West Bromwich Albion Football Club () is a professional football club based in West Bromwich, West Midlands, England. They compete in the EFL Championship, the second tier of English football. The club was formed in 1878 and has played at its home ground, The Hawthorns, since 1900. Albion was a founder member of the Football League in 1888, the first professional football league in the world. The club has spent the majority of its existence in the top tier of English football, where it has played for 82 seasons. The club has been champions of England once, in 1919–20, and has been runners-up twice. Albion have reached ten FA Cup finals and won the Cup on five occasions. The first win came in 1888, the year the league was founded, followed by wins in 1892, 1931, 1954 and most recently in 1968, the club's last major trophy. Albion also won the Football League Cup at the first attempt in 1966, and have reached a further two finals. The club's longest continuous period in the top division spanned 24 years between 1949 and 1973, and from 1986 to 2002 it spent its longest ever spell out of the top division. The team has played in navy blue and white stripes for most of the club's history, and the club badge features a throstle perched on a hawthorn branch. Albion has long-standing rivalries with other West Midlands clubs, with its traditional rivals being Aston Villa and Wolverhampton Wanderers. Albion contests the Black Country derby with the latter. History Early years (1878–1950) The club was founded as West Bromwich Strollers in 1878 by workers from George Salter's Spring Works in West Bromwich, in the Black Country. They were renamed West Bromwich Albion in 1880, becoming the first team to adopt the Albion suffix; Albion was a district of West Bromwich where some of the players lived or worked, close to what is today Greets Green. The club joined the Birmingham & District Football Association in 1881 and became eligible for their first competition, the Birmingham Cup. They reached the quarter-finals, beating several longer-established clubs on the way. In 1883, Albion won their first trophy, the Staffordshire Cup. Albion joined the Football Association in the same year; this enabled them to enter the FA Cup for the first time in the 1883–84 season. In 1885 the club turned professional, and in 1886 they reached