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Nottingham Forest’s extraordinary peak came under Brian Clough and Peter Taylor. Promoted from the Second Division in 1977, Forest became English champions a year later, then won the European Cup in 1979 and retained it in 1980. That rise from the second tier to back-to-back European champions remains one of English football’s great stories.
A number of years ago, I came across a great web page created by Alex Harm that presented the English Football League in a way I had not encountered before: every historical season, for up to four tiers of leagues, placed side by side across a very wide page. You could highlight a club across the years and see how it rose and fell over time. A few clubs were coloured so you could find the F.A. Cup or European champions.
Unfortunately, the page stopped being updated after 2018 and could only be found in an Internet Archive snapshot.
Eventually, I decided to save the page and maintain my own personal copy for reference. I updated it each year with a new season of results and added a fifth tier going back to 1987. But the content was buried within busy HTML, making each update tedious, so I recently decided to rewrite it completely for my own use. As I worked on it, I came up with a host of improvements that I think considerably enhance Alex's original concept.
It turns out Alex has since raised his page from the dead and established a new version. It makes a number of visual and structural updates, and I am very happy to see it again.
Meanwhile, I invite visitors to this page to explore the features that make it distinctive. I've teased out hidden information to tell a detailed story about the history of the English Football League, and do so in an interactive format that I think will appeal to football fans, and that I hope is highly engaging. In addition, since the story is ongoing, the current season tables will be tracked and kept up to date as well.
Daniel Kirkdorffer
July 2026
Current-season standings data is sourced from Wikipedia through the MediaWiki API; Wikipedia text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.