Beyond your own team, football is a huge, connected world: thousands of clubs, dozens of countries, and competitions stacked on top of one another. Here's the shape of it.
Clubs and countries
Week to week you play for a club — the team you train and travel with. The very best players are also picked for their country's national team for international matches. A player can change clubs many times in a career, but they only ever represent one country.
Leagues and cups are different
A league is the long test. Every team plays every other team over a season, and points add up: three for a win, one for a draw, none for a loss. Whoever has the most points at the end is champion — there's nowhere to hide over a whole year.
A cup is the short test. It's a knockout — win and you go through, lose and you're out. That's why cups produce shocks: a smaller team only has to be better for ninety minutes, not a whole season.
Going up and going down
Leagues are stacked in divisions, one above another. Finish near the top and you can be promoted to a higher division; finish at the bottom and you can be relegated to a lower one. It means even the games at the bottom of the table matter enormously.
The big competitions
At the top, football is really three kinds of prize:
- Domestic leagues — your country's main championship, won over a season.
- Continental club cups — the best clubs of a whole continent meeting each other.
- The World Cup — national teams, once every four years, the biggest prize of all.