Built on facts. Verified twice.
Where the data comes from
Minliga is built on open results data: the engsoccerdata England archive for the forty-six seasons from 1946/47 to 1991/92 (committed here as a fixed, checksum-guarded snapshot, because history does not change), the footballcsv archive (1992/93–2020/21) and openfootball (2021/22 onwards, including the current season's fixtures and results). Results, fixtures, dates and league tables are facts; the Court of Justice of the EU confirmed in Football Dataco v Yahoo! (C-604/10) that fixture lists carry no copyright. Nothing on this site is scraped.
Where the goalscorers come from
Goal-by-goal detail — who scored, in what minute, and the score after each one — comes from three kinds of source, and every match names the one behind it in its own words.
Recent seasons are licensed from Sportmonks under a commercial subscription. Earlier seasons are built from openly licensed datasets: Wikipedia, cited by the exact revision that was read, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the Fjelstul English Football Database by Joshua C. Fjelstul, also CC BY-SA 4.0; and epldata by Andrew G. Clark, under the MIT licence. Goal data derived from the CC BY-SA sources is published under CC BY-SA 4.0 in turn, so anyone may reuse it on the same terms.
Every goal is checked before a fan sees it. The goals in a match must add up to the score in this site's own verified archive; where they do not, the match carries no scorers at all rather than a story that disagrees with its own result. A few matches in most seasons are held back for exactly that reason, and a match nobody has researched yet is never shown as though nobody scored.
Where the archive starts, and why
It starts on 31 August 1946, the opening day of the first season played after the Second World War — seven years after the last one was abandoned four matches in, and one year after Matt Busby walked into a bombed-out Old Trafford. That is a real beginning rather than a convenient one: English league football restarted there, and it has run without a break ever since.
The competition was renamed the Premier League in 1992. Everything before that was the Football League First Division — the same clubs, the same promotion and relegation, one continuous record book — and this site labels each season by the competition it was actually played in rather than pretending either name covers the whole story.
The rules each season was played under
Two things changed inside the archive, and both are honoured season by season rather than smoothed over.
A win was worth two points until 1980/81 and three from 1981/82, when England became the first major league to make winning worth more than drawing twice. Points totals and points-per-game figures are therefore never compared across that line anywhere on this site — a 60-point season in 1979 and a 60-point season in 2019 are not the same achievement and are not shown as though they were. Positions, goals and margins carry across freely, because they mean the same thing in every era.
Clubs level on points were separated by goal average — goals scored divided by goals conceded — until 1975/76, and by goal difference from 1976/77. This is not a technicality. Portsmouth are champions of 1949/50, Arsenal of 1952/53 and Manchester United rather than Leeds of 1964/65 because of it, and it changes the order of at least one pair of clubs in thirteen of the thirty seasons it covers here. Every table on this site is sorted by the rule in force that season.
English league titles, all through history
Here is how the English league titles stand among the clubs you will find here, counted from the very first season in 1888/89 — including the ones won before this archive opens:
Liverpool 20 · Manchester United 20 · Arsenal 14 · Manchester City 10 · Everton 9 · Aston Villa 7 · Chelsea 6 · Sunderland 6 · Newcastle United 4 · Sheffield Wednesday 4 · Blackburn Rovers 3 · Huddersfield Town 3 · Leeds United 3 · Wolverhampton Wanderers 3 · Burnley 2 · Derby County 2 · Portsmouth 2 · Preston North End 2 · Tottenham Hotspur 2 · Ipswich Town 1 · Leicester City 1 · Nottingham Forest 1 · Sheffield United 1 · West Bromwich Albion 1
Sixteen of Liverpool’s twenty fall inside this archive and four do not; four of Everton’s nine, and eighteen of Manchester United’s twenty. Preston North End are here as champions of the first two seasons ever played, which this archive does not reach — their card says so, and their pages do not pretend otherwise. That gap is the honest shape of the thing, and it is why the all-time count sits above the archive count on every card rather than being replaced by it.
How the numbers are made
Every league table you see is rebuilt from the raw results — more than 34,000 matches since 1946 — exactly as it stood on the chosen night (or, if you prefer, once the full matchweek was complete; the two can differ, and we show both). Head-to-heads, streaks, milestones, and "what history said next" are computed the same way: from results, never estimated, never generated.
How we know it's right
Before anything ships, the pipeline must reproduce the final league table of all 80 completed seasons — including the champion of every one of them — and pass hundreds of internal consistency checks (points arithmetic, matchweek structure, position bounds, famous results like the 2011/12 final day). If a single check fails, the update does not publish.
The forty-six seasons before 1992 were checked harder still, because nobody alive can eyeball them. Every position, club, played, won, drawn, lost, goals for, goals against and points figure in all forty-six final tables was compared, row by row, against two independent published archives. The sources disagreed with each other four times; the reconstruction here was right on all four — twice because it applies goal average and goal difference in the correct seasons and one archive does not. The two points deducted from Arsenal and the one from Manchester United after the brawl at Old Trafford in October 1990 are the only points deduction in the English top flight in the whole period, and that is a closed result: every other club in every other season has exactly the points its wins and draws earn it.
Independence & privacy
Minliga is an independent fan project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to any football club or the Premier League. Club names are used only to refer to the clubs; no crests or official marks are used. The site needs no account, sets no tracking cookies, and stores your preferences only on your own device.
Copyright, sharing & disclaimer
© 2026 Minliga.com — Football through time.
Minliga is built to make football history easier to explore, understand and remember. Unless otherwise stated, the original writing, analysis, visualisations, design and presentation created for Minliga.com are protected by copyright. Underlying match results, scores, dates and other factual information remain facts, and third-party datasets and other material remain subject to their respective licences and rights.
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Some data made available through Minliga is provided under open licences, including CC BY-SA 4.0. Such material remains available under the terms of the applicable licence, irrespective of this general permission to share Minliga’s own content.
Minliga takes accuracy seriously and uses extensive automated and manual checks, but no historical database can be guaranteed to be completely free from errors or omissions. Information on Minliga.com is therefore provided “as is”, without warranties as to completeness or absolute accuracy. If you find something that appears to be wrong, we would genuinely like to know.
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Minliga.com is an independent football history and statistics service. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by or officially connected with the Premier League, the Football Association, any football club, competition, broadcaster or other organisation referenced on the site, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
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