Southern Football League

The Southern League is a football competition featuring semi-professional clubs from East Anglia, the South and the Midlands of England. Together with the Isthmian League and the Northern Premier League it forms levels seven and eight of the English football league system.

The structure of the Southern League has changed several times since its formation in 1894, and currently there are 87 clubs which are divided into four divisions. The Central and South Divisions are at step 3 of the National League System (NLS), and are feeder divisions, mainly to the National League South but also to the National League North. Feeding the Premier Divisions are two regional divisions, Division One Central and Division One South, which are at step 4 of the NLS. These divisions are, in turn fed by various regional leagues.

The league has its administrative head office at Eastgate House in Gloucester.

Professional football (and, indeed, professional sports in general) developed more slowly in Southern England than in Northern England. Professionalism was first sanctioned by The Football Association as early as 1885, but when The Football League was founded in 1888 its member clubs were based entirely in the North and Midlands, as the county football associations in the South were firmly opposed to professionalism.

Woolwich Arsenal (nowadays simply Arsenal) were the first club in London to turn professional in 1891 and were one of the prime motivators behind an attempt to set up a Southern League to mirror the existing Northern and Midlands based Football League. However, this venture failed in the face of opposition from the London Football Association, and Woolwich Arsenal instead joined the Football League as its only representative south of Birmingham in 1893. Additionally, an amateur league, the Southern Alliance, was founded in 1892, with seven clubs from the region, but that folded after one incomplete season.

Nonetheless, another attempt was made to form the Southern League, and this time it was successful. A competition for both professional and amateur clubs was founded in 1894 under the initiative of Millwall Athletic (now simply Millwall). Initially only one division was envisaged, but such was the enthusiasm for the idea, that eventually two divisions were formed. The sixteen original founder members were:

2nd Scots Guards withdrew before the first season started and were replaced by Southampton St Mary's. Woolwich Arsenal attempted to add their reserve side to the second division but this application was refused due to the club's existing membership of The Football League.

The Southern League soon became the dominant competition below The Football League in Southern and Central England, and by the turn of the century a few of the Southern League sides began to seriously rival the Football League in the FA Cup. A preview of the 1900–01 season in the Daily News described the league as "now, without a doubt, second only in importance and the strength of its clubs to the Football League itself. With the exception of Woolwich Arsenal, who prefer to remain members of the Second Division of the Football League, all the best professional teams in the South are now enrolled in the ranks of the Southern League".