Aston Villa

Aston Villa Football Club is a football club from the United Kingdom based in Birmingham (England), founded in 1874. It has played in the Premier League, the top tier of English football, continuously since 2019, although it is one of the most representative teams of the country's elite and is surpassed only by Everton Football Club in appearances in the top flight. It is one of the founder members of the Football League in 1888 and of the Premier League in 1992. It plays its home matches at Villa Park, also a century-old ground, with a capacity of 42,000 spectators.

Aston Villa has been a leading English club since the 1880s, when its team pioneered the modern game. This style of combined short, fast passing was introduced by the Scot George Ramsay, who was appointed the world's first professional football manager in 1886. The club influenced the sport's advance towards professionalism in 1885, and it was Villa's director, William McGregor, who founded the world's first football league in 1888.

Six English Football League titles and six FA Cups established Aston Villa as the most successful club in England, a position it held from the 1890s to the 1970s. Villa scored 128 goals in the 1930–31 season, which remains the all-time record in the top flight; however, the club began its first decline in the mid-1930s. The 1940s and 1950s were generally a period of mediocrity followed by a sharp decline in the 1960s, previously offset by the triumph in the 1956–57 FA Cup, which culminated in the club's takeover by Doug Ellis in 1968 and its first and only relegation to the third tier of English football in 1969–70. Villa returned to the elite from the mid-1970s under Ron Saunders, who led the club to a seventh top-flight league title in 1980–81 and its first Community Shield. It became the fourth English club to win the European Cup, doing so in its first participation in 1981–82, beating Bayern Munich 1–0 in the final, followed by the 1982 European Super Cup against F.C. Barcelona and the 2001 Intertoto Cup. In 2026, it won its first Europa League.

Aston Villa was a founder member of the Premier League in 1992, one of the three clubs that have been founder members of both the Football League and the Premier League. The club regularly qualified for European football in the 1990s, but after a period in which the club struggled to compete with the high levels of spending of the leading clubs, Doug Ellis sold his stake in the club to the American billionaire Randy Lerner, whose ownership ended with Villa's first and only relegation from the Premier League in the 2015–16 season. The club returned to the Premier League in 2019.

Throughout its history, Villa has spent 110 seasons in the top flight, the second most of any club, and has provided players for 77 international matches with England, also the second most of any club. Aston Villa currently ranks fifth in the all-time English top-flight table, since its creation in 1888, and is the seventh most successful club in English football by competitive honours.