U2start.com | Football / Soccer topic

Originally posted by gng007:I'm going to ask a question. It is a question that might shock some of you. But try to remain calm, and if you want, go ahead and answer.

Here it comes:

I don't understand soccer (yes, I'm going to call it soccer) leagues. I really want to understand it better because I'm growing more fond of the sport. MLS (the American professional soccer league, which many of you I'm sure feel like is quite comical) soccer is catching on here in the States. I have a team in my city (Real Salt Lake). Real SL won the MLS cup in 2009 and is now playing in the finals of the CONCACAF tournament. If we win our game tomorrow night against Monterrey Mexico then we get to go to the Fifa Club World Cup in Japan and line up against some premier teams. That would be a dream for us here in Salt Lake City.

ANYWAY, my question is this: I don't understand soccer leagues and how I am supposed to follow soccer globally. Sure, I can follow MLS pretty easy enough. ESPN covers that here in the States. But I have no idea, for example, what league Real Madrid plays in. Or even (gasp) Manchester United. I hear of these teams, but I have no idea how they work, what leagues they are in, etc. Is there a league in europe that these premier clubs all play in? What about the south american teams? Do they ever play each other? I'm confused. Help. I want to be a fan!

Right. Big mission to explain BUT I've got time on my hands, so I'll give it a shot!

For the record, I don't find the MLS comical - far from it. We've been able to watch some matches this year on ESPN America and the quality is far from bad, and you fans are a credit to your league. I've seen far worse quality football-wise in the lower pro leagues here in England.

In Europe, pretty much every country has its own major football/soccer league. Real Madrid play in Spain's top league, La Liga. Germany has the Bundesliga, Italy has Serie A, Holland has the Eredivisie. They're all the top leagues in their football structure. I'll try and explain the general nature of European football structure with England as an example, 'cause it's my 'local' league.

In England, we have a huge football league structure, composed of a lot of divisions. However, I'll just stick to the top four for now, they're the highest up the pyramid.

The top division is the Premier League/Premiership, and is 20 teams strong. Winning it is simple - team that finishes top at the end of the season is champion; we don't have a playoff cup like in American sports leagues such as the MLS, NHL etc. Each team plays each other twice, home and away (so 38 games a season) and the top team is national champion. It's the same format with most other leagues around the world; the MLS is a notable exception because I guess the founders want a system which is familiar to the average American sports-fan used to the structure of your other major sports leagues. Below the Premiership, we have the Championship, League 1 and League 2.

In order for teams to move between the leagues, we have a system of promotion and relegation/demotion.

At the end of every season, the bottom 3 teams in the Premiership get relegated/demoted (for essentially being the worst three teams) to the Championship. The Championship consists of 24 teams. At the end of each season, after 46 games (i.e. play 23 other teams home and away once) the top two teams are automatically promoted up to the Premiership.

The third place is filled by the team that wins the end of season playoff, which is competed by the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th placed teams in the division. However, the notion of a playoff system here differs from the American notion of sports playoffs, e.g. the Stanley Cup's 'best of 7' system.

In our playoff system, the four teams are split up into two ties, Team A vs Team B, and Team C vs Team D, and in each tie two matches are played, so both teams play home and away against each other. For example, Team A plays Team B, and wins the first match 2-0 but loses the second match 1-0; they win by virtue of an aggregate victory of 2 goals to 1 overall. Team A goes on to play the winners of the tie between Teams C and D - for the purposes of example, let's say Team D won it. Team A plays Team D in the playoff final, a one-off match, wins 1-0 and thus becomes playoff champions and wins the 3rd promotion place to the Premiership.

This system of promotion and relegation goes on between the divisions, so, as I say, at the top we have the Premiership - 3 teams go down to the Championship, 3 teams come up from the Championship. From the Championship, 3 teams are relegated to League 1, and 3 teams come up accordingly from League 1 to the Championship. From League 1, 4 teams go down to League 2 (why 4, I don't know, just for the purposes of maintaining competition I guess) and 4 teams come up - in the case of League 2, 3 teams are automatically promoted, and the 4th place is decided by a playoff series between the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th teams in the system I explained above. From League 2, 2 teams are relegated, but they go down to what are called the 'non-leagues', which is the secondary level of professional football in England but that's going probably a bit too far into depth bearing in mind this is supposed to be a kind of crash course in European/world football/soccer lol!

Basically, this system of promotion and relegation is similar throughout all the leagues in Europe, but I would suggest that the English league has the greatest amount of structure. The system is generally the same for most of world football, I would suggest, certainly in Europe and South America.

