The Other Football part 1 - Intro to English Football

In the spirit of the upcoming start of the inaugural RotoDatabase Premier League on August 16, I thought I'd write a series of articles, which will make up an introductory guide for those folks who haven't had much exposure to club soccer/football. Because our fantasy game is focused on the English league entirely, we'll scratch the surface on what football is like in England, from its organization to its culture and history, as well as some descriptions on all 20 English Premier League clubs participating this season. I'm hoping you find this guide informative if you're new to participating in fantasy soccer or following soccer in general and if by the end of this series, you're still not too keen on "the other football", then I hope you come away with a better understanding for a sport that's usually misunderstood in an American context, but is a religion in almost every other corner in the world. The whole idea behind this guide is for the soccer layperson to gain a better understanding of club soccer as much as it is to attract interest to our little fantasy soccer game. Let's have it!

So where to begin? Well, I'll start off with a simple concept and observation: just about every hamlet, town, and big city in England has a soccer team, properly known as a football club. Each football club has its varying sizes; there are your obvious full-time professional football clubs that play organized league football but you also have amateur clubs which in the simplest form, comprise of neighborhood folks with perhaps the romantic dream of carrying their club to promotion in a higher league, though in general they play purely for an intrinsic love and interest in the game. This brings me to my first topic...

The English Football League System

The majority of organized leagues around the world have adopted the structure, or at least some semblance, of the English football league system, which is in essence, a hierarchy of leagues where teams can be promoted up the ladder and likewise, relegated to the next lowest-tier league. Putting things against a baseball context, you can imagine the feasibility of the Durham Bulls of the Triple-A level International League winning their league championship and thereby, promoting themselves to the next tier of the sport: the Major Leagues. Conversely, if the Kansas City Royals finished with one of the 3 worst win-loss records in all of the Major Leagues for the campaign, the Royals would be relegated to the Triple-A level for the following season. Similar promotions and relegations are possible in the lower divisions as well.

Describing the system in its entirety can be maddening to explain given its massive scale (think of the entire American baseball league hierarchy from Single-A to MLB). There are supposedly about 7,000 football clubs in England, league and non-league, amateur and professional, some representing an entire city and some clubs representing a borough of a city (London alone has over 20 football clubs!). The lower divisions in English football have organized leagues based off geographic boundaries; there are leagues that resemble the county championship and there are sub-county leagues to determine entrants into those county leagues. At the bottom of the league system, you have amateur clubs that either fold or set up shop and there's quite some turnover in that tier of newly formed clubs as well as newly defunct ones.

For the sake of simplicity, I'll concentrate on talking about the top 4 tiers of English football:

Level 1: The Premier League

The English Premier League, or the Premiership for short, is the flagship league where presumably the 20 best clubs in the country face off for the top football championship in all of England. There are 38 weeks in the Premier League season, as each team plays each of the other 19 teams twice, one fixture is at home while the other is played away. Keep in mind that the Premiership as well as the other leagues down on the totem pole do not institute a playoff system to determine the champion. Simply, the team with the most points won after season's end is the champion. It's a somewhat foreign concept in American sports for the best overall team to be crowned champions after the regular season, but if you're one of those fans who like to see the best team record-wise awarded something (everything in this case) for their consistency, club football leagues are likely to be your kind of thing.

Believe it or not, the Premiership is a relatively new entity in English football, founded in the early 1990's and the first Premier League season was the 1992-93 campaign. I'll expound more on the history of the Premiership in a later segment, but in short, football in England prior to the foundation of the Premiership is something that could best be described as a "right bloody mess". Hooliganism ran rampant all over the country in the 1980's and it very nearly crippled the state of English football. While the British government turned its attention in ensuring fan safety and curtailing hooliganism in the process, a handful of Division One clubs became more preoccupied with the windfall in domestic and global television revenues that marked the late 80's/early 90's. Trying to capitalize on what could possibly compute as a trend, such clubs wanted to break away from Division One and in so doing, disband their clubs from The Football League to create their own "super league". Needless to say, those breakaway clubs succeeded in creating the Premier League and in fact, all 22 Division One member clubs became founding members of the Premiership (since 1995, the number of Premier League members was whittled to 20).

