Structure
The first tier of Italian football is Serie A, which is governed by the Lega Nazionale Professionisti Serie A and is made up of 20 teams. Next is the 22-team Serie B, which is organised by the Lega Nazionale Professionisti Serie B. Both of these leagues cover the whole of Italy.
In the third and fourth tier, there are parallel divisions; the Prima Divisione and the Seconda Divisione (both run by Lega Italiana Calcio Professionistico) each have two divisions, which are generally split on the basis of location. The Prima Divisione divisions have 17-16 clubs and the Seconda Divisione leagues have 18 clubs each.
At the fifth tier is Serie D, a league of nine parallel divisions (in which the clubs are divided by geographical location) that is organised by the Dipartimento Interregionale of the Lega Nazionale Dilettanti. Beneath these are five further levels; four of them, Eccellenza, Promozione, Prima Categoria and Seconda Categoria, are organised by regional committees of the Lega Nazionale Dilettanti; and the last one, Terza Categoria, by provincial committees.
All Serie A, Serie B and Lega Pro clubs are professional. Since 2011–12, the fourth tier was reduced from 3 divisions to 2 because of the international economic crisis.
Read more about this topic: Association Football League System In Italy
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“The question is still asked of women: How do you propose to answer the need for child care? That is an obvious attempt to structure conflict in the old terms. The questions are rather: If we as a human community want children, how does the total society propose to provide for them?”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“Just as a new scientific discovery manifests something that was already latent in the order of nature, and at the same time is logically related to the total structure of the existing science, so the new poem manifests something that was already latent in the order of words.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)