What are all the leagues and cups of English football?

This was utterly mysterious to us for years. And it may still be for many Americans. Allow us to explain.

First, here’s an example of something a TV announcer in England might say that you would never hear an American announcer say: that a team is playing their next four games in four different competitions! Specifically, you might hear them say “Manchester City are playing in the Premier League this weekend, the League Cup Final at Wembley next weekend, then the FA Cup quarterfinals, and then they’re at Barcelona in the Champions League.”

Most English football fans would understand what the announcer meant by that, but have American fans ever heard of a team playing in a bunch of competitions at the same time, including two tournaments plus another league in a different country?

The answer is likely no, so it occurred to us that we should write a guide to the various leagues and “cups” in English football.

Premier League: Top of the Pyramid

When Americans think of English soccer, they usually think of teams like Arsenal, Chelsea, Liverpool, and Manchester United. Those clubs are in what is now called the Premier League. This used to be called the First Division, but the allure of TV money and marketing power created a “re-branding” back in the early 90s.

The Premier League, with 20 teams, is really the top of a massive pyramid of clubs, and the best way we can explain it is through analogy: imagine if every professional baseball team in America was an independent entity. In other words, imagine that the Memphis Redbirds are, instead of the AAA affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals, a completely independent team that’s been playing in Memphis for more than 100 years. Then imagine if, all the way down to the local firefighters’ union putting together a baseball team and paying them part-time wages, it was all connected into one massive pyramid of leagues. That’s more or less what English football looks like.

Determining Champions in English Football

A major difference between English football and every sport in America is how they determine the champion. Americans insist on a “regular season” followed by “playoffs.” The English, and pretty much everybody else in the world, do it another way: Everybody in the league plays everybody else in the league, home and away. You get three points if you win and one if you tie. At the end of the season, whoever has the most points wins. (The first tiebreaker is “goal differential.”)

Check Out Our Frequently Asked Questions To Help You Plan Your Soccer Adventure.

The most exciting finish ever was when Manchester City won the league by scoring a goal with about 30 seconds left in the very last game of the year — taking it away from their rivals Manchester United to win it for the first time in 46 years. It’s basically the greatest thing that ever happened in English football … unless you’re a United fan.

Promotion and Relegation in English Football

Now, here’s another crucial thing to understand: the system of promotion and relegation. Imagine if, using another baseball analogy, the Pirates had a crappy year and finished last in the Major Leagues, then had to spend the entire next season playing in AAA. And meanwhile, Memphis finished with the best record in AAA; they would move up to the “big leagues” for the whole next season. In English soccer terms, we’d say the Pirates got relegated and Memphis was promoted.

In England, the bottom clubs at each level of the sport get relegated for the next season, and the top clubs get promoted. For example, this past 2022-23 season Southampton spent the season playing the heavyweights like Man U and Liverpool, but they finished last in the Premier League, so in 2023-24 they’ll be playing Millwall, Blackburn Rovers, and Hull City.

One thing about these lower leagues, by the way, is that it’s a heck of a lot easier to buy tickets for their games. Here is a post all about the lower-league clubs in and around London.

Here’s our video explaining promotion and relegation in English football:

The English Football League

The three levels below the Premier League make up the Football League. Basically it’s the old league system without the top tier, which broke off to call itself Premier. The top level of the Football League is called The Championship, with 24 teams. This is confusing to some Americans, because being “relegated to the Championship” doesn’t sound right, but in fact it’s very, very costly to a club. (Imagine selling tickets for your club’s game against Man U game vs. tickets for game with Huddersfield Town.)

The next level below the Championship is League One, another odd name since it’s the third level of English football. League One has 24 teams, almost all of whom Americans will never have heard of, such as Bolton Wanderers, Fleetwood Town, and Oxford United.

Below League One is League Two, with another 24 teams. 2023-24 members include AFC Wimbledon, Forest Green Rovers, and Grimsby Town. 

This, by the way, is one of the things we think Americans will love about English soccer: fairly small stadiums, fairly close to each other.