The Premier League is essentially a corporation, where each of the 20 member clubs has an ownership stake in and each club has one vote in all administrative matters and in electing officers to head league operations. In essence, the clubs are NOT franchises of the league but rather they are part owners of the league entity itself. Television revenues - domestic and overseas - are distributed evenly but there's a meritocracy to the remaining revenue streams as it depends on the club's league finish and on facilities fees for televised games, both of which benefit the richest clubs. With the top clubs earning more to their war chest as a result and their budgets increase with no domestic salary cap in place, a great deal of fans have heavily criticized the Premiership for increasing the gap between the top clubs and lower-tier clubs, both on and off the field. I'll save that for another write-up.

Relegation from the Premier League: Since the inception of the Premiership, more times than not, the relegation battle tends to be more exciting than the actual Premiership title race. The bottom 3 Premiership finishers are demoted back to The Football League's Division One (otherwise known as the Coca-Cola English Football League Championship) and as a result, they must forfeit their Premiership shares. The financial ramifications are quite big, given that a rough valuation of their share is about 60 million pounds, which goes a long way into affording a relatively big-budget player or two. When a team is sent down, they can actually try to get some return on investment for what they lost in selling their marquee players, especially to a Premier League club looking to push up the Premiership table for next season or a newly promoted Premiership club seeking their Premiership survival for at least one campaign.

The relegation battle normally lasts until the final day of the Premier League season (about the the second Sunday of May usually) and there are about a handful of clubs that could suffer the fate of "the drop". To add a greater element to the drama is that normally all of the fixtures for the finale are played simultaneously which elicits pictures of constant scoreboard checking.

The most dramatic relegation battle in recent memory came from the 2006-07 season. West Ham were tipped by the pundits to be relegated along with fellow London-based clubs, Charlton Athletic and Watford, and for good reason, as on the final day of the season, they would face the newly crowned Premier League champion Manchester United at Old Trafford (Manchester United's ground). Meanwhile, Sheffield United were originally thought to be safe as all they needed was a draw to guarantee their safety in the Premier League, a draw on their home turf against Wigan, who needed to defeat Sheffield United or else face the drop instead of West Ham or Fulham. In a meaningless game for Manchester United, West Ham held onto a 1-0 goal advantage thanks to Carlos Tevez (who left West Ham for Man United in the ensuing offseason). Meanwhile, Sheffield United had a 1-0 lead over Wigan, but it was heartbreak on an epic scale as Wigan overturned the 1-0 deficit into a 2-1 win. Fulham survived as did West Ham and Wigan as a result while unlucky Sheffield United were damned to the Championship, tied with Wigan in points, but that one goal surrendered to Wigan was the difference as Wigan won the goals difference tiebreaker over Sheffield United by one measly goal.

This past season's relegation battle for the 2007-08 campaign wasn't quite as dramatic, but it was a nail-biter as well. Fulham, for the second year in a row, had to stave off relegation on the final day of the season while Birmingham City and Reading were also threatened by the prospect of relegation. With Birmingham and Reading winning their respective games by routs while Fulham remained in a goalless tie against FA Cup finalist Portsmouth for much of their match, Fulham seemed to need a minor miracle to escape relegation. Then, late in the game, the American-born captain Brian McBride, in what proved to be his final game in a Fulham uniform, scored a late header to put Fulham on top for good and send Birmingham and Reading crashing out of the Premiership. It's amazing to note that the Cottagers had to win 4 of their final 5 games for Fulham to stay above the Premiership when they were all but mathematically eliminated, especially considering they had an interim coach fill in past the midseason mark. Birmingham were this past season's Sheffield United as a fairly decent enough run of late-season form could've seen Birmingham well entrenched from the drop, but it's the Blues that were relegated. Birmingham and Reading join Derby County, arguably the worst team to play in the Premiership's history, managing just 1 win and 8 draws in 38 matches.

