I know what you’re thinking, but I’m talking about soccer, European Football as it’s called on the continent and around most of the globe. While here in North America, North American football, baseball, basketball, hockey and NASCAR get most of the sporting eyes, soccer is the most popular sport in the world by a country mile. It’s not even close. Millions of people watch North American sports, Billions watch soccer. Why? The games drone on forever, there is never any goals and I can’t pronounce most of the names.
Well, that was me a few years ago before Jim introduced me to ‘the beautiful game’. Now, I really enjoy it and it’s largely because now I understand it so much better than I did before. So I thought perhaps I’d take some time to detail some of what I learned that made the game much more interesting to me. But be forewarned: it’ll never be a high scoring game, many games will end in a scoreless draw. If you’re only interested in scoring, you’ve come to the wrong place.
Lesson 1 – What is with all these leagues?
One of the things I didn’t understand about soccer is what teams belong to what leagues and how are they related. The first thing you should know is that soccer is so popular in Europe and the world that every country has many leagues based on skill level. For example, let’s look at England. England has 92 full time, professional soccer clubs, 11 of which operate out of London alone. The Top League, The Premiership league has 20 teams. Each year, the 3 teams with the worst record in the Premiership get relegated to the league below and the 3 best teams from that league get promoted to the Premiership league. It’s a little more complicated than that, but not something worth discussing here. The season is simply each team playing every other twice; once at home and once on the road. The winner of the league is the team with the most points at the end of the season. No playoffs. Straight and simple.
So it is with the other countries in Europe. In Spain, the top league is La Liga, in Germany it’s the Bundesliga, France is League 1 and Italy is Serie A. And so on and so on. WIth all these countries, as in England, the teams play each other home and away to accumulate points for the league championship and each year the bottom teams in the top league are relegated and replaced by the top teams in the next league down.
Okay, that makes sense! Each country has its own set of leagues. Now, let’s add a layer, or as Emeril Lagasse says, ‘let’s kick things up a notch!’.
One of the interesting things about European football is that every year, the top teams from every league play against each other in another league called the Champions League. This league takes place concurrently with the teams regular in country league play and gives soccer fans a chance to see the best teams from every country compete against each other. Let me be clear, this isn’t country vs country play like the World Cup. Instead, it’s club vs club across all leagues. Sort of like if the top teams in North American baseball played in a league with the best teams from Japan and other countries or like the Boston Bruins having a league game against the Moscow Dynamo. Of all the major sports, only soccer is popular enough to have enough talented teams across so many countries to make a competition like the Champions League work.
As with the Champions League and because interleague games are so popular, there is another competition and league for teams that did not quite qualify for the Champions League and that is the Europa League. Think of it as the same as Champions League, but with the next set of finishers in each of the leagues.
Finally, each Country has a national championship where most all teams in the country are allowed to compete. In England, for example, as many as 763 soccer teams compete for the FA Cup. Like the Champions League, this competition also runs concurrently with the regular soccer season.
So to summarize, each country has:
- It’s own leagues, and
- The best of the best of each league play against each other in the Champions League and the teams immediately below them in each league play against each other in the Europa League, and
- Each Country has its own Country championship where many teams play against one another.