There is a great bit of silliness that could happen soon surrounding English soccer, and we want to share this silliness with you. You seem like you enjoy silliness. You just clicked onto a blog post with “silliness” in the headline.
To explain why this silliness is silly, we need to describe for you how English and European soccer work. This will be complicated if you’re new to it, but we believe the effort will be worthwhile, so please, hear us out.
In England, each club soccer team plays in a regional or national league. Burnley, for example, my favorite soccer team, used to play in the English Premier League, the best league in all of England. This year, it’s playing in the EFL Championship, which stands for English Football League Championship. The EFL Championship is the second-best league in all of England. How is the league in which each team plays determined? It sorts itself out over time. The top three teams in the EFL Championship move up after each season to the Premier League. The bottom three teams in the Premier League move down to the EFL Championship. The bottom three teams in the EFL Championship move down to “League One,” the third-best league in all of England. The top three teams in League One move up to the EFL Championship. This is called “promotion” and “relegation,” and the number isn’t three between each league, but that’s the number on both sides of the EFL Championship. At the end of each season, the best teams in each league move up, and the worst teams move down.
Beyond playing in a regional or national league (the leagues become regional once you get to the sixth tier of the pyramid in England, because the pyramid widens and the teams have less money, so it makes sense to have smaller regional leagues than a big bloated national league with teams traveling all over the island), teams sometimes also play in a continental league, one run by UEFA—the agreed-upon governing body of soccer in Europe—and set up so the best teams from each country can play one another. This gets complicated for a few reasons, but one is that it happens simultaneously with the next season’s regular league. If Liverpool, for instance, were to qualify for the UEFA Championship League at the end of this 2022-23 season, they would play in the 2023-24 UEFA Championship League. It’s a lagging indicator of quality, then, but it gets the job done. Especially, as we’ll get to, at the top level, which is the UEFA Championship League.
There is not just, however, the UEFA Championship League. There’s the UEFA Europa League—good, but not as good (this is the European NIT, and it’s the closest thing to the NIT that exists outside college basketball, and we adore it immensely from afar but we don’t pay much attention to it, kind of like a long-distance girlfriend in 1987). There’s also the UEFA Europa Conference League, a relatively new third tier. Put simply: The best team or teams in each European country go to the UEFA Championship League, the next-best team or teams go to the UEFA Europa League, and the next-best team or teams then go to the UEFA Europa Conference League. Not every team plays in a continental league—most do not—but the possibility is there, mostly for teams who are at the top level of their nation’s soccer pyramid. In England, this is teams who play in the Premier League.
So far, then, we have teams playing in a league in their own country and some teams playing in a league across the whole continent in addition to that league in their own country.
There’s more.
We should pause here and note that the European soccer structure is what happens when clubs are more or less independent and free to pursue their own interests. They kind of freelance on the side of their main gig. “There’s a continental league I can play in too? Sure!” “There’s a cup (we’ll get to cups)? Sure!” All the leagues and cups play nicely with one another as far as scheduling is concerned because everyone likes having it this way. It’s also probably easier for their fans to follow because their non-soccer sports are a shred of what football, baseball, hockey, and basketball are here.
Now.
There are cups.
Different countries have different cup setups, but in England there are two big cups. There’s the FA Cup (that stands for Football Association Cup) and the League Cup (that stands for League Cup).
The FA Cup is cool. It involves teams all the way down the ninth tier of the English soccer pyramid, at which there are 320 clubs playing in sixteen different leagues, such as the Hellenic League Premier Division, featuring teams like Brimscombe & Thrupp F.C., which I believe is purely amateur (teams get progressively more semi-professional as you go down the tiers of the pyramid—at the bottom, which in some regions of England is twenty tiers deep, they’re all amateur teams). The FA Cup is a single-elimination tournament involving 732 different soccer teams, and it’s theoretically possible for a ninth-tier team to play the best team in the whole country, which makes it theoretically possible for a ninth-tier team to beat the best team in the whole country. This would be like if college football allowed Division III teams a path to playing Alabama.
