BP Daily Podcast

To clear something up here re: European football and parallel competitions...

Let's take English football as an example. The Premier League sees 20 teams play each other team twice, once at home and once on the road, and the winner is the the team with the most points (three for a win, one for a tie) at the end of the season. That's straightforward, I think.

The main domestic cup competition - the FA Cup in English football - runs alongside all the leagues and features pretty much every club in the country. The top teams enter in January, by which point the number of teams remaining stands at 64.

The Champions League is different, in that it's a pan-European tournament. Teams win the right to play in it based on their final domestic league position in the previous season. The number of teams that a country can enter, and whether they have to play off before reaching the competition, varies. More successful countries, such as England and Spain, send four teams. Minor eastern European nations might only send their league winners, and even then they might have to play a few qualification rounds before reaching the start of the competition-proper. The top teams from the main European leagues go straight there. Qualifying for this tournament is financially valuable to clubs, and it's also the most prestigious trophy to win because, obviously, you have to beat the best teams on the continent.