Ninety minutes and five seconds on the clock.
Sunderland AFC, eight years absent from the Premier League, needed one more goal. Nineteen-year-old local product Tom Watson provided it, and in the moments that followed, the fate of two clubs, two fanbases, and two cities shifted entirely.
The 2024-25 Championship play-off final, regularly described as the richest single match in world football, delivered another chapter in the long story of what promotion and relegation mean to the people involved.
No other structural feature of the sport produces that kind of intensity. No other mechanism keeps so many clubs, supporters, and players so genuinely invested right to the final moment of a season.
This guide explains how the system works, why it matters, and what the future might hold for it.
Here’s what we will cover:
- What the football pyramid actually is
- The thrill of promotion
- The agony of relegation
- How different countries approach the system
- The financial and emotional stakes involved
- Whether the pyramid can survive the pressures it currently faces
What Is the Football Pyramid?
The football pyramid is the hierarchical structure of leagues that organises the sport from its highest level down to its most local. At the summit sits the elite division — the Premier League in England, the Scottish Premiership in Scotland, the Bundesliga in Germany, and their equivalents elsewhere. Beneath that sit multiple further tiers, each connected to the ones above and below through the mechanism of promotion and relegation.
The principle is straightforward. At the end of each season, the best-performing teams in a lower division move up, while the worst-performing teams in a higher division move down. In theory, a club starting at the very bottom of the structure could work their way to the very top, given sufficient time, talent, and determination.
In England, the scale of the pyramid is significant. The National League System spans more than twenty levels, encompassing hundreds of leagues and thousands of clubs. The same basic principle applies across most footballing nations, though the number of tiers and specific rules around promotion and relegation vary.
The pyramid's underlying idea is essentially egalitarian. No club is guaranteed its position. Every placement must be earned through performance on the pitch.
The Thrill of Promotion: What It Means to Go Up
For many clubs and their supporters, promotion represents the most significant moment a season can produce. It is confirmation that the effort invested across months of football has translated into something tangible and lasting.
Promotion brings bigger opponents, larger stadiums, and considerably higher financial rewards. Moving into the top division in England, in particular, opens access to broadcasting revenues, commercial opportunities, and prize money on a scale that lower divisions cannot approach. The Championship play-off final, which settles the identity of the third club promoted to the Premier League each season, regularly attracts a prize described as exceeding £100 million when broadcasting and sponsorship revenues are factored in.
The emotional dimension is at least as significant as the financial one. Supporters who have followed their club through years of struggle describe promotion days among the most meaningful experiences of their lives. The story of Leicester City's rise from near-relegation to Premier League title winners, or Sunderland's long-awaited return to the top flight, carries a weight that results in a closed league system simply cannot generate.
These are narratives of persistence, community, and identity, and the pyramid makes them possible.
The Agony of Relegation: What It Means to Go Down
Every promotion has a corresponding relegation somewhere in the system, and the experience of dropping a division can be as devastating as going up is uplifting.
The financial consequences of relegation from the top flight are particularly severe. Clubs that have invested in wages and transfer fees commensurate with Premier League income suddenly face dramatically reduced revenues. Star players seek moves, contracts become difficult to sustain, and the gap between the squad that was competing at the highest level and the one now required for a lower division can expose significant structural weaknesses.
Some clubs manage the transition well and return quickly. Newcastle United's brief spell in the Championship before bouncing back is one example. Others find that relegation triggers a longer decline, slipping further down the pyramid with each subsequent season and sometimes disappearing from professional football entirely.
Yet relegation also produces some of football's most compelling stories. The sight of players and supporters sharing genuine grief at the final whistle of a season-ending defeat carries an emotional authenticity that sport rarely generates. And the determination to rebuild, recover, and rise again is itself a storyline that supporters invest in deeply. The pyramid allows for both the fall and the return.
How Different Countries Approach the System
Promotion and relegation is the standard model across most of Europe, South America, and significant portions of Asia and Africa, but it is not universal.
Major League Soccer in the United States operates as a closed league. New franchises are admitted through expansion fees rather than promotion from lower divisions, and no existing team faces the prospect of relegation. The system prioritises financial stability and predictability over sporting meritocracy.
