Promotion and Relegation.
This is important because the better a club you are the better division you play in. In Europe all the leagues are interconnected within their own countries. In England, which I'm gonna go ahead and venture a guess has the largest structure, to quote wikipedia "The system has a hierarchical format with promotion and relegation between leagues at different levels, allowing even the smallest club the possibility of ultimately rising to the very top of the system. There are more than 140 leagues, containing more than 480 divisions.[1] The exact number of clubs varies from year to year as clubs join and leave leagues or fold altogether, but an estimated average of 15 clubs per division implies that more than 7,000 clubs are members of a league in the English football league system." So I could start a team in say Mid-Sussex Football League division eleven and be in the premier league, I assuming I keep winning, in 20-ish some years. And assuming I build a nice enough stadium, yada yada, the premier league has a series of conditions you need to fufill in order to go up. But basically. the top teams go up a level, bottom teams go down. And this is how it works, an a somewhat smaller scale in most countries (Albania has four levels mostly because everyone here plays pickup 5 on 5 soccer and there's no good fields anyways), all over Europe.
What goes this mean? Well in the major sports leagues in N. America theres no risk when it comes to playing badly. Actually you're rewarded with the best pick or the best chance at a top pick of the incoming crop of collegiate athletes. You're gate revenue may go down but all you need is one big free agent signing, a big name rookie, or live in a big enough market to ensure that you're be able to keep the dollars flowing. So you see teams purposely tanking in order to get the best chance at a top prospect. In Europe you see the opposite. Which takes us to...
Why Soccer is structured so dang well...
a Table Format
I love the table structure of play. At least in England, every team plays each other twice, home and away. Top team after 38 games takes the title. That's it. Sometimes its a blowout with teams securing the title a month in advance, sometimes it comes down to the last day. But every game is important. No turning it on in the playoffs like hockey and basketball (hello celtics). And the best team usually wins. But's theres also drama on the other end of the table. The bottom three teams drop out of he top flight to the next division down. One team, which felt slighted after another club managed to avoid relegation by improperly signing Carlos Tevez, a famous Argentine player a few years ago, put the figure at 45 million pounds as the monetary loss at playing in the second level of English football, which they felt was owed to them by the team who had broken the rules. So for that amount of money they are fighting tooth and nail at the bottom of the table to get out of those bottom three spots.
b Cup Format
Running Concurrently with the regular season is each countries single elimination Cup tournament. (I'm using a lot of English examples I know but let's face it English soccer rocks) In the FA(Football Association) Cup had 762 teams competing for it in 2010 from the top 9 or so levels of the football pyramid. The larger leagues get dropped into the competition later on in the bracket but you regularly see smaller division teams taking big scalps and knocking off big clubs early in the competition and making cinderella like runs deep into the tournament.
c European Competition.
But by far the best part is the Champions League and the lesser Europa League where the best teams of EVERY European league get together and battle it out every year which makes for the best football you'll ever see bar none. The biggest and best clubs consistently make the final from all across the continent which makes for excellent football and interesting match-ups. And the craziest thing is all the European countries have a shot at getting their best teams to the final. Spots are allocated best on a complex merit-based system where the bigger teams and countries get dropped into the latter stages of the competition but even little ol' Albania has a chance to get its local champion a chance at facing the Barcelonas and Manchester Uniteds for European glory.
So the bottom line is anybody with a decent amount of money, a half decent place to play, and 18 guys can start a team, and assuming they keep winning could be playing against the biggest teams in the world. Of course they won't but the only thing stopping them is losing. Which when you think about it is pretty incredible from a N. American perspective. It's as if every minor junior hockey team was connected to the NHL by competition, instead of just being a feeder system for the bigger league. So I start a team with me and my buddies in the lowest hockey league. We win a bunch of games, jump up a level, get some better players, jump up another level, there's nothing stopping us from getting to the NHL.
So here's a funny soccer anecdote. I went to this early qualifying match for the local Tirana club with a Hungarian team. The reserve players were warming up and some guy in my section starts yelling to a guy on the bench on the other side, of the field. I don't know if he knew him or what, but the guy starts yelling back from the opposite side of the field. And the end up having this little conversation,"how you doing" yada yada. Thought it was hilarious.
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