You mentioned the CONCACAF Champions League - the equivalent competitions here in Europe are called the Champions League and the Europa League; in South America, they have the Copa Libertadores, and Asian football has its equivalent Champions League too.

In Europe, the Champions League is far more prestigious and famous than the Europa League, and to some extent the latter is a bit pointless, but that's beside the point. Basically, both competitions are made up by the most successful teams from European leagues. The format is sort of similar to the CONCACAF version. Qualification for the Champions League each season is a fairly complex affair, but we'll just stick with the basics, i.e. the competition proper is composed of 32 different teams from across the continent, e.g. league champions from Italy, England, Spain, Germany etc. and 2nd, 3rd placed teams etc. The actual structure is similar to the World Cup if you remember from last year, but not identical.

The 32 teams are split into 8 groups of 4, and within those groups, each team plays each twice, home and away, so 6 matches altogether. At the end of that phase, the top two teams progress to the knockout stages - the 3rd placed side drops down into the Europa League (but I won't go there for now!) and the 4th placed side is just knocked out of competition completely for the season. In the 1st knockout round aka. the last 16, each team is paired off with another to play a two-legged tie. The winners of those two-legged ties play in the quarter final stages, being paired off together again. The winners of the quarter finals progress to the semi-finals, again paired off for a set of two-legged ties, the winners play each other in the final. The winner of the Champions' League qualifies for the FIFA World Club Tournament you mentioned earlier, although if they pull out for whatever reason, the winner of the Europa League fills their place, but that rarely happens.

Examples of teams from the major European leagues (listed by country / top tier division) -

England / The Premiership - Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool, Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur

Spain / La Liga - Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atletico Madrid, Valencia, Sevilla, Villarreal

Germany / Bundesliga - Bayern Munchen, Schalke 04, Borussia Dortmund, Werder Bremen, Hamburger SV

Italy / Serie A - AC Milan, Inter Milan, Juventus, AS Roma, Lazio

Holland / Eredivisie - Ajax, PSV Eindhoven, Feyenoord, FC Twente, AZ Alkmaar

I could go on but shan't for now lol. I've just listed some of the more familiar names from some of the biggest leagues in Europe that you may find yourself coming across. At the moment, we're coming to the end of the football season here in Europe; most of the major leagues have only a few games left of their domestic calendar - in England, Manchester United are on course to win the championship title, as are AC Milan in Italy, Barcelona in Spain and Borussia Dortmund in Germany (although in neither case are they dead certs as yet). In the Champions League, we're at the semi-final stages - tonight, Manchester United just beat FC Schalke 04 2-0 in Germany, and are favourites to progress to the final (sorry Kirsten for reminding you, by the by!), and on Wednesday night, Real Madrid and Barcelona play the first match of their two-legged semi-final tie. As a sidenote, Real Madrid vs Barcelona is known as El Clasico - it's one of the biggest games in world football because they are two traditional powerhouses of Spanish football and have a massive rivalry. Think NFL, Steelers vs Ravens or NBA with Yankees vs Red Sox, and then add some - it's a BIG deal.

Anyway, I'll let you digest all that for now and see how you cope

hope this provides some kind of starting block!

gng007

14 years

WojBhoy,

Wow! Thank you very much! That was great and I really appreciate it. I think I probably know more about soccer now than anybody I know. Woot wooot! Thanks again.

So which team do you support? Do you go to a lot of matches?

I just bought a flex pass to Real Salt Lake MLS games (I get 10 seats to use at any game(s) I want) - so I can take 10 people to 1 game; or 5 people to 2 games; or 1 person to 10 games. You get the idea.)

I'm so excited for the CONCACAF championship game (should I quit calling it a "game" and call it a "match"?) that I am going to tomorrow night. I'll post some pictures tomorrow.

THANK YOU AGAIN.

WojBhoy

14 years

Originally posted by gng007:WojBhoy,

Wow! Thank you very much! That was great and I really appreciate it. I think I probably know more about soccer now than anybody I know. Woot wooot! Thanks again.

So which team do you support? Do you go to a lot of matches?

I just bought a flex pass to Real Salt Lake MLS games (I get 10 seats to use at any game(s) I want) - so I can take 10 people to 1 game; or 5 people to 2 games; or 1 person to 10 games. You get the idea.)

I'm so excited for the CONCACAF championship game (should I quit calling it a "game" and call it a "match"?) that I am going to tomorrow night. I'll post some pictures tomorrow.

THANK YOU AGAIN.