The League Cup is less cool. My impression is that it only exists because the EFL, the English Football League, which governs the top four tiers (Premier League, EFL Championship, League One, and League Two), saw the FA Cup and was a bit jealous. The League Cup—currently known as the Carabao Cup for sponsorship reasons, Carabao is both a type of water buffalo and an energy drink—is the same as the FA Cup except instead of involving 732 different teams, it involves just 92, the 92 in the top four tiers.
As you will hopefully guess by now, the Cups are not the ends of their own stories. You can make it into the continental leagues in Europe by succeeding in your own national league, sure, and you can move to a better national league by playing well and a poorer national league by playing poorly. But you can also make it into the continental leagues, from England, by winning the FA Cup or the League Cup. The way it works right now is this:
- The top four Premier League teams in the 2022-23 season qualify for the 2023-24 UEFA Championship League.
- The fifth-placed Premier League team in the 2022-23 season qualifies for the 2023-24 UEFA Europa League.
- The 2022-23 FA Cup champion qualifies for the 2023-24 UEFA Europa League.
- The 2022-23 League Cup champion qualifies for the 2023-24 UEFA Europa Conference League.
- If the FA Cup and/or League Cup champion has already qualified for a continental league by winning the other cup or finishing highly in the Premier League, they’ll be replaced in the UEFA Europa League or the UEFA Europa Conference League by the next-highest-finishing Premier League team.
- There are other complicating scenarios but you don’t need to worry about them.
Ok. So every team plays in their regional or national league, every team in the top nine tiers plays in the FA Cup, every team in the top four tiers plays in the League Cup, and seven teams from England go on to play in the three UEFA continental leagues. Got all that? Thank goodness you’re a good learner. We can finally get to the silliness.
The beauty of the FA Cup and the League Cup is the upward mobility they afford teams. Cinderellas are rewarded, and in a hypothetical world where a fifth-tier team magically becomes, overnight, the best soccer team in England, they’ll get to play at least in the second-best European continental league the next year, even if they can only move up one league at a time within their country. Theoretically, a Cinderella story could span multiple seasons.
This is not what’s happening.
Instead, the League Cup has reached its semifinals, and of the four teams remaining, two are very much in the mix for getting relegated out of the Premier League. The semifinals are two-legged—meaning they’re kind of a “best of two” series, but no need to worry about the specifics—but basically, if either of Southampton or Nottingham Forest has an outrageously good three games from here out in the League Cup, they’ll get to play in next year’s Europa Conference League even if they get relegated. Put another way, they’ll have to play in next year’s Europa Conference League even as they reconfigure their finances and fans panic and they cut and sell players and still try to do well enough in next year’s EFL Championship to get back to the Premier League, and back to the financial stability it provides.
It is very unlikely that this happens. The two-legged nature of the semifinals makes upsets more rare, and the reason Southampton and Nottingham Forest are facing relegation in the first place is that they are pretty bad teams this year as far as the Premier League goes. But. The possibility is there. The possibility is there that England could be represented on the European stage by a team it just kicked out of its best league for being too bad at soccer.
We can dream.
NIT World: Northwestern Took Game 1
In Northwestern’s six-game series against the Big Ten’s vengeful scheduling, the Wildcats won Game 1 last night, downing Wisconsin after a nailbiting final two minutes in which the teams scored three points, combined, on nine shots from the floor. It was everything basketball in Welsh-Ryan Arena was intended to be, except that Northwestern won (I always assume that at schools like Northwestern and Cal, the administration is actively trying to get rid of power conference sports at all times, like in an academic echo of Major League). Five games to go. How many does Northwestern have to win to keep their NIT dream intact? Probably just one, honestly. Kind of anti-climactic now that I spell it out.