Those clubs faced with the fate of relegation fall back to what's called the Coca Cola League Championship, the top division of The Football League, which is run by the country's governing body of football called The Football Association (or FA for short). If you recall, the Premiership is an entirely different entity separate from The Football League and runs as a corporation whereas the FA is essentially run as a national association. The perfect analogy of this would be the NCAA is to American college sports as the governing body of sanctioned competitions for such sports. Keeping in mind the NCAA analogy, The Football League is also split into three division tiers: The League Championship (formerly known as Division One), League One (formerly known as Division Two), and finally League Two (formerly known as Division Three).

Level 2: Football League Championship

Ever since the inception of The Football Association in 1885 up until 1992, the League Championship (which at the time was referred to as Division One) was the absolute top tier league in the land up until the Premiership superimposed itself as England's highest of all leagues. In the context for the upcoming 2008-09 season, the three relegated Premiership clubs (Birmingham, Reading, and Derby) are sent down to the Championship, which really is a badly named moniker. "The Championship" term was only instituted a few seasons ago (the 2004-05 campaign) and much like the Premiership has a sponsor for naming rights (in this case it's Barclays), Coca-Cola purchased the naming rights for the newly dubbed league and hence, it's referred to as The Coca-Cola Football League Championship. There are a total of 24 teams participating in the Championship, with the three relegated Premiership teams replacing the three Championship clubs that were promoted to the Premiership. On the lower rung of the ladder, the three League One clubs most recently promoted to the Championship replace the bottom three finishers of the Championship who are then relegated to League One. Circle of life, n'est-ce pas?

Promotion to the Premiership: It's normal for the preseason pundits to believe that the three most recently relegated clubs are the best positioned for promotion to the Premiership. Before this season, Charlton Athletic were odds-on favorites to win the League Championship and return to the top flight, along with Watford and to a lesser extent, Sheffield United. Unlike the Premiership, the Championship tends to have better parity from the top to bottom of the table. As it turned out, Charlton finished in a disappointing 11th place finish and Watford finished 6th, which was good enough to qualify for the Football League Championship playoffs (more on that in a second).

The champions and runners-up are automatically promoted to the Premiership. In this case, West Bromwich Albion (West Brom for short), one of the preseason favorites for a return to the Premier League, won the Championship last May and have further enhanced their reputation in this decade as a flip-flop club (alternating from relegation to the Championship and promotion to the Premiership). Stoke City were a surprising runner-up and will make their debut appearance in the Premiership this coming season.

The third and final spot for the Premiership promotion is actually determined by a playoff. The clubs finishing in the 3rd to 6th place range participate in the playoffs, with the quarterfinals and semifinals being a home-and-away leg while the final is played at venerable old Wembley Stadium in London. The playoff system is fairly recent in an English context, dating back to the 1986-87 season and though there have been format changes, the playoffs have been a compelling monkey wrench addition to a second-tier division that's generally overlooked in the national spotlight. This season's lucky Playoff winner was Yorkshire-based club Hull City, who like their Championship playoff runners-up, Bristol City, were surprising finishers in last season's Championship (Hull placed 3rd, City in 4th).

The aim for the newly promoted Premier League clubs is simply to survive relegation. With newfound wealth of sorts, most of them opt to purchase players they would otherwise have trouble signing beforehand in an aim to stay in the Premiership the following season. Ultimately, the goal is longevity. If a club could stay on board the Premier League for 3-5 seasons, while making progress in the standings, they could persuade higher quality players to join their ranks and target a 5th-8th place finish, which could surely mean a spot to play in European competition (more on that later). Such an example of such success is Portsmouth, the current FA Cup winners, who won the 2003 League Championship and guaranteed promotion to the Premiership. Granted, Portsmouth were purchased by a wealthy businessman who as expected funneled in new money into the club, after settling in the lower half of the Premiership table for 3 straight years, "Pompey" had gone on to finish in the top half of the Premier League standings the next couple of campaigns and enjoyed their first FA Cup win since 1939.

