How long does the premiere league (Manchester United, et all) soccer go on for? More to the point, how many games do they play in a season?
It lasts for most of the year. The Premier League wound up last week, and next season will begin early August.
There’s 20 teams in the Premiership, each playing the others twice (home & away), so 38 league matches. Then there’s the FA Cup and the league cup, where they’ll each play at least one match, and most will play two or three. Half-a-dozen teams are also playing in Europe each year, which adds to the total.
It’s similar for the lower divisions - they don’t have European matches, but an extra four or so teams means an extra eight league matches.
And there is no playoffs, whomever has the best record wins the league.
Whilst it’s true that the top team in each league is declared the champion, in the lower leagues playoffs occur to determine who gets promoted. For example, in the division below the Premiership (the Championship) the teams that finish 1st and 2nd get promoted and the teams finishing 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th play a mini knockout tournament to decide who claims the third and final promotion place. The bottom three teams from the Premiership are relegated to the Championship to ensure that the numbers of teams in each league remains the same.
[gritted teeth]
Don’t talk about playoffs… :mad: …come on Preston
[/gritted teeth]
Is our Eddie back for you all yet?
Yes (but I’m only supporting them by proxy, you realise 
)
I don’t follow the Championship, so I don’t really know for certain who all is involved in the playoffs or how it works. Care to give a brief description of what you need to happen?
The teams finishing 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th were Ipswich, Derby, Preston and West Ham respectively. At a random draw West Ham played Ipswich and Derby played Preston over 2 legs, playing once at the home ground of each time and the scores aggregated. The winners of these two games go into the playoff final, those teams being West Ham and Preston. They play the final on 30th May (not over 2 legs this time, a one-off game), the winner of this match gets the honour of being promoted to the Premiership to get whooped by the big boys
I hope I haven’t misunderstood what you meant but it’s not a random draw, the 3rd team play the 6th and the 4th play the 5th.
Next weekend over 3 days all the play-off finals will take place at the Millenium Stadium, Cardiff (don’t forget leagues 2 and 3 also have play-offs). So on Sat.Sun and Mon. we have the final games of the domestic league programme.
…and the 3rd & 4th place teams have the ‘advantage’ (hah) of playing the second leg at home.
Just to clarify the situation, which is the same for the Championship & for Divisions 1 & 2: the top two teams are automatically promoted (Sunderland & Wigan in the case of the Championship). The third promotion place is decided by the playoffs.
The reason for this system is to make the competition more interesting for more teams for longer. If it had been a straight top-three promotion, most of the Championship teams would have had nothing to play for since Easter. With the system as it is, anyone in the top half of the table is never more than a couple of good results away from being in a playoff position.
It does make for an exciting end to the season but it has its pitfalls too as Ipswich discovered ( as you well know GM ) They finished 12 points ahead of West Ham but were knocked out in the play-offs.
My own team managed to get into the automatic promotion places on the very last day even though the team they replaced had the better of us on the two games we played against each other. I’m not complaining though.
The play-offs do seem like money spinners so I can’t see them going back to the way it used to be.
However much we get fucked over by them, I’d hate to see the playoffs disappear. In fact, I think the third Premiership relegation place should also be decided through playoffs…it’d be a wonderful way of helping tackle the divide between the top two divisions…and some of the excitement we had with Survival Sunday would be guaranteed every year.
It wasn’t that long ago when the battle for promotio and relegation was co-mingled between the two divsions, i.e. the top teams in the lower division and the bottom teams in the higher division played-off to see who got to stay/go up.
Eh? I don’t remember that.
Re unfairness of play-offs, I think in the event of a draw over the two legs of the semi-final, the team with the higher league position should go through. Now that’s a meaningful advantage.
You didn’t misunderstand me, I just got it wrong, not sure why I thought it was a random draw :smack:
I don’t remember the situation Gangster Octopus described either, can you provide a cite that this was ever the way it was done?
Using the away-goal rule would be a preferable step, IMO.
According to here, the system was abandoned before 1900.
I stand corrected.
You mean only the higher placed team would benefit from the away goal rule (otherwise where’s their advantage) ? That would be OK I suppose. I don’t think that getting to play the second leg at home is much of an advantage at all, and ISTR that at least in European matches (don’t know about play-offs specifically) the statistics bear me out.
Just the normal away-goal rule (I wasn’t being clear about that - nothign to do with home advantage)
When I get a chance, I might dig out some statistics 
I suppose I feel that a big bias towards the higher-placed teams would damage the principle behind using playoffs in the first place.