No worries man

always happy to chat about football, it's my favourite sport

and if I'm of any help, I'm glad to be of service. As far as terminology goes, game and match are equally appropriate I'd say. The CONCACAF match sounds amazing, hope it's worth your going!

I support Norwich City, who at the moment are playing in the Championship, so the 2nd highest tier of English football. We're a sizeable club; not the biggest club, but pretty sizeable - probably in the top 30 in the country as far as support, financial muscle and recent success goes. Norwich is a city in the east of the country, e.g. if you look at a map of England, we're somewhere in the big lump to the right hand side. Unlike a lot of cities in England, we've only got the one major team here - cities like London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester have lots of different teams which creates a lot of local rivalries, whereas for us, our nearest domestic rivals are Ipswich, the nearest big city to us who are some 40 miles away. I grant you that, in American terms, 40 miles might as well be around the corner, but England being the small country it is in comparison, 40 miles is a fair distance for a 'local' rival.

Like I said earlier, the domestic season is nearly over, and with 2 games to go we're sat in 2nd place in the Championship, so we could be getting promoted this season. That in itself is a great thing, but the thing is, in the last 5-6 years we've been relegated twice. In 2003/04 we got promoted to the Premiership as champions of Division 1 (The Championship as it was before the name changed for sponsorship reasons), but we were relegated from the Premiership after only the one season.

Going up a division is always tough because the teams are generally better and have more money, and in the Premiership the financial gap is huge. The Championship playoff final is the most expensive prize in world football - the winner gets something in the region of £80m, so, 100m dollars or more? My currency conversion isn't the best but it's a shitload of money either way, and that gives you and idea of how being in the Premiership does for a club's bank account. The system of player transfer is different in European and most of world football to that in the states, i.e. we don't have draft picks and rosters etc., teams can buy and sell players as they see fit, to all intents and purposes.

However, back to Norwich. Like I say, we were relegated from the Premiership. However, after a succession of crap seasons, crap managers and general crap, we were relegated to League 1 two season back (2008/09), playing in the 3rd tier of English football for the third time in 50 odd years. We got promoted back to the Championship as champions of League 1 last season, but that's what makes this season all the more crazy, that we could be getting promoted twice in consecutive seasons - that rarely EVER happens in football because of the difficulty of adjusting to the league above, although there are clubs in recent years who've managed it on occasion.

Right, I need to crack on and get some sleep 'cause it's gone 4am and I need to head back to university today to start revision for my finals, but I'll be back to chat all things football etc. later if you should so wish! Take it easy bud

gng007

14 years

Salt Lake Tribune Front Page by gng007, on Flickr

gng007

14 years

WojBhoy,

Congrats to you and your fellow Norwich fans. That is awesome that you are headed up to the Premiership division after only one year in the Championship division.

When you have some time, here are some more questions I have:
1. Has Norwich ever won the Premiership division? If winning the Premiership is pretty much impossible for Norwich, what do you consider to be a successful season?

2. Which is more prestigious, winning the Premiership division or winning the European equivalent to the CONCACAF - I think you said that was called the Champions League?

3. Do any players on Norwich play for England's World Cup team? Sadly for us MLS fans, most of the premier American players are playing in England, France, and Germany.

4. Does the Premiership division (and other lower leagues) have things like salary caps, revenue sharing, etc? If not, it seems almost impossible for a team like Norwich to ever win the Premiership - I mean, how could Norwich afford to pay the big name players who could achieve a Premiership division championship?

5. Do the Premiership and Championship division seasons run concurrently?

6. During the division seasons, do the England club teams play any teams not in their respective divisions?

7. Do club teams in Europe (England, maybe more specifically) play teams from other European countries? During their seasons? Do those wins/losses go toward winning some tournament or is it just strictly for bragging rights (I think the term is "friendlies")?

8. Have you ever been to a World Cup game?

Thanks again!

Greg

MacStripey

14 years

okay.... last night......

in all fairness, ManU was and is many levels better than Schalke. No way of denying it. Schalke was hiding like chicken on a field full of foxes. The only player playing face to face with this top team was our keeper Manuel Neuer. He saved us from a possible 0 : 7 or even higher defeat.
But no need to hang our heads in shame now. ManU is top class and we are not. Reaching the semi final after beating Inter is the biggest success in Schalke's history. Time to be proud about that

conclusion of last night: ManU is a top team, hands down. They will make it to the final...... unless...... everyone thought Inter was unbeatable at home before..... until..... well, we'll see next week...

tonight, el classico.... go Barca go

u2spear

14 years

Nice to see two British scorers last night

and nice to see an English team doing well (as always) in the Champions League. Shame for Schalke but yeah your right Man U were very good. Hope it goes to penalties or something next game!

