Explainer: The English Football Pyramid
You might have read this before
Hello, my friends.
Yes. This piece originally appeared as a segment in a weekly email. But about 4 hours after I hit send, I realized I really should have made it its own post, so I could link directly to it. (Sorry. You’ll see what I mean. Soon. Someday. Maybe.)
English Football Pyramid Explainer
I’ve sat down to write this fucking thing a hundred times. I’ve been thinking my kid will be walking before I actually hit publish. Still might happen. They both keep growing expeditiously. So, buckle up with a second seatbelt. We’re going for a ride.
The Barclays Premier League
Just some stats for some comparisons across these divisions:
Average player salary - $3.1 million
Average attendance (pre-pandemic obvs) - 38,188
Let’s recap from a jillion months / life stages ago. If the Premier League season ended today, this is what the final standings would look like:
The fine folks at Manchester City would be your Premier League champions. A-fucking-gain. The top 4 would be City, Liverpool, Chelsea and West Ham. Those 4 clubs would play in the 2022-2023 group stages for the UEFA Champions League.
For simplicity’s sake, Arsenal and Spurs head to the UEFA Europa competition.⁴
Norwich, Newcastle and Burnley would get relegated, which means they would get punted down to the 2022-2023 English Football League Championship.
EFL Sky Bet Championship
Average player salary - $2 million
Average attendance - 20,181
Current English Football League Championship standings look like so:
That means, Fulham wins the Championship, and they get a sweet, sweet trophy. They also get promoted to the 2022-2023 Premier League. Bournemouth finishes second. They get no trophy. They also get promoted to the 2022-2023 Premier League.
Teams three through six … well, hell, why not just copy wikipedia here to save time?
As of 2021, the play-offs comprise two semi-finals, where the team finishing third plays the team finishing sixth, and the team finishing fourth plays the team finishing fifth, each conducted as a two-legged tie. The winners of the semi-finals progress to the final which is contested at Wembley Stadium. The Championship play-off final is considered the most valuable single football match in the world as a result of the increase in revenue to the winning club from sponsorship and media agreements.
Whoever wins the final gets a trophy. (Sorry, second place team. No participation trophy for you.) They also get promoted to the 2022-2023 Barclays Premier League.
Teams 22, 23 and 24 get relegated to 2022-2023 SkyBet League One.
Sky Bet League One
Average player salary - $135,000
Average attendance - 8,741
League One’s current table looks like this:
Similar set up. Finish first? Get a trophy and a promotion. Finish second? Get a promotion. Finish third through sixth? Get a playoff where a win gets you a trophy and a promotion. Finish 21st through 24th? Get a relegation. Down to the 2022-2023 Sky Bet League Two.
Sky Bet League Two
Average player salary - $98,000
Average attendance - 4,467
Sky Bet League Two. Similar set up. Finish first? Get a trophy and a promotion. Finish second? Get a promotion. Finish third? Get a promotion. Finish fourth through seventh? Get a playoff where a win gets you a trophy and a promotion. Finish 23rd or 24th? Get a relegation. Down to the 2022-2023 Sky Bet League Two.
League Two relegates to and promotes from The National League. Just like its American counterpart, it also doesn’t use a designated hitter.
The Vanarama National League
Average player salary - A number I can’t seem to come by
Average attendance - 1,977
The National League is the lowest tier with a National footprint. The National League promotes from and relegates to the National League North and the National League South.
A quick visual to illustrate where we are:
So that might come off as total overkill, but it only covers the top 160 clubs in professional English football. That might seem like a lot. (And it probably is.) But, frame of reference, there are 152 teams in the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and MLS. Sooooo …
But, there are around 7,000 organized football clubs in England and Wales⁵. Seven thousand clubs comes to something like 175,000 footballers on rosters. It goes down to something like 24 tiers.
Further, a whole boatload of those clubs are eligible for the FA Cup (any club down to Level 10) and the Carabao Cup (open to any club down to League Two.)
And because of that, sometimes we’re treated to something like last year’s FC Cup, where Tottenham had to play at Marine AFC. Marine play in the 8th tier; the Northern Premier League Division One West. The North Premier League Division One West, as best I can tell, does not have a sponsor. Yet.
Marine play in a municipal park north of Liverpool.
Just look at this gushing:
Tottenham got dressed for this match in a local pub. The netting was put up especially for this match. On the telecast, you could see people in their windows. There was even a cardboard cutout of Jürgen Klopp in “attendance.”
And yes, Spurs won 5-0.
The conclusion
I’ve gone way too long on all of this. Just to get to this point:
It took me a while to really get this whole Football Pyramid thing. But thanks to this wacky system, the English football dream isn’t so much about the hometown boy making the big leagues … it’s about the hometown team making the big leagues.
And not getting that is exactly what DOOOOOOOOMED the Super League. By locking in the Top 6 from England, you’re cutting off 6,994 teams and all their supporters. And even though AFC Marine isn’t ever going to hoist the big silverware, damn it, by god, they want to believe.