Playoffs

By the way, England does actually have playoffs. In all three Football League levels, the top two teams get automatically promoted, while the next four have a playoff to determine which one goes up. These finals are played at Wembley Stadium in London and make for some pretty dramatic stuff. Imagine a one-game playoff between two AAA teams at Yankee Stadium, with the winner going to the Majors for the whole next season.

Read more about the playoffs in English soccer.

Map of the Top Six Tiers of English Soccer Clubs

Here’s a Google Map of all the clubs from the Premier League down to tier six, the National League North and South, for the 2021-22 season.

Levels 5 and 6: The National League

Okay, so that’s it for the Football League. We’ve now covered the top 92 teams in English football, but we’re hardly a quarter of the way done! But we’ll go faster, because it gets fairly confusing from this point and there’s only so much we can explain in one post.

The next two levels just below the Football League are the National League and the National League North/South. We will defer to Wikipedia for a moment:

The top tier of non-League football is the National League. It contains a national division (National League) of 24 clubs (Level 5), and is the lowest level with a single nationwide league. There are two divisions at Level 6, covering the north (National League North) and south (National League South), with 22 clubs each. Some of these clubs are full-time professional and the others are semi-professional. Below the National League, some of the stronger clubs are semi-professional, but continuing down the tiers, soon all the clubs are amateur. Lower-level leagues also tend to cater to progressively smaller geographic regions.

One club in the National League, where Groundhopper Paul saw a 2016 FA Cup game against League Two Notts County, is Boreham Wood, out in the suburbs of London.

English Football Leagues: Levels 7 and Below

Okay, now we’ve covered the top 160 teams in English football, but wait, there’s more! The seventh tier is made up of – brace yourselves – the Northern Premier League Premier Division, the Southern Football League Premier Division, and the Isthmian League Premier Division.

The eighth tier has six leagues – three sets of pairs that feed, through promotion and relegation, to the three leagues in the seventh tier.

And … right there we will quit trying. There are, incredibly, 24 levels of English football with an estimated 7,000 teams, but that number changes from year to year. If you really want to dig into this, we defer once again to Wikipedia.

Maybe Charts Will Help?

Here are two good images to help you out. The first is the big picture, showing the first nine levels (with out-of-date sponsorship, but still):

Next up is the non-league structure, levels 6 and down.

The Cups

Okay, still with us? Probably not, but we needed to write this for our book. So on we trudge.

“Cup” is what the English call a tournament, and these go on throughout the year. Every country has at least one domestic Cup, and in England, the biggest and best of them all is the FA Cup. (FA being “Football Association.”) The beauty of the FA Cup is that it is open to the first nine levels of English football described above; usually over 700 teams enter!

(We have another blog post called
What Is The FA Cup?)

The other beautiful thing is that the pairings are drawn at random, including where the games happen. And if a game ends in a tie, they replay it at the other stadium.

It starts out in August with some preliminary rounds, then four rounds of qualifying, then the “proper” rounds start in November. That is when the League One and League Two teams enter – but again, remember that it’s unseeded and totally random. So you might be sitting third in League One, enter the FA Cup, and have to go play at some semi-pro team from the Isthmian League. It’s crazy.

The Third Round Proper is when the teams from the Premier League and Championship come in, and that’s usually the first weekend in January. This is where most of the country starts to notice, because every year some Premier League team has to go play on some cow pasture of a field, and everybody is always rooting for the “minnows.” In January 2017, for example, Liverpool hosted Plymouth Argyle from League Two — and they drew 0-0! Liverpool had to go down there and play them again, winning only by 1-0.

You also get random matchups like Tottenham-Arsenal, two bitter North London rivals who might happen to draw each other in the Cup, in addition to their two Premier League meetings each year.

In the Fourth Round Proper, played in late January, there are still some “giant killings” possible, but most of the time this is where the Big Boys start to push the little ones out of the way.

The Sixth Round is the quarterfinals, and in 2017 a couple of non-league teams made it this far.

