Another key difference that took me a while to appreciate is that the European clubs are not franchises of their leagues - they are independent organizations participating in a national football association, which is in turn governed by a continental association (UEFA).
This is huge, huge, huge. It's fundamental to understanding European footy and it's fascinating. I'll speak about England, since it's the oldest and best known.
"Football," encompassing all codes of a "move the ball from one end to the other" games, grew organically in England in the mid-19th century, and took different forms in different places. In the London area and in public (ie private) schools, the game where you could pick up the ball and run with it was favored (but some schools still played feet-only). In the industrial north, the game with feet-only was favored (but the other was still also played).
There were various meetings and codifications of rules and whatnot. The game got divided into Rugby football,* named after the public school where its history was most rooted (imagine if gridiron was called "Yale football," that's the idea), and Association football, from the Football Association and its predecessor Associations that organized various clubs. "Soccer" is the shorthand/bastardization of "a
ssociation football." So don't let anyone tell you that Americans are wrong for calling it soccer. The term has plenty of history and current usage in England.
*Rugby branched into rugby league and rugby union. I'm not going into that now.
But this was all drawn up by mustachioed dudes in sepia photographs. At root level the game was played by clubs, which were groups of men who associated voluntarily. Again, sometimes these were at elite schools, and sometimes at factories and the like. Arsenal trace their roots to workers at a munitions factory. What is now Manchester United started as the Newton Heath Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Football Club, a group of railway workers. Sometimes it was a cricket club whose members wanted to do something else when cricket wasn't being played. A cricket club in Sheffield, the hub of feet-only football in the mid-1800's, started holding football games for its members on Wednesdays, when the cricket ground wasn't in use; Sheffield Wednesday Football Club still exists and currently plays in the second tier of English football.
Notwithstanding the various attempts to "associate," these clubs were atomistic. They were member-goverened and member-financed and the members played the games. Competition was arranged informally. A bunch of handlebar mustache dudes would travel to play a bunch of other handlebar mustache dudes on a sepia mud-field somewhere. Sometimes they would play one game of pick-up-the-ball and one of feet-only.
Since these were self-financed efforts, and adidas and Nike didn't exist, uniforms were makeshift. Just as American baseball clubs crafted a "uniform" by intially having its ragtag players wear the same color stockings, creating team names that carry on to today, soccer clubs created their "uniform" by pinning the club's badge or crest over their heart, on the left side of whatever sepia-colored shirt they had.
Gradually, as the boundary between rugby and soccer became distinct and the rules standardized, various efforts were made to organize ongoing competitions. These were mostly regional. There was a desire for a national tournament to crown a king, so the FA Cup was instituted in 1872. England-wide leagues as we know them now did not yet exist. There was no real way to make sense of a seeding system or anything like that, so all of the teams, of whatever strength, went into a hat, completely random draw. You might get a string of home games against weaker teams all the way to the final, or a string of away games with bad travel against stronger teams, or whatever mix. That format essentially remains today.**
In 1878, the forerunner of the Premier League, the Football League, was founded. As soccer was still relatively stronger in the north compared to rugby in the south, and with the impracticalities of traveling up and down the country every week, it was initally all northern clubs: Accrington,
Aston Villa, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers,
Burnley, Derby County,
Everton, Notts County, Preston North End,
Stoke, West Bromwich Albion and
Wolverhampton Wanderers. Of these, the bolded are currently among the 20 PL teams, and the italicized have been in the PL in the recent past.
Just as in American baseball, in the 1870's-80s, what had been a pastime started to become a cutthroat affair, and these genteel "clubs" began to pay professionals, and just as in American baseball, this was controversial. The solution was much different. American baseball created closed leagues with franchises that were monopolies, as blessed by one of the handful of worst SCOTUS decisions of all time. You had to buy your way in, and once you were in, you were in for good. Other teams only existed as franchises of the major league clubs.
That did not fly in England. The soccer clubs were, at heart, still clubs. Baseball was popular in America, but soccer clubs were at the beating heart of their communities - like Texas high school football x1000. So the clubs became formal business entities, joint-stock companies like the Green Bay Packers, essentially*** and started to pay players. After the Football League was founded in 1878, lower tier leagues with greater geographical reach were assembled, and at the turn of the century promotion and relegation was introduced. This solved the problem of competitive balance and incentivized sound club management.
So the English football pyramid now looks like this. The league names smack of the same kind of what-the-fuck-is-this of American college football conferences, now that the Big 12 has four teams and the Big 10 has thirty seven; or Spinal Tap being called "the New Originals."
1. Premier League/20 clubs
2. Championship/24 clubs (not to be confused with the pan-European Champions league)
3. League One/24
4. League Two/24
Even more confusingly, these four are together known as "the Football League," and everything below it is "non-league football."
Beyond the fifth tier the leagues are regionalized to minimize travel for what are semi-pro clubs and to reflect the wider pyramid - eighth tier has 160 clubs, the 11th and bottom tier has 792 clubs, now we're into pub-club territory.
There is promotion and relegation all up and down the pyramid, every year. Three teams go down from the PL to the Championship, and three up the other way; three down from the Championship to League One, and three up the other way; etc.
So in theory, DC Auto Repairs in the eleventh-tier Devon Football League, whose players are not paid, and which is so small-bore that clubs either don't have websites or use the kind of website that my kid's youth sports leagues use to schedule games, could rip off eleven championship seasons in a row and win the Premier League.
Last year, the "top six" English clubs - Man City, Man U, Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Spurs - along with the heavyweights from the other big European leagues like Real Madrid, Barcelona, Juventus, PSG etc. announced the formation of a "Super League," or closed-competition permanent Champions League, where they would play each other in and around their domestic league seasons every year, without having to qualify for the Champions League by finishing at the top of their domestic leagues. In short, they wanted the guaranteed money streams from guaranteed Liverpool-Barcelona games, without the risk of not qualifying. Or, the American model.
Fan reaction was extremely negative, and in some cases violently so. I have to go earn a living now... but the point is that at the heart of the European system is the idea of a "club," run by and for its members, that earns its way into the top league and stays there by competing, and not by having a billionaire buy its way into a closed cartel. They are still, literally, clubs. I am a member of Everton Football Club, for real. (For the same reason, "moving" a club in England is just unheard of. If you can't profitably run yourself, you don't move to the biggest city lacking a franchise in the closed cartel, you sink down a level. If you look at the way that so many baseball franchises are basically pocketing the TV money and betting on franchise appreciation, and not putting it into payroll, you see the downsides of this. The Rays would spend if the alternative were home games for the next year with the Augusta Greenjackets and no TV money).
Goodbye.
