Guide to European Soccer, Vol. 1 – The Structure

For some time, I’ve promised Ted that I would write a post that would help him understand the different competitions that exist in European club soccer. This should serve to accomplish that goal and may be part one in an explanatory series of posts on club soccer.

Structurally, club soccer differs from American professional sports in a number of ways. Many of these differences add intrigue to the various competitions and from an American perspective, they’re interesting at least in the sense that it’s novel. For a variety of reasons, the closest comparison to club soccer in American sports is college football. They both have fans with disturbing levels of passion and single-mindedness and they both have a static power structure among teams that takes generations to change. In college football, teams like Baylor or Indiana won’t be challenging for the national title in our lifetimes. And clubs like Sunderland and West Ham have no chance to win the Premiership in the foreseeable future (unless they’re bought by billionaire Arabs).

Starting at the top, European soccer is overseen by UEFA, who administer the inter-league competitions (Champions League and UEFA Cup) and the international competitions (European Championship and World Cup qualifying).

Each member country in UEFA has their own club league structure, with the exception of small countries like Wales, Liechtenstein, and Monaco, which are absorbed by the English, Swiss, and French leagues respectively.

For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll focus the domestic discussion on England, however to the best of my knowledge all of the individual countries have similar operating systems. Most people know that the Premier League is the top flight of English football and that three teams are promoted to and relegated from the league every year.

What’s interesting is that there are about 7,000 clubs that exist in the league system and that they’re all connected. Below the premier league is “The Championship” the 2^nd flight league with 24 teams, most of which have significant fan support and tradition. Below that are League One and League Two, with 24 teams each. Again these leagues have professional players and the clubs have legitimate fan bases. For example, Leeds United currently resides in League One, and they were the champions of England as recently as 1992 before they experienced a massive financial implosion.

The four leagues described above comprise “The Football League”. Below them are several tiers of smaller leagues that employ a mix of poorly paid professionals, semi-pros, and amateurs. Yet all of these clubs are connected within the league structure. Theoretically, a fan in a small town could go to his local ground and watch his team of electricians and plumbers play against a club neighboring town and then 10 years later, that club (with a major injection of money) could be playing Manchester United at Old Trafford in the Premier League.

The Competitions:

Premier League – At the moment, the English league is the best league in the world. There are 20 teams, each plays a home-and-home against every other team for a total of 38 games. The team with the most points at the end is the champion. No playoffs. Simple. Clean cut. And every game matters. The bottom three teams are relegated to The Championship. The final standings are used to determine qualification into next year’s European competitions (more on that below). I think the end of year cash payments from the league to the teams are based on the final standings as well, although the differences in the amounts of money are not great enough to be significant.

The lower leagues operate with a similar home-and-home format, although promotion and relegation rules vary slightly. For example in The Championship, the top 2 teams receive automotive promotion, while teams 3-6 participate in a 4 team playoff for the final spot.

In addition to the league, there are several tournament-style competitions that run concurrently with the league season.

The FA Cup: The FA Cup is a single-elimination knockout tournament that is open to all clubs in English football. Games occur during the season, with certain weekends consisting of FA Cup games instead of league games. There are a series of qualification rounds that serve to pare down the semi-pro clubs and the teams from the Premier League and The Championship enter the competition in the round of 64. There is a caveat to the single-elimination format, where if the game ends in a draw, it triggers a replay at the home stadium of the visiting team in the initial game. If that game ends in a draw, it goes to extra time and then a shootout. From what I can gather, the FA Cup used to be absolutely massive in England, but has lost a bit of its luster in recent years. It’s still a pretty big deal, and the final at Wembley in May is one of the biggest and most viewed games in English sport.

Unlike American sports, the FA cup doesn’t use seeds. The draw for each round of the tournament is conducted at random, after the prior round has concluded. This format results in some interesting combination. Two titans could draw each other while two lower league teams match up for the right to advance. Even more interesting are the mismatches. In a famous game from last season, a club called Havant and Waterlooville, a team basically consisting of semi-professional players, played Liverpool at Anfield and actually took 1-0 and 2-1 leads before losing 5-2. It might not sound like a big deal, but H&L has an average home attendance of 600 and their starters included a teacher, a garbage man, a construction worker, and various other regular guys. Then the team went out and ran up a several thousand pound bar tab, which Liverpool’s front office decided to cover. The picture below is after they lost the game at Liverpool.

