Coca-Cola replaced the Nationwide Building Society as title sponsor.
Wigan Athletic were promoted to the Premier League as Championship runners-up.
They had only been elected to the Football League in 1978, had been the league's fourth-lowest placed club in the 1993–94 season, and before 2003 had never reached the second tier of English football.
Nottingham Forest were relegated from the Championship to League One, becoming the first former European Cup winners to be relegated to the third tier of their domestic league – having won two straight European Cups a quarter of a century earlier.
Only ten seasons previously, in 1994–95, they had finished third in the Premier League, and had reached the quarter-finals of the UEFA Cup the following season.