EFL Championship: Dates, teams, venues, history & more

The EFL Championship is known to be one of the most competitive and difficult leagues to predict in European football, which also helps make it one of the most entertaining to watch.

With the incentive of three teams being promoted to the Premier League every season, there is always plenty at stake in the second tier of English football, a division that is packed full of some of historically the biggest clubs in the English game.

EFL Championship structure

The Championship is the second-highest division in the English Football League pyramid and consists of 24 teams, with the top two at the end of each season being promoted to the Premier League automatically.

The final promotion place is decided via a play-off format, with the teams that finish third to sixth contesting two-legged semi-finals, with the winner from each of those ties going on to face each other in the final at Wembley.

Billed as the 'richest game in football', the winner of that one-off final at Wembley will not only secure promotion to the Premier League, but they will also receive a windfall of upwards of £135m.

There are also three relegation places to fill in each Championship season, with the bottom three teams in the division at the end of every campaign suffering automatic relegation to League One.

EFL Championship history 

There has been a second tier of the English Football League pyramid for the last 132 years, but the division has taken on different guises over that time.

For the first 100 years of its existence it was known as the Football League Second Division, but that all changed in 1992 with the formation of the Premier League.

The Premier League replaced the Football League First Division as the top tier of the EFL pyramid, with the second tier then becoming known as the First Division for the next 12 years.

However, in 2004 the second tier was rebranded again and became known as the Championship, the title it still holds to this day.

EFL Championship previous winners

Since the Championship took on its current form in 2004, 13 teams have been crowned champions of the second tier, with Sunderland landing the first title during the 2004/05 season.

Of those 13 teams, six have lifted the title twice - Sunderland, Reading, Wolves, Newcastle United, Norwich City and Burnley - the latter claiming the second of their titles in 2023.

The Clarets clinched the league crown in fine style, bouncing back to the Premier League at the first time of asking after smashing the 100-point barrier.

The second tier of course dates back further than 2004 and the most-successful teams in the competition's history are Leicester and Manchester City, who have both won the title on seven occasions.

Season	Champions	Runners-up	Play-off winners
2004/05	Sunderland	Wigan	West Ham
2005/06	Reading	Sheffield United	Watford
2006/07	Sunderland	Birmingham	Derby
2007/08	West Brom	Stoke	Hull
2008/09	Wolves	Birmingham	Burnley
2009/10	Newcastle	West Brom	Blackpool
2010/11	QPR	Norwich	Swansea
2011/12	Reading	Southampton	West Ham
2012/13	Cardiff	Hull	Crystal Palace
2013/14	Leicester	Burnley	QPR
2014/15	Bournemouth	Watford	Norwich
2015/16	Burnley	Middlesbrough	Hull
2016/17	Newcastle	Brighton	Huddersfield
2017/18	Wolves	Cardiff	Fulham
2018/19	Norwich	Sheffield United	Aston Villa
2019/20	Leeds	West Brom	Fulham
2020/21	Norwich	Watford	Brentford
2021/22	Fulham	Bournemouth	Nottingham Forest
2022/23	Burnley	Sheffield United	Luton
2023/24	Leicester	Ipswich	Southampton

EFL Championship 2024/25 dates

The new EFL season is scheduled to start on Saturday 10th August, 2024. The fixtures for the 2024/25 season will be revealed at 09:00 BST on Wednesday 26th June.

A total of 552 matches will be played during the regular season, which will culminate on Saturday, 3rd May, 2025.

That will signal the end of the campaign for the majority of teams in the Championship, but the sides that finish third to sixth will contest the play-offs to decide the final promotion place, with the play-off final taking place over the final Bank Holiday weekend in May next year.