1978–79 Football League
80th season of The Football League
The 1978–79 season was the 80th completed season of the Football League.
Bob Paisley won his third league title at Liverpool as his side fought off competition from Nottingham Forest and West Bromwich Albion. Albion were in their first season under the management of Ron Atkinson, and pulled off a famous 5–3 away win over Manchester United with a team that included Bryan Robson, Brendan Batson, Cyrille Regis and Laurie Cunningham.
The three relegation places went to Queens Park Rangers, Birmingham City and Chelsea. QPR had declined since the departure of Dave Sexton in 1977 and were relegated just three years after finishing runners-up in the league. Meanwhile, Chelsea's manager Danny Blanchflower paid for his team's shortcomings by losing his job.
Money dominated the headlines during the season: Trevor Francis became England's first million-pound footballer after joining Nottingham Forest from Birmingham City. Liverpool became one of the first English clubs to have a shirt sponsor when they agreed a sponsorship deal with Japanese hi-fi manufacturer Hitachi.
Crystal Palace won the Second Division title, followed by Brighton & Hove Albion, who were promoted to the top division for the first time, and third-placed Stoke City. Going down were Sheffield United, Millwall and Blackburn Rovers.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “1978–79 Football League” is 80th season of The Football League. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Football, League and 80th, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “80th season of The Football League” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3446249. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1978 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “1978–79 Football League” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.