Welsh Teams in The English Leagues
Swansea City are in the Premier League and Cardiff City in the Football League, with Newport County, Wrexham, Colwyn Bay and Merthyr Town in feeder leagues. These six teams have all played in the English football league system since their founding and all declined the offer to move into the League of Wales, now known as the Welsh Premier League, when it was founded in 1992. However, the Welsh teams Bangor City, Barry Town, Caernarfon Town, Newtown and Rhyl did move into the Welsh league system from the English league system. Welsh teams participating in the English football league system can enter the FA Cup. Welsh teams participating below level 4 of the English football league system are governed by the FAW for disciplinary and administrative matters whereas Welsh teams at level 4 and above of the English football league system are administered by the English FA for the 2011–12 season onwards.
From 1996 to 2011 the FAW only allowed teams in the Welsh league system to enter the Welsh Cup. Prior to 1996 Welsh teams playing in the English league system were invited to participate along with some English teams located near the Welsh border. As this rule excluded the biggest Welsh clubs from the Welsh Cup, the FAW launched the FAW Premier Cup in the 1997–98 season to include the top Welsh Premier League teams and the top Welsh teams in the English league system. The FAW Premier Cup was discontinued after the 2007–08 season. On 20 April 2011, the Football Association of Wales invited the six Welsh clubs playing in the English league system to rejoin the Welsh Cup for the 2011–12 season but only Newport County, Wrexham and Merthyr Town accepted.
There are also a small number of English-based teams in the Welsh leagues, see List of association football clubs playing in the league of another country.
Read more about this topic: Football In Wales
Famous quotes containing the words welsh, teams, english and/or leagues:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language.”
—Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)
“By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summon’d am to a tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end:
Methinks it is no journey.”
—Unknown. Tom o’ Bedlam’s Song (l. 57–60)