Promotion, relegation and the football pyramid — and the systems that do it differently
How clubs move up and down between divisions in England, Germany and Spain, why Argentina relegates on a three-year average, and why Mexico has stopped relegating anyone at all.
In most of the football world a league is not a closed club of franchises. It is one floor of a building, and at the end of every season some clubs take the stairs.
The idea
Divisions are stacked in a pyramid. The clubs that finish at the bottom of one division are relegated to the one below, and the best clubs from below are promoted to take their places. Nobody buys a place at the top; in principle any club can climb there, and any giant can fall.
The consequences shape everything about the sport's economics and drama. The bottom of a table matters as much as the top, a season is rarely "over" in March, and the gap in income between divisions makes relegation the most expensive result in football.
England
The Premier League has 20 clubs. Below it the English Football League has 72 more, in three divisions of 24: the Championship, League One and League Two.
Each season the bottom three Premier League clubs go down and three Championship clubs come up. The top two are promoted automatically. The third place is decided by play-offs, and these changed for 2026–27: they now involve six clubs, from third place to eighth. Fifth plays eighth and sixth plays seventh in single-match eliminators at the higher-placed club's ground; the winners meet third and fourth in two-legged semi-finals; and the final is at Wembley. If you learned the play-offs as "third to sixth", that is now out of date.
Germany
The Bundesliga has 18 clubs. The bottom two go down automatically. The club finishing 16th gets a last chance: a two-legged relegation play-off against the club that finished third in the 2. Bundesliga, with the winner taking the top-flight place. It is a rare fixture in which a first-division side and a second-division side play for the same thing.
France's Ligue 1 and the Netherlands' Eredivisie, also 18 clubs, use the same pattern: two straight down, and the 16th-placed club into a play-off.
Spain
La Liga has 20 clubs and relegates the bottom three. They are replaced by the top two of the second division and the winner of a play-off among the clubs placed third to sixth.
Italy's Serie A also sends three down — and adds a twist at the margin: if two clubs finish level on points for the last safe place, a play-off decides it rather than goal difference.
Argentina: relegation by average
Argentina does not relegate on a single season's table. In 2026 two clubs go down:
- the club with the fewest points in the annual table, which adds the year's two tournaments together; and
- the club with the worst promedio — its points-per-match average over the last three seasons.
The promedio exists to soften the effect of one bad year, and it changes the psychology of a relegation fight completely: a newly promoted club has only its current results in its average and can be in danger after a poor start, while a big club having a terrible season may be protected by two decent ones. It also means the table you see on any given weekend — a zone table in the Apertura or Clausura — does not tell you who is in trouble. The annual table is where to look.
Mexico: no relegation at all
Liga MX used to work on a similar average, the cociente. Promotion and relegation were then suspended, with fines for the clubs at the bottom of that table instead — and from the 2026–27 season the competition's regulation simply states that Liga MX clubs will not be relegated, and second-tier clubs cannot be promoted. The fines have gone too. Liga MX is, for now, a closed league with two tournaments a season. The Apertura and Clausura guide has the detail.
Brazil
The Brasileirão is closer to the European model: 20 clubs, one 38-round season, and the bottom four relegated to Série B. Level on points, Brazil looks at wins before goal difference — a small difference that can reorder a relegation zone.
Why it matters for reading a table
Before you read any league table, ask three questions. How many go down — two, three, four, or none? Is there a play-off place just above the drop? And is relegation decided by this table at all? Every table on this site marks the places that matter with a coloured edge and a written key, and says underneath what it cannot compute.