However, Portsmouth is the exception to the trend as a number of Premier League clubs either languish in the Premiership and do little headway overall (i.e. Fulham, Bolton), flip flop in between leagues (i.e. West Brom), or they're stuck in the Championship or the lower leagues with a Premiership return being a pipe dream (i.e. Nottingham Forest, Sheffield Wednesday).

Levels 3 & 4: League One and League Two

Like the Championship, both League One and League Two have 24 club participants in each league with the similar promotion/relegation practices except that neither league institutes the playoff (simply, the 3 best finishers are promoted).

Level 5: Blue Square Premier League

Outside the entity of The Football League is The Football Conference; the top flight league of The Football Conference is the Blue Square Premier. The best way to explain The Football Conference is that it's at the regional level of English football (whereas the Premier League and the Football League are more at the national level), as The Football Conference is comprised of hundreds of regional and county leagues and divisions. This is where you'll see a good number of semi-professional part-time clubs participating, with the golden dream of someday cracking The Football League, which makes The Football Conference feel like a different ecosystem even if it's interconnected with The Football League in some way.

Here the 24 best teams from the two conferences directly below the Blue Square Premier, the Conference North (the division representing the Northern UK) and the Conference South, lock up for promotion into League Two. I won't delve in any deeper, as there are approximately 18 subdivision tiers to talk about, and at the deepest level, you'll find all kinds of amateur county leagues (called Sunday football leagues), but basically that's the lay of the land.

If you and I started a football club...

...is it possible for it to get into The Football League? Of course, but the odds of reaching the Football League, let alone the Premiership are just as slim as winning the lottery. However, it's this kind of romantic dream that makes setting up a club all that more endearing. In an American sports context, with some help from local governments and their taxpaying citizens, a sports franchise could be created from scratch or an existing franchise could move to that area and set up shop. Despite all the red tape that comes with starting up a new sports franchise, one thing is almost certain: the franchise automatically plays in the highest league of the land because there really is one league above all. In England, the system of promotion and relegation ensures that newfound clubs earn their spots in the league.

The Football Association (FA) Cup

For the clubs that represent daydreamers and the Davids to the Goliath clubs on the English landscape, there's no greater way to make an impact on a nationwide scale quite like the FA Cup, the oldest knockout football cup competition in the world, dating back to 1871. For those of you wondering why there's no playoff system to determine league champions, that's because the FA Cup is run as a complementary competition to the league. A club fortunate enough to win the highest league in the land (the Premier League in this case) and the FA Cup has achieved what's called "The Double", which is practically the equivalent of a team winning the World Series and the Super Bowl in the very same season.

The competition itself is exactly like the NCAA Men's College Basketball Tournament in the States, as it's truly "March Madness". The exact number of clubs participating in the FA Cup changes, but it's safe to say hundreds of clubs (over 700 to be almost exact) across England (as well as 6 Welsh clubs) vie for the FA Cup. However, instead of brackets to determine who plays who, they are done in random draws and the matches themselves except for the semifinals and finals are not played at neutral venues but rather it's a home game for one of the two clubs drawn. Should a match for that round be played to a tie, the match would resume at the away team's home ground. Preliminary qualifying rounds between the lower-tier sides are played in August to determine first round participants while the Premier League clubs actually don't enter the tournament until around January for the tournament's third round. So, if a Premiership club makes the final, they would play three rounds leading up to the semifinal to make it a total of 5 matches required to win the FA Cup. It all reaches to a head in the final at Wembley Stadium, which is traditionally recognized as the dream place for every English to club to play in for the famous FA Cup trophy.