The debate between open and closed league structures has intensified as American investment in European football has grown. Proponents of the closed model argue it protects clubs from the financial devastation that relegation can cause and makes long-term planning more viable. Critics argue that removing the threat of relegation fundamentally changes what a season means, eliminating the urgency that keeps even mid-table clubs fully engaged until the final weeks.
Germany adds an additional layer of drama to the process through its relegation play-off, in which the third-worst team in the Bundesliga faces the third-best team from the second tier over two legs. In Argentina and Mexico, relegation can be determined by a multi-year points average rather than a single season's performance, which changes the strategic calculations clubs must make over time.
Despite these variations, the principle that league position should be earned through sporting performance rather than purchased through franchise fees remains deeply embedded in football culture almost everywhere the game is played at a serious level.
Why It Matters: Money, Pride, and the Stakes for Everyone Involved
The financial implications of promotion and relegation are significant enough to shape club strategy across every level of the pyramid. Broadcasting revenues in the Premier League dwarf those available in the Championship, which in turn exceed those of League One, and so on down the structure. A single promotion can transform what a club is able to invest in players, infrastructure, and staff. A single relegation can require immediate and painful cuts.
For players, the stakes are personal as well as professional. Promotion can mean better wages, greater exposure, and the chance to compete against higher-quality opponents. Relegation can mean wage reductions, contract terminations, and the need to reassess career plans. Managers face similar pressures: achieving promotion can define a career, while failing to prevent relegation often ends a tenure.
For supporters, the financial dimension is largely secondary to the emotional one. What promotion and relegation create is genuine consequence. Every point accumulated or dropped matters. Every goal scored or conceded in the final weeks of a season can determine where a club spends the next twelve months. That sense of real stakes, felt throughout a fanbase, generates an investment in the game that no closed league system has yet managed to replicate.
The Future of the Pyramid: Pressures and Prospects
The pyramid faces genuine challenges that are unlikely to diminish in the coming years.
The 2021 European Super League proposals brought the tension between commercial interests and sporting tradition into sharp focus. The plan, which would have created a closed competition for a group of elite clubs permanently insulated from relegation, was rejected overwhelmingly by supporters across Europe. The backlash demonstrated how deeply the principles of the pyramid are embedded in football culture, and the proposals were withdrawn relatively quickly. Similar ideas have resurfaced in various forms since, however, and the underlying financial pressures that generated them have not gone away.
The gap between the highest level of the pyramid and the levels below it continues to widen. Broadcasting revenues have grown fastest for the most popular leagues, creating an increasingly significant financial gulf between a club competing in the Premier League and one competing in the Championship, let alone further down the structure.
Parachute payments, which provide recently relegated clubs with a portion of their previous broadcasting income for a transitional period, are intended to soften this impact but have themselves become a source of controversy, with critics arguing they give relegated clubs an unfair financial advantage over their new division rivals.
Whether fully closed leagues could take hold in European football remains an open question. Fan opposition has historically been a powerful constraint, and the culture of promotion and relegation is sufficiently entrenched that dismantling it would require considerable political will alongside financial incentive. The pyramid's core principles — that position is earned rather than assigned and that every season carries genuine risk for every club — reflect something fundamental about how football understands itself.
Those principles are unlikely to vanish without considerable resistance.
Football's Ever-Moving Ladder
The pyramid is more than a system for deciding which division clubs compete in. It is the structure through which football tells its stories.
The team that climbs from part-time amateur football to the professional game over a decade. The historic club that falls through the divisions and must rebuild from the bottom. The newly promoted side that defies expectation and survives the first season against much wealthier opponents.
Every club, regardless of size or ambition, exists within the same connected structure. The result of a match between two part-time clubs at the base of the pyramid can, through a sequence of promotions over many years, eventually determine who competes at the top of it.
That connection between levels, that sense of a single continuous ladder stretching from the local park to the international stage, is what makes the pyramid something more than an administrative convenience.
Next time you watch a team celebrate avoiding relegation with a last-minute winner, or a group of supporters in tears at a promotion that has taken years to arrive, consider what the pyramid made possible. It created those moments. It gives them their meaning. And as long as it survives, it will keep producing more of them.