Elsewhere…
Virginia Tech knocked off Duke, improving to 2-7 in ACC play and 1-7 in their last eight. Hunter Cattoor hit five threes, MJ Collins hit a jumper from just inside the elbow to take a two-point lead with seconds left, MJ Collins promptly accidentally punched Kyle Filipowski in the throat and managed to not get called for any sort of foul for it, flagrant or otherwise. It was, in other words, every Virginia Tech fan’s dream, and frankly it was kind of mine as well. I just didn’t know that coming in.
The Hokies are alive in the NIT race but could have work to do on either side. Duke, meanwhile, is…alive in the NIT race? They’re 14-6, which should be too good in a power conference, but they’ve only beaten Xavier and Maryland-Eastern Shore, and they’re one elaborate Josh Pastner prank on Saturday away from being .500 in league play. In short? It’s on the table. And if we get a bunch of graphics saying it’s Duke’s first NIT since 1981 and ignoring how Mike Krzyzewski dodged us in 2021, I’m going to have to be physically restrained. Something to keep an eye on. Especially if you’re one of the people in charge of physically restraining me.
No Bracketology update today—our apologies. You aren’t missing anything, we’re just late.
The Worst Sens News
This is actually tragic. Wanted to preface with that.
Bob Jones, a 53-year-old assistant coach for the Ottawa Senators, has been diagnosed with ALS. The team announced it today. Don’t really know what else to say. Prayers to him and his family, and prayers for a cure.
Bringing It Back to Burnley
On a lighter note, Burnley’s latest transfer splurge has brought them to Lyle Foster, a South African striker, and at least one report is saying it would be a “record-breaking” deal if it goes through. I love the idea of Burnley being the biggest spenders in South African soccer history. They hosted a World Cup! That’s a medium soccer country right there!
**
The menu for today:
7:00 PM EST: Ohio State @ Illinois (ESPN)
Ohio State was never really in the NIT mix, but Illinois sure has been, and if we have our way tonight in Champaign (we’re not going to Champaign physically, but we’ll be there in spirit), that will remain the case. Go Bucks, I guess.
9:00 PM EST: Kentucky @ Vanderbilt (SECN)
Similar story here. Kentucky isn’t out of our woods yet. Danger for the Cats.
8:00 PM EST: Oklahoma @ TCU (ESPN+)
9:00 PM EST: Oklahoma State @ Texas (LHN)
The Oklahomas continue to operate in parallel, each playing on the road tonight down I-35. On the Texas side: We never took our victory lap for Shaka Smart’s Marquette passing post-Shaka Smart’s Texas in KenPom, so let’s just say that we were being classy and didn’t mistakenly assume we’d already done it.
7:00 PM EST: Mizzou @ Mississippi (SECN)
7:00 PM EST: Miami @ Florida State (ESPNU)
7:00 PM EST: Notre Dame @ N.C. State (ACCN)
9:00 PM EST: UNC @ Syracuse (ESPN)
9:00 PM EST: Indiana State @ Drake (CBSSN)
9:00 PM EST: Georgia Tech @ Clemson (ACCN)
Other peripheral NIT action, mostly in the ACC, mostly in the ACC because the ACC has a bunch of teams in the NIT mix.
11:00 PM EST: Wyoming @ UNLV (CBSSN)
And if you want a nightcap…hard to beat these two. Well, easy to beat them. But hard to beat a game between the two of them if you’re an NIT fan looking for a nightcap. What might have been.
3:00 PM EST: Newcastle @ Southampton – 1st Leg (ESPN+)
Another thing to remember about Southampton is that I don’t like Newcastle. Man City Lite. That’s what we call them. I do still like Nick Pope, though. The goalie and the alien-hunter.
7:00 PM EST: Bulls @ Pacers (League Pass)
Maybe tonight’s when AK gets that rebuild itch (I’m really out of the loop on the Bulls again I’m sorry everyone).
