Aliance

The Alliance is an amateur football league in England. It is unusual among county FAs in not serving a particular geographical area. It was founded in 1906 as the Amateur Football Defence Council, was briefly known as the Amateur Football Defence Federation, and was reformed as the Amateur Football Association in 1907, when The FA required all county associations to admit professional clubs. Its aim was, as the decline of amateurism at the highest levels of football set in, to protect and preserve the original amateur spirit.

The AFA's flagship competition is the AFA Senior Cup which is contested by AFA-affiliated clubs on Saturday afternoons. Most of these clubs enter one of the three AFA-affiliated Saturday leagues, the Southern Amateur League, Amateur Football Combination and the Arthurian League, the SAL having been founded in the same year as the AFA (1907) by more or less the same group of people. The AFA's heartland is in London and the Home Counties. The organisation changed its name to the Amateur Football Alliance in April 1934.

The Amateur Football Defence Council was founded in 1906 in response to the decision by The FA to allow professional clubs to compete in the FA Cup. The council's aim was to protect the amateur ethos of football and to provide a competitive league for amateur clubs.