Brighton came up (2017), I remember talking to Paul Barber (the Brighton CEO) when they first came to Turf Moor. I don’t think, geographically, they had any gain on us.
“Look at what they’ve done with their stadium and their infrastructure.”
Baldwin reaches for material explanations for Burnley’s ability to punch above the club’s size in a town of 80,000 people. He argues that executive stability, allied to judicious recruitment, investment in a training ground and the appropriate manager for the job in Dyche, meant more than Burnley’s geography, 30 miles north of Manchester.
“Stability was part of Burnley’s formula,” Baldwin says. “Why were we there six years? Well, even though we’d sometimes go into the last game of the season seeing if we’d survive, there was never a consideration to change the manager. We had an ownership that wasn’t rushing to sell and we had a stable executive team.
Dyche was the right fit for Burnley (Dave Howarth – PA Images via Getty Images)
“You have to have a very good recruitment strategy and part of it is not to judge a player just by what he can do with the ball at his feet. It’s what he can do in a change of environment and culture and our culture was not to get too ahead of ourselves, a siege mentality.
“Are there players overseas who won’t come to Burnley because they don’t know where it is? Yeah. But you know what? The pool of players is very big.
“That’s my take anyway. If someone said to me we’d done something extraordinary at Burnley and against the odds in the North, I’d say it was nothing to do with the North.
“The ownership, the executive and the football management team have to have a real synergy. Even if one is off-kilter, the business will drift. Those factors are definitely more important than geography. It’s the minutiae of running a club, the many lines of detail.”
Burnley bounced straight back up from Premier League relegation in 2015 and 2022 — illustrating why many call the parachute payment system a ‘trampoline’ payment system — and are among the favourites to do so again this season under new coach Scott Parker.
Baldwin says he is “shocked” by Yorkshire’s absence from the Premier League map, but does not think that has anything to do with players not wanting to live in, for example, Leeds. He says the same about “the allure of Manchester and Cheshire” for Burnley recruits — and the same goes for Wigan, Bolton, Blackpool and Blackburn presumably.
But he does concede there is one area where geography may play an oversized part in clubs’ outcomes: “I think the north-east has a harder task, Sunderland, Middlesbrough — because you’re a long way away up there.”
Manager Peter Reid celebrates Sunderland’s promotion to the Premier League in 1999 (Craig Prentis /Allsport)
Retreat 10 years and Sunderland were a Premier League club, ending the 2013-14 season with Gus Poyet in charge. But, owned by Texan businessman Ellis Short, an early U.S. entrant into the league, they were in constant managerial flux. After two more unconvincing seasons and three more managers, Sunderland went down under David Moyes in 2017 and have not been back since.
Back-to-back relegations brought a four-season stay in League One and, while Sunderland have just embarked on a third season back in the Championship, it would be an achievement for them or any other to finish above the three trampoline clubs — Burnley, Sheffield United and Luton Town — next May.
As Jewell says, though, establishing a club identity means the discussion can move from location to reputation.
In 2024, Newcastle are known for the wealth of the club’s Saudi Arabian owners rather than for geographically being twice as far from London as they are from Scotland’s capital, Edinburgh.
Sunderland’s majority French ownership is not pumping in money on anything like that scale. The club’s profile is now based on signing bargains (Jack Clarke), technique (Patrick Roberts) and emerging talent (Trai Hume). But how far the team and club are from the Premier League could be seen in their FA Cup experience against Newcastle last season, and locally there are questions about the size of investment at the Stadium of Light. Post-2017 relegation, respected data website Transfermarkt states Sunderland’s most expensive signing remains Will Grigg, for £3million, from Wigan in 2019.
Also in the north-east, Middlesbrough, who were in the original Premier League and then spent 13 straight seasons there until 2009, have had only one year back since, 2016-17 under manager Aitor Karanka. Like Sunderland, they have the necessary training ground infrastructure and with Michael Carrick in charge, there is a developing profile based on style of play. Anecdotally, prospective signings and their agents are mentioning the Carrick factor.
Long-time owner-chairman Steve Gibson remains a generous benefactor — he converted £107million of debt into shares last December — and the club are regarded as financially stable. But more than ever there are richer ownerships across England and this season’s first parachute payment is £44m; Middlesbrough’s latest turnover was £28.5m.
Carrick instructs his Middlesbrough players from the sidelines (MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Middlesbrough — and Wednesday, and others — are evidence against the idea that this is all ‘cyclical’. Foreign ownership, different club models… they are here to stay. Wednesday’s task is in fact to break their cycle.
“I understand the question,” Wilder says at York of the five-from-20 Premier League number, “but there’s some quite big clubs in the North, isn’t there? Liverpool, Man United, Man City. I think it might just be a blip, it was all right the year before, wasn’t it, when Burnley and Sheffield United got promoted?”
And indeed three northern clubs may well be promoted this season. The Premier League map for 2025-26 would then look different.
Does this matter? As McPhillips of NPP says: “I was at a meeting last summer in Manchester with foreign investors, quite a few of them from the USA. One of the things attracting them to Manchester, rather than some other places, was the culture, and in particular the football clubs.
“Having a city with a thriving top-flight football club was quite an attraction. When they’re thinking of investing in their business, it’s attractive in terms of bringing clients in, it’s good for the people who’ll be working for you. It’s not the number one driving factor in where you invest, but culture and sport do play a part.
“Some were in the tech sector, some in manufacturing. Having a Premier League profile is just an additional positive about a place.”
As the Lord Mayor of Leeds, Eileen Taylor, said when Bielsa’s team were promoted back to the Premier League in 2020, it was “wonderful… to say once again that Leeds is the home to a Premier League club”. In the same year, Hull’s Chamber of Commerce reflected on the five seasons between 2008 and 2017 that Hull City spent in the top division, saying: “It puts a place on the radar.”
And then there was Burnley chairman, Mike Garlick, who in 2017 said: “The Premier League put us — places like us — on the map.”
(Top photos: Getty Images. design: Dan Goldfarb. Graphic: John Bradford)
