Soccer and Basketball:  League structures
By Patrick Claviolo

We all know that soccer is not a mainstream sport in the Philippines while basketball is our number one sport.  Talking about soccer will probably bore the hell out of most.  But I’ll try a different approach… talking about soccer AND basketball with their similarities and differences.  From these facts, perhaps we may have something to talk about and probably keep the subject alive and worth reading.

Most basketball fanatics in the country love the National Basketball Association (NBA).  The NBA season starts with the elimination round where 30 teams (divided to 2 conferences) will compete against each other.  The top 8 teams from each conference will advance to the playoffs.  These 16 teams are the elite teams for the year.  Those not included in the top 16 are eliminated and will take an early summer vacation.  After the smoke is cleared and an NBA champion is declared, the losing teams will examine themselves in the off-season on what went wrong and will try to recover from this debacle and prepare themselves for next season.  The advantage of being eliminated early on is they get to pick early in the rookie draft.

Now we go to soccer.

It is no secret that soccer is the most popular sport worldwide.  Yes, it is more popular than basketball!  And because of that fact, countries from all over the globe have their own domestic leagues that feature varying levels of skill and competition.  Let’s take Europe for example.  Unlike in the NBA where a champion is declared every year and where the teams remain pretty constant from season to season, the professional soccer leagues in Europe have their own particular benchmarks for success and failure.

Now let’s focus on the English Premiership as our main example.  The Premiership is the top level of English professional soccer and consists of 20 teams, each playing a yearly 38-game league schedule made up of two matches against each of the other 19 teams, one home and one away.  In the NBA, standings are determined simply by the wins and losses.  Soccer standings are determined by points accrued.  A team gains three points for a win, one point for a tie (or draw), and gets zero points for a loss. The team that has accrued the most points after the full schedule of 38 games is declared the league champion for that season.  Typically, there is no Super Bowl-type of event to decide the season champion for European leagues.

The Premiership, however, is not the only professional soccer league in England. In fact, there are several divisions of pro soccer aligned in a hierarchy after the Premiership: the League Championship holds the second tier of teams, and is followed in order by Division One, Division Two and finally the Nationwide Conference, which represents the lowest level of professional soccer competition in England.

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4 June 2006