Much like the NCAA tournament, the FA Cup has its Cinderella clubs, but 2008 was marked by a higher than usual number of Cinderella teams making their runs. Barnsley, a relatively obscure club in its own right, pulled off a shock upset of Liverpool in the 5th round, who are regarded as one of England's Big 4. Barnsley followed up with an encore in the 6th round upset of another Big 4 side, Chelsea. With Manchester United upset at home to Portsmouth in a controversial 6th round match, Portsmouth were the last Premiership side left standing after Cardiff City upset Middlesbrough away in the very same 6th round. The FA Cup semifinals read as if Loyola Marymount, Drexel, Albany, and St. Joseph's were playing in the NCAA Final Four. Barnsley, Cardiff City, West Brom, and Portsmouth, with all 4 being relatively obscure clubs, made unprecedented runs to the FA Cup semifinals In the end, Portsmouth would beat Cardiff in an England-Wales FA Cup final at Wembley, which marked Portsmouth's first FA Cup triumph since 1939.

The FA Cup winner doesn't just take home the vaunted Holy Grail of English knockout football but also a chance to play on a stage even greater than England...

Playing in Europe

The cream of the crop clubs in England are usually fortunate enough to play in a third competition run concurrently with their league and FA Cup ambitions: to take part in playing in Europe. There are two European competitions: one, a top-tier knockout competition called the UEFA Champions League and two, the second-tier knockout competition called the UEFA Cup.

UEFA Champions League

The Champions League is the most prestigious tournament of the two UEFA-sanctioned competitions. The trophy for the winner of the Champions League is dubbed the European Cup, simply because prior to 1992, the competition was called the European Cup (formally known as the European Champion Clubs' Cup). Just think of the World Baseball Classic and instead of countries being represented by their national teams, each respective nation is represented by their best clubs. The Champions League is somewhat of a misnomer, given that the competition is not restricted for national champions only, but there are also wild card spots, for lack of a better term, with more spots assigned to the stronger leagues as determined by what's called an UEFA coefficient, a statistical method of ranking the best leagues in Europe. For example, there are 3 universally recognized leagues considered to be the strongest and most prestigious on the continent: England, Spain, and Italy. Each of these three countries sends their top 4 league finishers from the prior season into the Champions League. For example, this past season, Premiership champion Manchester United and runners-up Chelsea locked up the top two bids into the Champions League whereas Arsenal and Liverpool both finished 3rd and 4th respectively, which in the process, qualified them for the Champions League (all 4 clubs mentioned here are considered to be England's Big 4, the wealthiest and most successful clubs in the English game today). Contrast this to say, Croatia, who have an UEFA coefficient of 16, as the 29th strongest league in Europe, and they could only send one representative in the upcoming 2008-09 in the Champions League, Dinamo Zagreb.

When Liverpool won the Champions League in 2005, they did not finish in England's top four. The old rule stated that the Champions League winners could not participate in next season's competition to defend their trophy if they did not qualify in their league (that is, to finish top four). However, a new rule was instituted that ensuing offseason which declared that Liverpool or any defending champion that did not qualify for the Champions League because of their league finish, could come back the following year and defend their championship. So, in this case, England had 5 teams in the Champions League: Liverpool, Chelsea (2005 English league champions), Manchester United, Arsenal, and Everton (Liverpool's cross-town rivals).

UEFA Cup

The UEFA Cup is Europe's second-tier continental knockout competition with basically the same rules for determining entrants but as you can guess, the UEFA Cup participants are almost always the best league finishers after the UEFA Champions League takes their picks. However, UEFA Cup qualification is not as straightforward as the Champions League's procedure. In terms of England, the 5th place finisher from last season, Everton, automatically qualifies. England's two knockout cup winners: the FA Cup winner and the League Cup winner (the League Cup or Carling Cup is like the FA Cup but only between league sanctioned clubs) qualify. In this case, Portsmouth (FA Cup winner) and Tottenham Hotspur (Carling Cup winner) automatically progress to the UEFA Cup if neither has qualified for the Champions League (otherwise, the UEFA Cup spots go to their runners-up). However, the 6th and 7th place league finishers are in no means, automatic finishers to play in the following season's FA Cup.

