History of Aston Villa F.C. (1874–1961)
aspect of history
Aston Villa Football Club are an English association football club based in Aston, Birmingham. They were formed in 1874, and played nine years in the FA Cup and local cup competitions before becoming a founder member of the Football League in the 1888–89 season. Aston Villa were one of the dozen teams that competed in the inaugural Football League in 1888 with the club's vice-president William McGregor being the league's founder. They played in the top league in England until the 1935–56 season when they were relegated into the Second Division. They have won the English League championship seven times: in 1894, 1896, 1897, 1899, 1900, 1910 and, most recently, in 1981. They have also been runners-up on a further nine occasions: in 1889, 1903, 1908, 1911, 1913, 1914, 1931, 1933 and 1990.
Aston Villa emerged as the most successful English club of the Victorian era. By the end of Villa's "Golden Age" at the start of the First World War, the club had won six of their seven League Championships and the FA Cup five times (1887, 1895, 1897, 1905, 1913).
Aston Villa won their sixth FA Cup in 1920. For the remainder of the inter-war years though, Villa were on a slow decline.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “History of Aston Villa F.C. (1874–1961)” is aspect of history. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through History, Aston and Villa, 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 Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q12060202. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1874, 1888, 1935 and 1894.
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This entry incorporates text from “History of Aston Villa F.C. (1874–1961)” 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.