Blackburn RoversFew clubs link the beginning of organised football and the Premier League era as directly as Blackburn Rovers, one of only three clubs to be founder members of both the Football League, in 1888, and the Premier League, in 1992. The club was founded in 1875 after a meeting at the Leger Hotel in Blackburn, on the initiative of Arthur Constantine and John Lewis, who wanted a side playing under Association rules. Within a decade it was among the strongest teams in the country. Rovers won the FA Cup in 1884, 1885 and 1886, and they remain the only existing club to have won the trophy three times in a row. Further victories followed in 1890 and 1891, and the sixth and last came in 1928, with a 3–1 win over Huddersfield Town.
The club's home, Ewood Park, has been its permanent ground since 1890. Rovers had played a few games there in the previous decade, when the site was known as Ewood Bridge and also staged greyhound racing. About 10,000 spectators watched the first league match at the ground, and the record attendance of 62,522 was set in 1929 and still stands. The stadium was significantly rebuilt in the 1990s, and a statue of Jack Walker stands behind the stand that carries his name. Its name has never been commercial, which suits a ground that has been used for more than a century and a quarter.
Blackburn's first league titles came before the First World War, in 1911–12 and 1913–14, and for eight decades they remained the only ones. The change began in 1991, when the local steelworks owner and lifelong supporter Jack Walker took over the club. He persuaded Kenny Dalglish to return to management, and Rovers won promotion to the inaugural Premier League in 1992. Walker then paid a British record fee of £3.6 million for Alan Shearer, who formed the 'SAS' attacking pair with Chris Sutton, and the two scored more than 50 goals between them in the title season. In May 1995 Blackburn won the Premier League, its first league title in 81 years, and qualified for the Champions League for the first time.
The success proved hard to extend. Dalglish moved upstairs after the title, the champions finished seventh in 1995–96 under Ray Harford, and in the summer of 1996 Shearer was sold to Newcastle United for a world-record £15 million. Blackburn were relegated in 1999, and Walker died in August 2000. Even so, the club returned to the Premier League in 2001, and in February 2002 won the League Cup in Cardiff, beating Tottenham Hotspur 2–1 under Graeme Souness. The squads of the following years included Brad Friedel, Mark Hughes and Andy Cole, and Hughes, as manager, took the team to three consecutive cup semi-finals.
The period after Walker's death was less stable. In 2010 the Indian poultry company Venky's bought the club from the Walker Family Trust, and in 2017 Rovers became the first Premier League champions to fall into the third tier. The club has since returned to the second tier, where it plays in blue-and-white halved shirts, and it has not been back in the Premier League since. Blackburn is also the only town club to have won the Premier League, one of only seven clubs to do so, and that fact, together with six FA Cups and three league titles, still defines how the Rovers see themselves.