Football in England developed a very different system from that in North America, and it has been adopted for football in most other European countries, as well as to many other sports founded in Europe and played across the world. The features of the system are: • The existence of an elected governing body to which clubs at all levels of the sport belong. • The promotion of well-performing teams to higher-level leagues or divisions and the relegation of poorly performing teams to lower-level leagues or divisions. • Matches played both inside and outside of leagues. European football clubs are members both of a league and of a governing body. In the case of England, all competitive football clubs are members of
The Football Association, while the top 20 teams also are members of the
Premier League, a separate organization. The 72 teams in the three levels below the Premier League are members of still another body, the
English Football League. The FA operates the national football team and tournaments that involve teams from different leagues (except the
EFL Cup, operated by the English Football League and open to its own teams and those in the Premier League). In conjunction with FIFA and other countries' governing bodies, it also sets the
playing rules and the rules under which teams can sell players' contracts to other clubs. The rules or
Laws of the Game are determined by the
International Football Association Board. The Premier League negotiates television contracts for its games. However, although the national league would be the dominating competition in which a club might participate, there are many non-league fixtures a club might play in a given year. In European football there are national cup competitions, which are single elimination knock-out tournaments, are played every year and all the clubs in the league participate. Also, the best performing clubs from the previous year may participate in pan-European tournaments such as the
UEFA Champions League, operated by the
Union of European Football Associations. A Premier League team might play a league game one week, and an
FA Cup game against a team from a lower-level league the next, followed by an EFL Cup game against a team in the EFL, and then a fourth game might be against a team from across Europe in the Champions League. The
promotion and relegation system is generally used to determine membership of leagues. Most commonly, a pre-determined number of teams that finish at the bottom of a league or division are automatically dropped down, or relegated, to a lower level for the next season. They are replaced by teams who are promoted from that lower tier either by finishing with the best records or by winning a playoff. In England, in the
2010–2011 season, the teams
Birmingham City,
Blackpool and
West Ham United were relegated from the Premier League to the
Football League Championship, the second level of English football. They were replaced by the top two teams from the second level,
Queens Park Rangers and
Norwich City, both of which won automatic promotion, as well as
Swansea City (a Welsh club that plays in the English system), which won a playoff tournament of the teams that finished third through sixth. In the
2011–12 season, the teams
Wolverhampton Wanderers,
Blackburn, and
Bolton were relegated to the Championship. They were replaced by
Reading,
Southampton, and
West Ham. The two former teams had won automatic promotion, while the latter occupied the last promotion spot when they defeated
Cardiff 5–0 on aggregate in the semifinals, and defeated
Blackpool 2–1 at the final in Wembley Stadium. The system originated in England in 1888 when twelve clubs decided to create a professional
Football League. It then expanded by merging with the
Football Alliance in 1892, with the majority of the Alliance teams occupying the lower
Second Division, due to the divergent strengths of the teams. As this differential was overcome over the next five years, the winners of the Second Division went into a playoff with the worst placed team in the
First Division, and if they won, were promoted into the top tier. The first club to achieve promotion was
Sheffield United, which replaced the relegated
Accrington F.C. Relegation often has devastating financial consequences for club owners who not only lose TV, sponsorship and gate income but may also see the asset value of their shares in the club collapse. Some leagues offer a "
parachute payment" to its relegated teams for the following years in order to protect them from bankruptcy. If a team is promoted back to the higher tier the following year then the parachute payment for the second season is distributed among the teams of the lower division. There is of course a corresponding bonanza for promoted clubs. The league does not choose which cities are to have teams in the top division. For example,
Leeds, the fourth-biggest city in England, saw their team,
Leeds United, relegated from the Premier League to the Championship in 2004, and went without top-flight football for 16 seasons before United returned to the Premier League in 2020. During this period, United were relegated again to the third-tier
League One in 2007 and returned to the Championship in 2010. Any city that loses all of its Premier League clubs to relegation will continue to be without a club in the top league until a local club plays well enough to be promoted into the Premiership. Famously, the French
Ligue 1 lacked a team from Paris, France's capital and largest city, for some years. Likewise, Berlin clubs in the
Bundesliga have been rare, due to the richer clubs being all located in the former West Germany. As well as having no right to being in a certain tier, a club also has no territorial rights to its own area. A successful new team in a geographical location can come to dominate the incumbents. In
Munich, for example,
TSV 1860 München were initially more successful than the city's current biggest team
Bayern München. As of the current 2024–25 season, London has
13 teams in the top four league levels, including seven Premier League teams. Clubs may be sold privately to new owners at any time, but this does not happen often where clubs are based on community membership and agreement. Such clubs require agreement from members who, unlike shareholders of corporations, have priorities other than money when it comes to their football club such as tradition or local identity. For similar reasons, relocation of clubs to other cities is very rare. This is mostly because virtually all cities and towns in Europe have a football club of some sort, the size and strength of the club usually relative to the town's size and importance. Buying an existing top-flight club and moving it to a new location is problematic, as the supporters of the town's original club are unlikely to switch allegiance to an interloper. This means anyone wanting ownership of a high ranked club in their native city must buy a local club as it stands and work it up through the divisions, usually by hiring better talent. There have been
some cases where existing owners have chosen to relocate out of a difficult market, to better facilities, or to realize the market value of the land that the current stadium is built upon (A famous example being the
Relocation of Wimbledon F.C. to Milton Keynes). As in the U.S., team relocations have been controversial as supporters of the club will protest at its loss. ==Systems around the world==