Although I feel La Liga has better individual players, The Premiership has the best teams, definatly.

jofice

14 years

Originally posted by u2spear:Nice to see two British scorers last night and nice to see an English team doing well (as always) in the Champions League. Shame for Schalke but yeah your right Man U were very good. Hope it goes to penalties or something next game!

Although I feel La Liga has better individual players, The Premiership has the best teams, definatly.

If you're talking about the Man Utd only, I think you'll find Giggs scored and he's not British

WojBhoy

14 years

Originally posted by gng007:WojBhoy,

Congrats to you and your fellow Norwich fans. That is awesome that you are headed up to the Premiership division after only one year in the Championship division.

When you have some time, here are some more questions I have:
1. Has Norwich ever won the Premiership division? If winning the Premiership is pretty much impossible for Norwich, what do you consider to be a successful season?

2. Which is more prestigious, winning the Premiership division or winning the European equivalent to the CONCACAF - I think you said that was called the Champions League?

3. Do any players on Norwich play for England's World Cup team? Sadly for us MLS fans, most of the premier American players are playing in England, France, and Germany.

4. Does the Premiership division (and other lower leagues) have things like salary caps, revenue sharing, etc? If not, it seems almost impossible for a team like Norwich to ever win the Premiership - I mean, how could Norwich afford to pay the big name players who could achieve a Premiership division championship?

5. Do the Premiership and Championship division seasons run concurrently?

6. During the division seasons, do the England club teams play any teams not in their respective divisions?

7. Do club teams in Europe (England, maybe more specifically) play teams from other European countries? During their seasons? Do those wins/losses go toward winning some tournament or is it just strictly for bragging rights (I think the term is "friendlies")?

8. Have you ever been to a World Cup game?

Thanks again!

Greg

Promotion is far from a certainty yet, but we're hopeful! We're 1 point ahead of Cardiff City who are in third, so as long as we match or better their results from the last two league games of the season, we're good. If not, it's the playoffs and they are nerve-wracking. Right.

1. No, we've never won the Premiership or the national title. It used to be called the 1st Division before it became the Premiership (again, sponsorship reasons and TV broadcasting - everything changed when Sky Sports got a monopoly on live sports across Europe lol). If we were to achieve promotion, a successful season would be to survive and stay in the division for that first season in the Premiership, i.e. 17th place. Anything more would be a fabulous season lol.

2. In terms of prestige, the Champions League is the main goal for every major club, but since very few clubs across the continent actually stand a chance of winning it, only those few clubs realistically look to it as an opportunity for silverware. Winning a country's national league is certainly a big thing for any club, but in most countries there are only 3-4 clubs who regularly manage to successfully challenge for the title. In England, only 4 clubs have won the title since it became the Premiership in 1992/1993 - Manchester United (11 times), Arsenal (3 times), Chelsea (3 times) and Blackburn Rovers (1 time, and that was very much a flash in the pan). You go back over the decades and various clubs had extended periods of success, e.g. in the 1980s, Liverpool were the big team that everyone had to beat, and regularly won trophies both domestically and in European competition, but in recent years they've declined somewhat, but they're on their way back.

3. Ahaha, no no no I'm afraid not - I only laugh because that's a great unlikelihood at the best of times. Virtually all the players who play for the English national team have always been picked from players in the Premiership, i.e. the country's top tier of club football, generally 'cause the better players play in the highest league - players from outside the top-flight (a colloquialism for the Premiership) have rarely ever been selected to play for England. The last Norwich player to get an England call-up was Robert Green - yes, he who had the amazing spill against the USA in South Africa. He started his career with us and got an England call-up in 2005 for an end-of-season tour of the United States in 2005, the year we got relegated from the Premiership.

4. Does the Premiership division (and other lower leagues) have things like salary caps, revenue sharing, etc? If not, it seems almost impossible for a team like Norwich to ever win the Premiership - I mean, how could Norwich afford to pay the big name players who could achieve a Premiership division championship?

No we don't; there's been debate in bringing in salary caps and the like for some time now, but it won't probably ever happen. It's sort of meritocratic in the sense of the clubs who can afford to pay the most in transfer fees and wages to players have earned that right through being more successful than their competitors over the years. However, nowadays, clubs can become rich almost overnight by being taken over by rich investors, e.g. clubs like Manchester City and Chelsea have become relatively unpopular in recent years because they were taken over by foreign billionaires and started signing players for huge money in the blink of an eyelid, which a lot of people in football found irksome, but it's almost accepted as the norm now. It wouldn't be impossible for a club like Norwich to win the Premiership, 'cause at the end of the day it's 11 guys taking on another 11 guys 38 times a season, but it's virtually never going to happen.

