The Football League Championship is the highest division of the Football League and the second-highest division in the English Football League system.

Currently sponsored by Coca-Cola, this latest incarnation was introduced in 2004, replacing the old Football League Division One, formed in 1888, as part of a raft of rebranding measures introduced by the League's chairman, Lord Mawhinney.

It had become the second tier of English football in 1992, when the 22 teams resigned en masse and formed the Premier League.

The new First Division had 22 teams until 1995, when a further re-organisation, at the insistence of world football's governing body FIFA, meant a reduction in the size of the Premier League from 22 to 20 teams.

Since then, the Championship has comprised 24 teams. The two teams finishing the season in the top two places are automatically promoted to the Premier League and the bottom three teams are relegated to Football League One.

Teams finishing in places three to six compete in a two-legged semi-final, with the winners of those matches meeting in the Football League Championship play-off final, now held at Wembley Stadium. Such is the value of a place in the Premier League – thought to be around £40m per season – the play-off final is widely recognised as the most lucrative one-off club match played anywhere in the world.

According to finance experts Deloitte, the Championship, in its first season, was the richest non-top-flight football division in the world and the sixth-richest division in Europe, with TV revenue playing a major part in this.

In its first season the Championship had a total attendance of 9.8 million fans – the fourth highest in Europe behind the English Premier League (12.88m), Spain's Primera Liga (11.57m) and Germany's Bundesliga (10.92m), but beating both Italy's Serie A and France's Ligue 1.