Cardiff City

Cardiff City Football Club (in Welsh: Clwb Pêl-droed Dinas Caerdydd) is a football club from the city of Cardiff, Wales. It was founded in 1899 and from the 2026/27 season will play in the Championship, after being promoted from League One in the 2025/26 season.

Founded in 1899 as Riverside F.C., it adopted the name Cardiff City in 1907. The club reached its greatest successes during the 1920s, when it was promoted to the First Division (the top tier of English football before the creation of the current Premier League), finishing as runners-up in the 1923/24 season and winning the FA Cup final in 1927, being to date the only non-English team to lift the trophy of that competition, and, together with Swansea City, one of the non-English teams to win a top-flight competition in England. After the Second World War the club fell from the First Division and in the 1960s it was a regular in the European Cup Winners' Cup, reaching the semi-finals in the 1967/68 season. Between 1985 and 2000 the club was mired in a serious sporting crisis, falling as far as the Fourth Division. From 2000 it achieved a series of promotions that took it to the English Football League Championship (second tier) and to the 2008 FA Cup final and the 2012 English League Cup final.

Cardiff City is one of the 6 Welsh teams that take part in the English league. Together with Swansea A.F.C. and Wrexham A.F.C., it is considered one of the three big clubs of football in the country. Since in 1921 the Welsh national league, which lacked a sufficient number of competitive teams, was integrated into the English football league system by joining the Southern Football League (which is now the seventh and eighth tiers), the Football Association of Wales lacked a league of its own between 1921 and 1992, and for this reason the three big teams have competed in league tournaments outside the country since that date, not being incorporated into the Welsh Premier League upon its creation in 1992 and being excluded from competing in the Welsh Cup, the country's cup tournament, still in existence, which until 1995 included both the clubs competing in Wales and the Welsh clubs competing in England, and whose top champions are the three most important clubs, Cardiff City being the second most decorated club with 22 titles, behind only Wrexham A.F.C., which is the most decorated of them with 23 titles, being the last champion before the exclusion of the Welsh clubs in England from the competition.

In 2013 Cardiff City were proclaimed champions of England's second-division tournament, with which it secured promotion to the Premier League. However, the Welsh team would be relegated again that same season.