The Singapore Football League (SFL) is a league of semi-professional football clubs from Singapore that are affiliated with the Football Association of Singapore (FAS). Founded in 1975, it was the top-level football league in Singapore from its foundation until 1988, when it was replaced by the FAS Premier League.
It now provisionally makes up the second and third tier of football in Singapore after the fully professional Singapore Premier League (SPL), which was established in 1996 as the S.League and had also replaced the FAS Premier League. Teams in the SFL are eligible to compete in the Singapore FA Cup but are not able to be promoted to the SPL, as the latter does not practice a promotion and relegation system.
Although it is an semi-professional competition organised by the FAS, several former national team and ex-S.League players have played in the league such as Jonathan Xu, Indra Sahdan Daud, Precious Emuejeraye and Ahmad Latiff (Eunos Crescent), Yazid Yasin (Gymkhana) and Zulkiffli Hassim (Yishun Sentek Mariners).
The history of the National Football League (NFL) can be traced back to the earliest 20th century during British colonial rule, whereby the Singapore Amateur Football Association (SAFA) was formed in year of 1892. SAFA was responsible for organising the top-tier football leagues in Singapore with NFL as the top-tier football league from early 20th century. It was previously made up of Division 1, Division 2 and Division 3, with the bottom team of Division 3 being relegated to the FAS Island Wide League. In 1975, the Football Association of Singapore (FAS) revamped the existing league structure involving 118 teams into a two-tier league system.
For the 1987 season, the teams play each other once in a league format. The top eight placed teams in the league progressed to a knock-out stage to determine the champions. League stage winners Tiong Bahru defeated 4th-placed Tampines Rovers 2âÂÂ1 in the final to clinch the championship. The top tier of the football league system was replaced by the FAS Premier League between 1988 and 1995.
In 1996, FAS created the S.League, a professional league, which was again revamped to the Singapore Premier League (SPL) in 2018. Since then, the NFL made up provisional tiers 2 and 3, behind the professional SPL, with rules of promotion and relegation applied for teams in NFL Division One and NFL Division Two but not into the SPL. Teams play two-round league home-away format. League features promotions and relegations for all the teams in both divisions, where the top two teams of a division will be promoted to the upper division, and the last two relegated to the lower division.
In 2020, the NFL was renamed as the Singapore Football League (SFL). Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the first season of the revamped SFL was delayed to 2022.