League System
The first league of professional football in Greece was officially established as the Panhellenic Championship in 1927. The league ran until 1959, when it was replaced by the Alpha Ethniki which ran until 2006 when it was then replaced by Superleague Greece.
Superleague Greece is the top-flight professional football division within Greece. The league contains 16 clubs, with the winners of the league becoming the Champions of Greece. The team with the most national championships is Olympiacos, who have won 39 times - 5 Super League titles, 19 Alpha Ethniki titles and 15 Panhellenic Championships. Two other P.O.K. clubs also dominate the history of Greek football; Panathinaikos with 21 titles and AEK Athens with 11 titles.
At the end of the season the bottom three clubs in Super League are relegated to Beta Ethniki, to be replaced by teams promoted from that division. Below the Beta Ethniki the league structure becomes regionalised, with a North and South Gamma Ethniki, 12 regional Delta Ethniki groups, and numerous Local championships one level lower.
Read more about this topic: Football In Greece
Famous quotes containing the words league and/or system:
“Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward the Light Brigade!”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)