United Kingdom
There are many semi-professional football teams at non-League level. The bottom division of The Football League (the fourth tier of the English football league system) has traditionally been the cut-off between professional ("full-time") and semi-professional ("part-time") in English football. However, many teams in the top non-League competition, the Conference National have become "full-time" in an effort to achieve League status.
Women's football in England is semi-professional at the top levels, as finances depend both on promotion and relegation of parent male teams as of the female teams themselves. Full professionalism for women is thus still in the planning stages; top female players often depend on other sources of income (such as coaching and physical training), and many attend university or college while playing.
In Scottish football, semi-professional teams compete at all levels below the Scottish Premier League, with most teams below the Scottish First Division being semi-professional.
Historically, English rugby league and rugby union have had one full-time professional division, with semi-professional divisions at the next level down. The second tier of union, the RFU Championship, became fully professional beginning with the 2009–10 season.
Read more about this topic: Semi-professional
Famous quotes containing the words united and/or kingdom:
“The white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
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—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)