The League Cup: The League Cup, or Carling Cup, as it is called at the moment is basically a less prestigious version of the FA Cup that is open only to teams in the top 4 divisions. Most clubs see it as something nice to win, but often use the competition to give their younger players a chance to gain some experience.

Other Countries: The other major leagues are set up nearly the same and have their own analogous domestic cup competitions. There are some minor differences in number of teams and promotion/relegation rules, but overall it’s pretty much the same.

European Competitions:

There are two major inter-league European competitions: the Champions League and the UEFA Cup. The Champions League is a big deal, so big that it’s televised on ESPN. The UEFA Cup is basically the NIT to the Champions League’s NCAA tournament, so we won’t spend too much time there.

Contrary to its name, the Champions League isn’t a league at all, but a tournament with a similar format to the World Cup – round-robin group play followed by a knock-out tournament. The Champions League (UCL for short) features all the best teams in Europe. It’s massively prestigious, and simply playing in the games is worth a lot of money to the competing clubs. The UCL runs concurrently with the season, with the games scheduled at night in the middle of the week.

The group stages are seeded, so that each pod of four usually contains two clubs from big leagues and two clubs from small leagues. Each team plays a home-and-home against the other three teams in the group with the top two advancing to the knockout stage. Typically there aren’t many surprises at this stage and by the time pool play is winding down there is little intrigue remaining.

The knockout phase games are set using a random draw similar to that of the FA Cup. There are some restrictions on the 1^st round – teams from the same league can’t play each other, and the #1 finishers in group play can only face the #2 finishers in other groups. After the round of 16, the draw is fully random. The format is a 2 game home-and-home series, with the winner being the team that has the most total goals. In case of a tie, the team that has scored more goals away from home advances. If there is still a tie, the 2^nd game goes to extra time and then a penalty shootout. The final is a single game played at a neutral site.

Teams qualify for the UCL based on their performance in their leagues in the prior season. Again, contrary to its name, the Champions League does not consist of exclusively champions. Leagues are allocated a number of berths into the competition based on the strength of the league. The top leagues (England, Spain, Italy, Germany) receive four bids, with the top two finishers in each league going straight into pool play and the 3^rd and 4^th place finishers entering into a play-in round against teams from small countries. Theoretically, the champion from Belarus or Norway could go all the way to the finals, but these days we generally see the same old big boys in the final stages. Qualifying for the Champions League is a huge deal, not only for the opportunity to play in the competition, but also because of the money and prestige at stake. Apparently it’s worth upwards of 30 million pounds. Additionally, it becomes substantially easier to attract top players to a club that is consistently playing in the Champions League.

From a spectator’s perspective the allure of the Champions league is to see matchups between huge clubs from different countries. It really is fascinating to watch. In the upcoming round of 16, we have Liverpool v. Real Madrid, Manchester United v. Inter Milan, Chelsea v. Juventus, among others.

The UEFA Cup has a similar format to the Champions League, just with less famous teams. It’s only moderately prestigious, but it serves to give mid-tier teams something to shoot for. In the English League there are 3 or 4 UEFA Cup berths at stake (there’s some minutiae involved). One bid goes to the FA Cup Champion, unless that team has already qualified for the Champions League or UEFA cup through league standing. The other bids are given out based on standings with the 5^th, 6^th, and 7^th place teams generally getting in. In all leagues, especially England, the standings don’t change much from year to year. Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, and Liverpool have pretty much had the UCL spots locked down in recent times (although Aston Villa is challenging hard this year). A UEFA Cup bid is a reasonable goal for mid-table teams, similar to how decent college football teams are happy to play in a New Year’s Day bowl, even though they realize they have no shot at a national championship.

And that’s the structure of European Soccer. It's interesting to me because there are so many things going on at once that are somewhat unrelated. For example, Arsenal is basically has no chance to win the league at this point, but they're still alive in the FA Cup and in the Champions League. They're also in 5th place in the league, so even though they're dead for the title, the league games are still incredibly important in the hopes that they can overtake one of the teams ahead of them. Meanwhile, at the other end of the table, there are 3 teams tied for last on 21 points, but we can go all the way up to 9th place Man City, who only has 28 points, meaning that there are 11 teams that are still involved in a relegation fight. And all of that without even mentioning the title race, which is still hotly contested between Manchester United, Chelsea, and Liverpool. And that's just the English league.