Football is a very popular sport in Britain.  Many people, especially men, support a particular team and may go to watch the games that their team plays.  Professional football is controlled by two organizations, the Football League and the Football Association (the FA).  In England and Wales, there are 93 teams in the League, organized into four divisions:

In Scotland, there are 38 teams in the League, organized into three divisions:

Teams play regularly against the other teams in their league or division according to a fixed programme.  At the end of the season the team in the Premier League (or the Premier Division in Scotland) with the most points is the League Champion.  This competition is called the League Championship.

The other important competition is the FA Cup, often just called the cup.  This is open to all amateur football teams that belong to the FA as well as the 93 professional teams.  The teams play against each other in a knockout competition.  The two teams left in the competition play in the FA Cup Final at Wembley Stadium in London.  This is a very important national sporting occasion, watched by millions of people on television.

Teams names usually include the name of the town or city where the team is based, e.g. Leeds United, Sheffield Wednesday, Wolverhampton Wanderers (Wolves), Dundee United, etc.

English football teams may have lost ground to the more cultured continents in recent years, but it is still the most passionately supported sport in the land, and if you have the slightest interest in the game, then catching a league or FA Cup fixture is a must.  The season runs from mid-August to early May, when the FA Cup Final at Wembley (for which tickets are almost impossible to obtain) rounds things off. Currently, the Premier League is dominated by Manchester United who are challenged most regularly by other northern clubs -- Liverpool, Blackburn, Leeds and Newcastle.  In the Midlands, Birmingham’s Aston Villa are the strongest club, while in London the contest is between Arsenal and Chelsea.  Wales’s big three teams are Cardiff City, Swansea City and Wrexham, which all play in the second division; the rest of the Welsh clubs play in the feeble Konica League of Wales.  Scotland has three divisions, each with fewer teams than the equivalent south of the border, and of considerably lower standard.  Glasgow Rangers has dominated the tip flight in recent years, and is the only Scottish club to currently have the clout or the cash to make big-name signings -- they recently brought the trouble-prone Paul Gasgoine, arguably  the most talented English player of his generation, back from an ill-starred spell with Italy’s Lazio.

The team with the biggest following is Manchester United, whose matches are virtually always a sell-out, regardless of how the team is playing.  Of the other glamorous English clubs, Liverpool and Newcastle United also command so ardent a following that tickets for their matches are often like gold dust.  It’s easy enough to get tickets, if booked in advance, for most other Premier League games, unless two local sides are playing each other.  In Scotland, only the “Old Firm” clash between Rangers and Celtic (representing the Protestant and Irish Catholic communities of Glasgow respectively) is a certain full house.

Most fixtures kick off at 3 p.m. on Saturday (highlights of the day’s best games are shown on BBC1’s Match of the Day, on Saturday night), though there are generally a few mid-week games (usually 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday), and one each on Sunday (kick-off between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.) and Monday (kick-off at 8 p.m.) both broadcast live on Sky TV.  Tickets cost from about £15 for Premier games, falling to less than £10 in the lower divisions.

Since the introduction of all-seater Premiership stadiums in 1994, top-flight games have lost their reputation for tribal violence, and there’s been a striking increase in the numbers of women and children attending.  Nonetheless, it’s an intense business, with a lot of foul language, and being stuck in the middle of a few thousand West Ham supporters as their team goes 3-0 down is not one of life’s more uplifting experiences.