Can someone explain to me how the world football leagues work? I have all these names that somehow squeezed into my American brain like Arsenal, Champions League, Man U, and such, but I don’t quite understand how they all fit together.
Does every country have it’s own league(s)? Is there ever inter-league play? What happens when the World Cup or Olympics roll around? Does everyone just go home and form a new national team just for the event?
National teams are made up of players from various leagues who are from that country. In some cases the regular teams keep playing while the national team has some of their players. For example the US national team has players from various leagues all over the world , not just MLS. As long as they are US citizens it doesn’t matter where they play.
Each country, or rather each national football association, has its own league system, but they all work on one basic principle: every team plays every other, at each of their grounds. Points are awarded for wins and draws, typically 3 and 1 respectively, with the highest points tally at the end of the season being the league winner. In some smaller leagues, such as in Scotland, there will be two matches at each ground between each pairing of teams over the course of a season.
Generally you’ll find the principle of promotion and relegation used, where team(s) finishing the season at the bottom of a league are moved down to the one below, being replaced by those finishing top of that lower league.
Inter-league play occurs in Europe at the level of the Champions League and the Uefa Cup, along with other smaller and generally meaningless competitions, and the Champions League is the most significant (and lucrative) title a European club can win. Places in various qualification stages of these competitions are given to national organisations to distribute among their top teams from the previous season, the idea being that the big guys finishing at the top of major leagues such as the Premiership enter at a later stage than the champions of smaller countries’ domestic competitions.
If you look here, the right-hand column shows the points accrued by each Premiership team this season. The dotted horizontal lines show the four Champions League places on offer for next season, the one Uefa Cup place, and the ‘relegation zone’ at the bottom.
Yes, national teams are formed for international competitions such as the World Cup, but bear in mind that the qualification stage of this is spread over a couple of years, and in Europe this alternates with the European Cup. Eligibility to play for a national team depends on birth and nationality, not on what club a player is currently employed by, so a fair few British-born players who would never be good enough to play for England become involved in Caribbean national squads through family backgrounds, and African players in the Premiership are routinely called back to represent their countries in the African Nations competition (along with all sorts of other connections some players have).
There are various European international competitions for teams from the different national leagues. For instance, the UEFA Champions’ League is competed for by the winners and high-placed finishers in the various top-flight leagues such as the English Premiership, the Italian Serie A etc. Other similar competitions include the UEFA Cup (high-placed finishers in the top leagues, but not the league winners) and formerly the European Cup-Winners’ Cup (the winners of their country’s knock-out cup competition, in England the FA Cup) - now merged into the UEFA Cup.
Other competitions like the European Championship and the World Cup are as BD said - national team competions where players compete on behalf of their country of origin, not the country in which their current club is based.
ETA - Too slow! :smack:
Every country has their own leagues. In those coutnries there are tiers, similar to Major leagues and the various levels of the minor leagues we have here for baseball. In most countries if you do poorly enough you get se nt to the league just below you and if you do well enough you get sent up a league (called relegation and promotion respectively). Tehre is also pseudo loeagues made up of the best tweams from the various leagues. In Europe this is called the Champions League and I think in South America it is calld Copas Libetedores. These specialty leagues play concurrently with the national leagues.
Then there are Cup competitions in most coutnries. these are single elimnation tournaments, similar to our March Madness, but everyone is invited. These also run concurrently wiht the leagues.
Also, there is the National team, which a player cna be asked to play for (I thinkif youare registerd for international play you are required to play for your national team if you are called up). Generally a national team has three types of games,: 1) freindlies, which are as they sound games that have no relevance outside the game itself, basically at raining game; 2) World Cup qualifiying - to determine the 32 teams in the World Cup every four years; and 3) Regional Championship qualifying - this is like the European Cup, won by Spain last year, teams must go through a qualifying round.
On top of this there are Under-16s and Under 20s National teams, and then the club teams have reserve teams that play.
The bottom line is that top tier player could be playing in uip to a half dozen competitions at any one time.
Despite its name, the Champions League isn’t a league competition. It’s a cup competition, with knock-out qualifying stages for teams from smaller countries, a group stage similar to that of the World Cup, and more knock-out stages involving the final 16 teams.
You bunch of Euro-centric answerers!! 
Examples of non-European interleague or international play:
The Copa Libertadores in South America, played on an annual basis, with qualification based upon results from the prior calendar year’s leagues. BIG in South America.
The Gold Cup, a competition among the nations who are members of CONCACAF (think all of North America, the Carribean, and the non-Hispanic South American countries).
The Copa America, a competition among the Hispanic nations of South America, though they have been inviting countries in from outside to fill out the tournament to a round 12 teams lately.
In general, there is a parallel structure in most countries, and on most continents, to the competitions you find in European countries, and in interleague/international play in Europe.
One interesting difference found in Latin America: often the domestic leagues are split into the Apertura and Clausura halves (Opening and Closing). This allows for a playoff system if they want.
