Football is the number one spectator sport in the UK and London has more than its share of teams. There are four professional leagues in England, the Premiership, the Championship, League One and League Two.
The Premiership is the highest and League Two the lowest and each season the top three or four teams in each division will move up and the lowest three or four teams will move down a division. The Premiership has twenty teams in it and currently six are London clubs. Arsenal and Tottenham from north London, West Ham from the east, Chelsea and Fulham from west London.
Add to these Charlton, Crystal Palace and Queens Park Rangers in the Championship, Millwall, Brentford and Leyton Orient in League One and Barnet in League Two. That’s twelve teams in one city and in theory they could all play in the same league.
People are fiercely loyal to their teams and areas, and some rivalries are venonmous, Arsenal and Tottenham fans hate each other even though their stadiums are only about three miles apart. Chelsea, Fulham and QPR are all within a 2 mile radius in west London so the competition for fans is huge and once you are a fan there’s no supporting a rival if they’re doing well just because they’re a London club.
Ticket prices for Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham are some of the highest in the country but the payback is that some of the top foreign players who come to play in England only want to play for a team in London because the cosmopolitan nature of the city helps them to settle and feel at home. Newcastle might pay big salaries but some players just don’t want to live there.
Getting a ticket for the best supported teams can be difficult. Arsenal, Tottenham and Chelsea sell out almost every game, Arsenal have just moved into a new 60,000 seat stadium and still have a waiting list of over 30,000 for season tickets. Unless you want to pay over the odds for a ticket trying one of the smaller or lower division teams is probably a good way of catching a game.
The season for all four leagues runs from August until May and if you want to see where all those people who remain determindly silent on the Tube let off some steam, go to a football match.
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