Romanian football league system

The Romanian football league system refers to the system in Romanian club football that consists of several football leagues bound together hierarchically by promotion and relegation.

Structure before the 2013-14 season

Liga I

The Liga I is the highest level in the Romanian football league system and is operated by the Romanian Professional Football League. 14 professional teams compete for the title of Romanian Football Champion in a round-robin home and away, with 26 season matches in the regular season. After the regular season will end, the top 6 teams will challenge the League Champion title, as well as the remaining European Cup spots, while the last 8 teams will battle to avoid the three relegation spots. Two directly and the 12th placed team will play a play-off against the 2nd place Play-Off winner from the Liga II. The teams that will advance to the Play-Off or Play-Out will take half of the points won, in the regular season. The halved points will be rounded in addition (e.g. if Astra will finish the regular season with 61 points it will start the Play-Off with 31 points).

League system

A league system is a hierarchy of leagues in a sport, usually with a system of promotion and relegation between consecutive levels of the hierarchy. They are often called pyramids due to their tendency to split into an increasing number of regional divisions the further down the pyramid one descends. League systems are used in a number of sports, especially association football, rugby league and rugby union.

In North America, a similar league system exists, but without promotion or relegation. Most professional sports are divided into major and minor leagues. While baseball and association football (known as soccer in North America) have well-defined pyramid shapes to their minor league hierarchies, ice hockey's professional minor league system is linear, with one league at most of the four levels of the game. Basketball follows a roughly inverted-T-shaped three-level system.

Gridiron football does not operate on a league system, in part because of that sport's reliance on amateur college football for development of future players (other North American sports also recruit players from colleges and universities, but it is far more pervasive in professional football) and in part because the expense and injury risk of the game makes maintaining a minor football league impractical. The indoor American football system can be seen as an informal league system, but there are widespread differences between the indoor and outdoor forms of the game.

The Football League

The Football League is a league competition featuring professional association football clubs from England and Wales. Founded in 1888, it is the oldest such competition in world football. It was the top-level football league in England from its foundation in the 19th century until 1992, when the top 22 clubs split away to form the Premier League. The Football League has been associated with a title sponsor since 1983. As this sponsor has changed over the years the league too has been known by various names.

Since 1995 it has had 72 clubs evenly divided into three divisions, which are known as the Championship, League One, and League Two, with 24 clubs in each division. Promotion and relegation between these divisions is a central feature of the League and is further extended to allow the top Championship clubs to exchange places with the lowest-placed clubs in the Premier League, and the bottom clubs of League Two to switch with the top clubs of the National League, thus integrating the League into the English football league system. Although primarily a competition for English clubs, clubs from Wales, Newport County, Cardiff City and Swansea City, also take part, while in the past Wrexham, Merthyr Town and Aberdare Athletic have been members.

Sergiu Hanca

Sergiu Hanca (born 4 April 1992) is a Romanian professional footballer who plays for Dinamo Bucureşti as a midfielder.

External links

FIFA

The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA /ˈfiːfə/; English:International Federation of Association Football) is the governing body of association football, futsal and beach football. FIFA is responsible for the organisation of football's major international tournaments, notably the World Cup which commenced in 1930 and the Women's World Cup which commenced in 1991.

FIFA was founded in 1904 to oversee international competition among the national associations of Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. Headquartered in Zürich, its membership now comprises 209 national associations. Member countries must each also be members of one of the six regional confederations into which the world is divided: Africa, Asia, Europe, North & Central America and the Caribbean, Oceania and South America.

Although FIFA does not control the rules of football (that being the responsibility of the International Football Association Board), it is responsible for both the organization of a number of tournaments and their promotion, which generate revenue from sponsorship. In 2013 FIFA had revenues of over 1.3 billion U.S. dollars, for a net profit of 72 million, and had cash reserves of over 1.4 billion U.S. dollars.