2015–16 National League
English football season

The 2015–16 National League season (known as the Vanarama National League for sponsorship reasons) was the first season under the new title of National League, the twelfth season consisting of three divisions and the thirty-seventh season overall.
The National League covers the top two levels of Non-League football in England. The National League is the fifth highest level of the overall pyramid, while the National League North and National League South exist at the sixth level. The top team and the winner of the play-off of the Premier division will be promoted to League Two, while the bottom four are relegated to the North or South divisions. The champions of the North and South divisions will be promoted to the Premier division, alongside the play-off winners from each division. The bottom three in each of the North and South divisions are relegated to the premier divisions of the Northern Premier League, Isthmian League or Southern League.
On 6 April 2015, it was announced that as of the 2015–16 season the League was to undergo a name change from the Football Conference to the National League. As well as the name change, the league's logo was re-designed and the league's broadcaster BT Sport signed a new three-year contract; the structure of the league and the title sponsor Vanarama remained the same.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “2015–16 National League” is english football season. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through National, League and English, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19781368. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “2015–16 National 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.