The semis are at Wembley in mid-April, and all this leads up to the FA Cup Final, played almost every year since 1872, and which now happens in May at Wembley. It’s like the Super Bowl of English football. One famous giant-killing was when Wigan beat mighty Manchester City, 1-0, on a fantastic last-minute goal. Here are the highlights:

Interesting side note: Wigan became the first team ever to win the FA Cup and be relegated (from the Premier League to the Championship) in the same season.

The full schedule for the 2022-23 FA Cup is available now.

Other Cups

So that’s the biggie, the FA Cup. The second one to know about is the League Cup, which is the same deal as the FA Cup but only for the Premier League and the three Football League divisions, so a total of 92 teams.

The semifinals of the League Cup are played in two legs (collectively called a “tie”), one at each stadium, total goals win. It happens that during Groundhopper Paul’s travels in 2018, he saw the second leg of each semifinal. Manchester City won at West Ham, 3-0, to finish that tie 9-0! But the truly great game of his tour was the second leg of Sunderland vs. Manchester United. Sunderland won the first leg at home, 2-1, and then won the second leg in a penalty shootout at Man U – a game which he wrote about as “Sunderland’s Big Night at Old Trafford.” That’s the game that made Paul an Honorary Mackem.

Other Cups that get played during the season:

• Football League Trophy (aka Checkatrade Trophy) for Leagues One and Two only — sort of
• FA Trophy for levels 5-8
• FA Vase for levels 9-10
• Conference League Cup for levels 5-6
• And a bunch of others.

European Competitions

For clubs in the Premier League, “getting to Europe” is a major goal, usually reserved for the top seven teams in the league now that the Europa Conference League was added for 2021-22.

The biggest of these is the UEFA Champions League, which takes top teams from every European domestic league and makes a tournament for the following season. In England, the top four teams go. The whole thing is 32 teams, divided into eight groups of four. The groups of four all play each other, home and away, with the top two advancing to the “knockout stage” where they play home-and-away ties. This goes on until the final, which is a single game on a neutral field in late May.

Here are the 2023-24 Champion League dates.

The second European competition to know about is the UEFA Europa League which will feature 32 teams in 2021-22. It is like the NIT to the Champions League’s NCAA. The fifth-place, and sometimes sixth-place English team goes to this one, and it runs just like the Champions League, only hardly anybody really cares unless their team is in it.

Here are the 2023-24 Europa League dates.

A third competition is the UEFA Europa Conference League. Last season, West Ham became the first English club to win the Europa Conference League, beating Fiorentina.

Here are the 2023-24 Europa Conference League dates.

Other than the money, the significance of these European competitions is in helping you attract big-time players. If you qualify for Europe for next year, you’ll find it easier to sign these guys, and of course with the TV and ticket revenue, you’ll have the money to pay them, as well.

World Cup, etc.

Everything I’ve described so far is for clubs, not countries. Many Americans only know about the World Cup, but that’s countries playing each other. It’s every four years, with the world split up into six regions. Each of these has their own championships, as well as qualifying tournaments to get into the World Cup. The European Championship, played every four years alternating with World Cups, is a really big deal.

And in the United States …

The U.S. runs more or less the same; we have a league called Major League Soccer, and a cup called the Lamar Hunt Open Cup. MLS doesn’t have the single-table format and schedule everybody else uses, and there’s no promotion and relegation. As for the quality of play in the MLS, our best guess is that if you took the top MLS teams and dropped them in England, they would struggle to stay in the Championship. Most would wind up in League One or League Two. Here’s Paul’s argument for that.

So There You Have It

So, going all the way back to the start: How was it that Manchester City (back in 2014) had four games coming up in four different competitions? Well, now you can sort of understand.

• Saturday against Stoke City in the Premier League;
• The following Sunday against Sunderland in the League Cup Final;
• The next Sunday against Wigan in the FA Cup Sixth Round;
• And then on Wednesday at Barcelona in the Champions League.