5. They do indeed. Our football season runs from August of one year 'til May of the following year, so this season has been running since August 2010 through to May 2011, because it's a traditional 'winter sport' here, and that time-frame is generally the same for all clubs throughout Europe. The exception hitherto has been Russia, but they're currently reworking their domestic league to run in conjunction with the other leagues around Europe. You have to imagine that all the divisions are still part of the same league, they're just higher / lower tiers, so they all tie into one another in a sense.

6. During the division seasons, do the England club teams play any teams not in their respective divisions?

They do - in addition to the league system, we have 2 major domestic cup competitions. We have the League Cup and the FA Cup (we also have a competition called the Johnstone's Paint Trophy, but it's a minor competition because it's only competed by teams from League 1 and League 2, i.e. the 3rd and 4th tiers of the football league). The League Cup is competed for by all the teams in the main football league, i.e. the Premiership, Championship, League 1 and League 2, and is a straight knock-out competition, i.e. teams get drawn to face each other in one-off matches and progress by winning each tie. Imagine the World Cup system but without the group stage.

The FA Cup is a similar format, but much bigger because any team in the country, professional or amateur, can compete for it. It's a fairly lengthy process as a result, i.e. there are a set of preliminary qualification rounds for teams outside of the top 4 divisions. The Cup proper start in the January of each season when the 1st round starts, and at this point clubs from League 2 are brought into the mix. In the 2nd round, clubs from League 1 come in (it's slightly more complex than that, but that's the basic jist of the thing), and in the 3rd round, all teams from the Championship and the Premiership are put into the draw. I would suggest it might be slightly easier to check out the relative Wiki. pages to get a better explanation on the structure, i.e. how teams are brought into the draw, should you so wish to get a better understanding, but that's a basic idea. For the record, the FA Cup is the oldest competition in world football, and as a result one of the most famous. Norwich have never won that either lol, but we have won the League Cup twice in our history - the highest profile trophy we've won aside from a couple of Championship and League 1 titles.

7. Do club teams in Europe (England, maybe more specifically) play teams from other European countries? During their seasons? Do those wins/losses go toward winning some tournament or is it just strictly for bragging rights (I think the term is "friendlies")?

We do indeed, in competitions like the Champions League and the Europa League that I mentioned earlier. Those competitions are made up by the highest placed teams from the various European national leagues. We have an extremely complicated system for working out how many teams from each country qualify for European competitions called 'coefficients' - if you ever hear or read a European football fan talk about playing 'in Europe', they're generally talking about the Champions League or the Europa League.

Basically, the coefficient system works out how successful and 'big' each league in Europe is with regard to their historical success in European competition over a 5 year period, e.g. teams that have won either competition or teams that have progressed to later stages of the competition such as quarter- or semi-finals; subsequently, the coefficient system helps decide how many teams from each country qualify as a result.

English teams have been some of the most consistently successful in European competitions over the last few seasons, so we have one of the best coefficent ratings, and as a result are granted the maximum number of 4 teams to qualify for the Champions League, and 3 places for the Europa League. Spain get a similar number because their teams have been equally as successful. Italy were in a similar position, but in recent years their teams have been less successful, and so Germany (by virtue of their teams have been more successful, i.e. having teams consistently progressing further in European competitions) have overtaken them in the coefficient ratings, and are being granted more berths for Champions League and Europa League qualification as a result.

I appreciate this might be a lot to take in, and as I said, if you want a potentially clearer idea, it might be worth checking out Wikipedia, although you might get lost in amongst all the stuff there is to find out!

8. 'Fraid not, although I'd love to! The last time England hosted the World Cup was in 1966, waaaay before my time (also the only time we've won it), and hitherto I've had no opportunity to go and follow the England team abroad at the various World Cups over the last few years.

Originally posted by MacStripey:okay.... last night......

in all fairness, ManU was and is many levels better than Schalke. No way of denying it. Schalke was hiding like chicken on a field full of foxes. The only player playing face to face with this top team was our keeper Manuel Neuer. He saved us from a possible 0 or even higher defeat.
But no need to hang our heads in shame now. ManU is top class and we are not. Reaching the semi final after beating Inter is the biggest success in Schalke's history. Time to be proud about that

conclusion of last night: ManU is a top team, hands down. They will make it to the final...... unless...... everyone thought Inter was unbeatable at home before..... until..... well, we'll see next week...

tonight, el classico.... go Barca go