by Simon Wright

Created on: January 29, 2009   Last Updated: February 15, 2009

Promotion and relegation is the lifeblood of many football leagues, providing the incentive and motivation for teams to strain every sinew right until the end of the season. The elation that accompanies promotion is only matched by the anguish felt when teams suffer a relegation. There are, of course, some leagues that operate without promotion or relegation and I'll touch them briefly in due course. However, for the vast majority of football leagues, the prospect of gaining promotion and the fear of being relegated plays an important part in the development of football teams and the pressures that clubs and managers face.

England is home to the oldest football league in the world (founded in 1888) and serves as a good example of the way that relation and promotion works. Indeed, I imagine that the creator of this article title probably had the English football league in mind, given that it is often referred to as the "football pyramid". I'm aware, however, that football is a global game (and Helium a global website) so I will then go on to touch briefly upon some of the other nations' leagues and some differences versus the English model.

The English football league system:

There are 92 professional teams, arranged into the four recognised leagues. At the top, you have The Premier League which features the big boys; household names such as Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Liverpool. The next level down is The Championship, followed by the First Division and then the Second Division. The pyramid doesn't stop there either though, as there are a series of semi professional and amateur leagues that lie beneath the Second division. In theory, it is possible for grassroots amateur teams to rise up from the depths of non-league football to enter the professional ranks. For the purposes of this article, I'll start from the Second Division and work my way up to the Premier League.

The Second Division is comprised of 24 teams. Prior to 1987, there was no automatic relegation from this bottom tier of the professional league structure. The only way for a new club to gain admission, therefore, was if one of the existing teams went out of business, which did happen from time to time. The introduction of relegation to the English Conference has helped make the league more competitive and dramatic, even if it has created despair for fans of long-established clubs who have dropped through the trapdoor. The current position is that two teams are relegated each year and replaced

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