This will be totally irrelevant to those of you who follow Premiership football (which the broadsheet newspapers seem to assume is just about everyone) but I’m still somewhat bewildered by the latest rebranding of the English professional league hierarchy.
[To recap for younger, non-British or football-indifferent readers... from 1958 to 1992 we had a simple system, with four numbered divisions of full-time professional clubs. In 1992, the First Division became the (separately governed) Premiership and Divisions 2, 3 and 4 were renumbered 1, 2 and 3. This either restored the popularity of English football or created a system of unchecked capitalist greed, depending on your point of view. At the end of last season, Division 1 (previously Division 2) was renamed The Championship, while Divisions 2 and 3 (previously Divisions 3 and 4... are you keeping up?) are now League One and League Two. I've ranted about this before, by the way.]
Anyway… I think it’s stupid. The team who, at the end of the season, are at the top of the Premiership (or Division 1 before 1992) have always been said to have “won the Championship”. That’s what the league is… it’s the championship of English football. To suggest that the team ranked 21st in the country can also have won *the* championship is ludicrous; indeed, they’re champions of their division, but that’s all. And League One and League Two? Of what? Of the teams ranked 45th to 92nd in the country? I mean… HUH?!
As far as I recall, I quickly (despite misgivings) got used to the 1992 rebranding. But the latest changes have reminded me that whenever I think about my team’s fortunes in the (usually) Third Division, my brain is subconsciously inserting the parenthetical “which is really the Fourth Division”. I can’t get used to League Two, because that little voice in my brain is saying “Hang on… *is* it League Two? Or League Three? Or is that what it was before? Oh, no… that was Division Three… so is it now Division Two, then?”
Thankfully, though, sanity arrives in the form of padraig’s blog, particularly a Nottingham Forest article he wrote. I need only remember that my team are somewhere within the English Vaguely Pyramidal Relational Table of Excellence and Confused Branding.