How European cup competition works

In the Summer leading up to the new season (July-August), the Champions League and UEFA Cup run what are called qualifying rounds. The champions and runners-up of Europe's strongest leagues usually clinch a bye to forgo the qualifying rounds and are automatically in the next stage of the competition, called the group stage (those of you familiar with that term from the World Cup, it's exactly what it is). However, teams who did not finish runners-up or champions in the strongest leagues, as well as champions of the weaker leagues, must participate in the qualifying rounds. For example, Arsenal and Liverpool have to get through the qualifying rounds to advance to the group stage, but both clubs have a privilege granted to clubs of stronger leagues in that they don't participate in the qualifying rounds until the latter stages. This leaves the champions and runners-up of the weaker, more obscure leagues to have to start the competition from the very first qualifying round all the way through the final qualifying round, should they get that far.

Those clubs progressing from the qualifying rounds will advance to the Group Stage, where a total of 32 clubs are split into 8 groups of 4, decided by a televised draw. It's not quite a completely random draw in that all 32 teams' names are selected by one large pot, rather, there are 4 pots with each one containing a ranked tier of 8 teams. For example, the top 8 seeds belong in the same pot, the 2nd tier clubs have their own pot, and so do the 3rd and 4th tier clubs. To draw out a group, one ball would be selected from each pot, each resembling a club, to comprise the group assignment. Such a practice is done so that there's a best possible combination of parity in the mix, even though it's inevitable that some groups would be stronger than others (i.e. "group of death"). Within the group stage, the clubs participate in a round robin home-away format for a formality of 6 games to be played. The two best finishers with the most points in their group qualifies. Goal difference is usually used as a tiebreaker. Furthermore, all 3rd place clubs eliminated from the Champions League would then participate in the Knockout Stages of the UEFA Cup.

The group stage qualifiers would then take part in the Knockout Stages up until the cup final, which is essentially a playoff system (first knockout stage, quarterfinals, semfinals). A knockout round is essentially a home-away leg where the team with the most goals scored in the two matches progresses to the next round. Should there be a tie, the team with the most away goals scored moves onto the next round and should that not work after two matches of regulation, an extra time session is added. Should the extra time session surpass without a decision, then it's on to dreaded penalty kicks. The cup final is a one-and-done affair at a chosen neutral site (much like the Super Bowl) to determine a winner in either the Champions League or UEFA Cup.

The Treble

It's possible for a team to win three trophies in one season, called a treble. In recent memory, Liverpool won the FA Cup, the Carling Cup, and the UEFA Cup in 2001, but as any Manchester United fan will tell you, it's not the proper Treble combination. The Treble consists of 1) a national league championship, 2) a national knockout cup championship, and 3) a continental league knockout cup competition. In 1999, Manchester United won a famous Treble: the English Premier League, the FA Cup, and the UEFA Champions League, quite possibly the hardest feat in club football. Only three other clubs replicated such a feat in sweeping their national trophies and winning the European Cup: Celtic (Glasgow, Scotland) in 1967, Ajax Amsterdam in 1972, and PSV Eindhoven (Holland) in 1988.

There is such thing as a Quadruple, to win 4 trophies in a season. In fact, the 1967 Celtic club did it, in winning the Scottish League, the Scottish Cup, the European Cup, and the less prestigious Scottish League Cup, which like its English counterpart only pits league-sanctioned member clubs and doesn't count non-league participants. In today's game, Chelsea, Manchester United, Liverpool, and Arsenal are usually in the running for the Quadruple each season but it usually never materializes as a realistic chance.

That finishes one installment of "The Other Football". Next time, I'm going to introduce you to the 20 Premier League clubs which should give you a good feel for who are considered the New York Yankees and Kansas City Royals of English football. I'll also touch upon what football culture is like in England and abroad, in general. In addition, I'm going to post my top 100 rankings (like Funston's Big Board for the other football). Granted, I haven't done one before, but I'll give it my best shot. Until then, keep your clothes on...

-Ray