Parallel to the posts on tactics, I'm going to write a series of posts on how the different competitions in soccer work. I think it's safe to say that there isn't anything quite like the league format of professional soccer in the USA.
To start with, high level soccer is played on two levels. The first is at the club level, which is where players ply their trade professionally. You get paid for playing at the club level, there are few restrictions on who can play on a team, etc. Most countries have professional, club level soccer leagues, though only a few of these are considered elite leagues/
The second level is the national level. At the national level, you play for your country, typically for free or at least not for much money. At the national level playing is all about pride in country and the desire to represent your home. The World Cup and Olympic soccer are examples of national level competitions.
Most high level players have both a club affiliation and a national affiliation. An example would be Lionel Messi, who plays club football for Barcelona and national football for Argentina. In this article we're going to discuss the basics of club football; in a later article we'll talk about national level competition.
League Pyramid
The first thing to know about professional soccer is that each country has multiple leagues, and organizes its leagues into a pyramid. The very best league in each country is at the top of the pyramid, the second best is second, etc. The closest analogue we have in the US is in Major League baseball, which is organized into levels. The biggest difference is that the teams in the higher leagues do NOT own the teams in the lower leagues. Though there can be affiliations between clubs, each club is operated independently. Each country has one organizing body that oversees all of the various leagues of that country, called its football association. A country's footballing pyramid usually goes very deep, ranging from the very best professional leagues all the way down to complete amateur Sunday leagues; all of the leagues are arranged in a hierarchy.
In the examples below, we're going to use English football, in which the top league is called the Premiere league (or Premiership) and the second level is called the English Championship.
Within each league, the league title is determined in the regular season. Soccer (except here in the US) doesn't have traditional playoffs, as American sports do. During the course of a season, every team in a league plays every other team, once at home and once on the road. A win nets your team 3 points in the standings; a draw nets your team 1 point, and a loss is worth 0 points. At the end of the season, the points for each team are tabulated, and the team with the most points wins the league. This is the most prestigious domestic award that a team can win. Because it takes place over a whole season, the league title removes some of the randomness associated with determining a championship using playoffs, and thus generally the best clubs win the title.
Now, here's where the league pyramid comes in. The teams that do the best in a season, usually the league champion plus one to three more teams, move up the pyramid to the next league in the following season. This is called promotion. For example, the team that wins the English championship is automatically promoted into the English Premiere league, and plays in the Premiere league the following season. This is hugely valuable for a team, because generally the higher your league, the more money you make because attendance and television rights money go up when you're playing better competition.
In order to make sure that each league has the same number of teams each season, the teams that do the worst in each league have to move down and play in the next league down the pyramid. This is called relegation. In England, the three worst teams in the Premier league have to move down and play the following season in the Championship. This is devastating for the same reason that promotion is valuable: your TV money and attendance money drop as a result of dropping down to the next league, which can have a real effect on how your club is run. The relegation spots in the standings are usually called the relegation zone or drop zone, and a team might be described as being "X number of points off the drop."
To give a baseball example, the worst team in baseball last year were the Arizona Diamondbacks. Imagine if, as a result of their poor record, they had to play this season in Triple A, and the best Triple A team got moved up into MLB.
The relegation/promotion system has a few main effects. First, in American sports teams that do poorly are rewarded, in the form of high draft picks, typically easier schedules, etc. Teams that do poorly in soccer are badly punished, which removes the incentives to lose on purpose. Second, while in American sports usually the only interesting thing in a given season is who will win the championship, in soccer the fight to avoid the relegation zone in soccer is usually just as interesting, if not more so.
A couple of other things to note: First, in soccer the name for the standings of all of the teams in a league is called the league table. Second, the teams that finish at the top of the table in the highest level of a country's pyramid obviously can't get promoted, since it's the top of the association. Instead, they are rewarded by being granted a place in an international competition contested among the best clubs of each country. We'll discuss these competitions in a later article.
In addition to the league title, every football association contests another award, the league cup. In our next article on the structure of the sport, we'll discuss the league cup.
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