There are people out there who don't understand how the English football league system works, you know. Or the 'British premier league soccer' system, but that's just the whole two-nations-separated-by-a-common-language thing. It's the kind of thing that needs diagrams to explain, as well as a conscious mental effort to put yourself in the mindset of someone who doesn't understand the concept of promotion and relegation, so here's a detailed blog entry explaining all those things that are universally known to 99% of the world.
I mean, really, it's like having to explain what roast beef and yorkshire pudding is! Or steak and kidney pudding, or rice pudding, or sticky toffee pudding, or "the concept of hundreds of different foodstuffs being called 'pudding' and nobody thinking that's at all strange". It's something we think of as completely normal and self-explanatory over here, and the idea of someone not understanding it is incomprehensible to us.
(Another universally accepted thing over here is talking as if people from countries with different customs are stupid and wrong, as long as we say it in a way that shows we're only joking. I consider myself to have full permission to do that, and intend to indulge to excess. Anyone reading this is welcome to do the same to me and my country in return! That's the way to forge good international relations! Americans tend to have strange customs like 'politeness' that prevent them from doing it, which is a terrible shame.)
So, as everyone knows, the Premier League looks something like this:
A couple of important points of terminology here - it's not the British Premier League, it's the English Premier League. With a sort of asterisked footnote that Welsh teams are allowed to play in it too, but it's still definitely English. Scotland has its own football league, and Scottish people don't like it if you don't know that.
Also, it's "PREM-ee-er", not "pre-MEER".
So, there are twenty teams in the premier league, and they each play all the others twice in the season - once at each team's home ground. This system must seem strange and unfathomable to Americans - I don't understand American football at all, but as far as I can gather, each team plays seventeen games a season; two against some teams, one against others, and none at all against the rest. I find it difficult to comprehend who could have invented an arrangement like that, or why.
It's three points for a win, one point for a draw. A draw is what some people call a 'tie'. When both teams score the same number of goals in a game. Or no goals at all. Yes, match results of 0-0 are not uncommon - why would anyone think that's weird?
Anyway, you can ignore the colours at the top of the table; that's about European qualification, which is a whole different essay for another time. The interesting thing is the bottom three teams, highlighted in red. The teams that finish in the bottom three places won't play in the Premier League next season; they are relegated to the division below.
Another important point about how to talk about football - a team is plural, not singular. "Manchester City HAVE won the league this year," not "Manchester City HAS won the league this year." Likewise, Burnley ARE going to play in the Championship next season.
Also, if you're talking about Wolverhampton Wanderers, it's "Wolves", not "the Wolves". Wolves have finished tenth.
Wait, "the Championship", you say? Yes, I'll admit this is a bit confusing. The Championship is the name of the league that sits below the Premier League. This is what the Championship table looks like this season:
There are 24 teams in this one, so they play more games in a season. And next season Burnley, Watford and Norwich will be playing in the Championship, and the Premier League will have Fulham, Bournemouth and the winner of the playoff tournament held between the four teams who finished below them. The final's on Sunday, between Huddersfield and Forest.
And the three teams that finished at the bottom of the Championship are relegated to the division below that, which is called (and I admit that this is rather confusing) League One. And they're replaced by the teams who finished at the top of League One this season, in the same way.
The structure looks like this:
These four divisions are still generally described as "the league" - it's a leftover from the days when all four were run by an organisation called the Football League (the Premier League is a separate entity nowadays), they were much more sensibly called Division One, Division Two, Division Three and Division Four, and the whole thing was more of a closed shop. There were more leagues underneath, but only on rare occasions would a team from them be allowed to join the 'league'.
But the 'English football league pyramid' in modern times keeps on going down, with automatic relegation and promotion to the levels below. Two teams are relegated from League Two, into the top of the 'non-league' divisions, which is called (again, rather confusingly) the National League.
And below that, we start to see why it's called a 'pyramid' (although some might say a 'triangle' would make more sense. It's not like it's three-dimensional.)
At level six of the pyramid (which is also called "Step 2" of the non-league league system. Yes, really.) it splits into a North and South. Each division has 22 teams (or should have - when we get down this low in the pyramid, we start to have issues with teams going out of business, so the numbers aren't always the same), and every year four teams are relegated from the National League and replaced by two from the North and two from the South.
If for example all four relegated teams are from the far north of England, then those all fall into the National League North next season, and two of the more southern teams from there are moved across to the National League South to keep the numbers even. And of course there's also relegation from the National Leagues North and South, down to the level below...
And now it gets a bit more confusing. At this level, there are three different governing bodies. They're called (for reasons owing as much to tradition as geography) the Northern Premier League, the Southern League and the Isthmian League. The latter basically covers the south-east of England, including London. It's not an isthmus.
Until very recently, each of these three leagues had one 'premier league' at level seven, and two regional divisions at level eight. But the Football Association, which is in overall charge of the whole pyramid, decided it would be better if the number of divisions at each level went in a more logical 1-2-4-8-16 progression, and so the Southern League created an extra premier division, and the other two each created an extra 'division one'. And a lot of teams were shuffled around from one league to another so that they could all have roughly twenty teams in each - it's entirely possible for a team to move from Northern Premier to Southern, for example, in order to keep the distribution equal, even though there are three different leagues with their own bosses and staff in charge.
And below those three leagues, it all gets a lot more local...
Yes, fifteen different governing bodies run the 33 divisions at levels nine and ten of the pyramid. Most of them have one division at each level, but there are various exceptions. There are 17 divisions at level ten instead of 16 - the two run by the South West Peninsula League (which covers Devon and Cornwall and is the only remaining league to be in level ten but not level nine; there used to be a couple of others) promote only one team at the end of the season, while all the other level ten divisions promote two. And of course each of these divisions has roughly twenty teams in it, just like all the ones above and below.
The pyramid keeps on going beyond that level, naturally. By this time we're well into the part-time amateur game, and teams and leagues down this low are prone to breaking up and re-forming as brand new ones, but there's still promotion and relegation going on. At level eleven there are a whole FIFTY divisions, and I don't think anyone could really want to keep track of them all. But they're very important to the people who play in them, against all the other small teams in their local area!
How far down does the pyramid go? It's really hard to say. It disappears into a morass of small local leagues, in a way that no American could ever hope to understand. Some people say it goes down to level 23 or 24, and try to track the potential route a team could take to reach the Premier League in a quarter of a century's worth of promotions. But I'm fairly sure I've lost everyone's attention by this point already, and I'm certainly not going to try to compile them all into a diagram.
So that's how football works! Simple, isn't it? Why can't American Football be so straightforward and common-sense?
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