Promotion and Relegation in European Soccer

Barclay's Premier League in professional soccer, which is based in England and Wales, begins its regular season this Friday.  I'm looking forward to watching some of the matches that get broadcast over here.  The NBC Sports Channel (channel 33 here in Gainesville on Cox) has been showing matches from last year to prepare the viewers for what is coming.  Yesterday there was an interesting match between Arsenal (of  London) and Norwich City.  Arsenal is one of those "football clubs" that, along with teams like Manchester City (last year's champion), Manchester United, Chelsea, and Liverpool, have dominated the Premier League over the past several years.  Norwich City, which has its own rich history and tradition in English soccer, found itself finishing the past season in one of the worst three positions in the standings....and this means that, for this 2014-15 season, it has been relegated to the next lower league, called the Football League Championship (or "Championship" for short).  If Norwich City recovers, though, it can regain promotion into the Premier League.  I find this promotion/relegation process intriguing and see that it is used in other European soccer leagues as well.  This year, the Premier League will have the three highest-finishing teams from the Football League Championship last year as part of its twenty-team schedule.  But I have a feeling that, unless any of them happen to be playing the "bigshots", I won't be seeing any of their games on NBC Sports.  By the way, if for some unexpected reason, Norwich City endures a disastrous season this year in the Championship, then it will be relegated to the next lower league, called League 1.  And so on...

The leagues in English soccer go like this, in terms of promotion and relegation, in terms of ranking for prestige:

1 Barclay's Premier League
2 Football League Championship
3 League 1
4 League 2
5 Conference Premier
6 Conference North and Conference South

The levels keep going down to level 10, so you can get a sense as to the degree of depth present in English professional soccer!  By contrast, there is no system of relegation for Major League Soccer here in North America.  If you want something here that is comparable to what is going on overseas, you need to go to a different sport and look at baseball's minor league system.  But even that fails the comparison to a degree, since, in baseball, (1) the minor league clubs on the different levels are mainly run by the major league teams, (2) there are much fewer levels in the minors, (3) it's the players, not the teams, which are promoted or relegated in minor league baseball, and (4) the grassroots local support for minor league baseball teams here is much less than the deep support for soccer clubs within local communities in England and the rest of Europe...