THIS year, yeah. God knows what it will be next year, or the year after that, etc. :eek:
Minor correction to a couple of posts - the European Cup is the former name of what is now the Champions League, and the term is still occasionally used.
The quadrennial tournament between national teams of Europe is the European Championship, not Cup.
Oooh, play-offs, forgot about them (I’m going to happily continue with Anglo-centricity 
). The third promotion place in English leagues doesn’t go straight to the third-placed team (or fourth-placed in League Two), but to the winner of a mini knock-out tournament between 3rd-6th (4th-7th) placed teams. At the time of writing, you can see that Ipswich need three points to get into 6th place, putting them into such a position. Random example, honest 
(BTW, how on earth have Cardiff ended up with four games in hand?)
Quite a few teams had games postponed during the ice age last month, Cardiff had more than most. Not only that but one league game was changed to allow for the FA cup replay against Arsenal.
I think the EUFA cup is going to be renamed, I think it’s going to be the EUFA League.
Care to explain how the Brazilian and Argentinian leagues work? I admit I’ve never taken that a close look at them, but I’ve heard that they’re really confusing in regards to relegations and promotions.
And they have split spring/fall leagues as well, right?
For the OP.
You will hear terms, the Double, the Triple, the Quadruple. In England this refers to winning a combination of four titels in the same year: The League Cup, The FA Cup, The League Championship, and the Champions League. In terms of prestige the League Cup is the lowest, while the other three depend quite a bit on your perspecitve (ask a Chelsea fan and they would claim the Champions League is what they want to win more than anything, aska Liverpool fan and theyu would probably say the League Championship) Nobody has ever won the quadruple although Manchester United are still in all four competitions at this point. Manchester United won the Triple in 1999, excluding the League Cup.
Ehm, that’ll be a quintuple, please, since they also won the World Club Cup 
(or is it Club World Cup?)
That one is a lame competition where the winners of the different continental versions of the Champions Leauge play.
It’s important to bear in mind that international games frequently occur during the regular league (club football) season–although the international tournaments, like the Euros and the World Cups, take place during the summer (when club football is on summer break in Europe), games from the qualifying rounds of those tournaments are often held during the club season. Same thing for friendlies (i.e., “exhibition” matches).
So, every once in a while, the top leagues will be interrupted for a weekend of international fixtures, which usually happens just when your club is finally hitting its stride, and thus the break upsets your momentum and often leaves you with injured players who over-exerted themselves during a meaningless friendly.
One other thing to point out is that the players you see in the international teams typically play for the top divisions of a certain nation’s league (not necessarily their native country’s league), but you also have a rich assortment of lower divisions, the teams from which can often be promoted to a higher division (or relegated to a lower division). This system of promotion/relegation is unlike anything you’ll find in American sports, including the MLS, and is one of the features I find most engaging about world soccer.
How the system works, however, varies from one league to the next. Latin American leagues tend to have a rather Byzantine system which I can’t quite follow; in European leagues, it’s usually more straightforward–top teams winning promotion, bottom teams getting relegated–although nowadays you do have a “wild card” situation, as seen in the English League playoff system (as explained by GorillaMan).
The Triple is also called the Treble, which seems to be the preferred term in England.
And, technically, there is one team that has won a quadruple (if you limit the trophy count to major competitions, and disregard things like the World Club Cup as the Mickey Mouse cups that they are)–Celtic, back in '67. (admittedly, one can argue that the standards of Scottish football aren’t really as high as what you’ll find in England, or Italy, Spain, Germany… etc.)
And if you open it up to women’s football, the Arsenal Ladies have accomplished a similar feat. If only their male counterparts could do the same! (not in the foreseeable future, sadly).
World Club Championship.
That’s yet another level of play, which pits the winner of the Copa Libertadores (essentially, the South American club champion) against the winner of the UEFA Champions’ League (the European club champions).
It’s more like a friendly than a real match, though- it’s played in Tokyo for the benefit of a 99% Japanese live audience and a fairly small global television audience, and allows unlimited substitutions.
I always thought the name was a bit arrogant- a bit like the NBA or NFL calling their champion team the “world champions”, as they do- since only teams from two continents compete. Granted, the chance of anyone else winning, were they allowed to enter, is miniscule, but still.
ETA: apparently, I’m wrong and it’s changed a bit: it is now the Club World Cup, and includes teams from six continents!
I can’t recall the NBA or NFL ever calling their champion teams the “World Champions”. Or did you not mean that they actually had done so?
I don’t think either league actually uses the phrase “world champions” anymore but the media do it all the time.
Consider also the “World Series”.
Isn’t that name because the original sponsor was a newspaper called “The World”?
No. It was because in the late 1800’s, when the concept of a championship between the AA and the NL was first promulgated, they considered the winner of a national championship to be in effect the best team in the world at the game, not much of anyone else having yet picked the game up.