Playoffs - Association Football

Association Football

As a rule, international association football has only had championship playoffs when a league is divided into several equal divisions/conferences/groups (Major League Soccer, Primera División de México) and/or when the season is split into two periods (as in many leagues in Latin America). In leagues with a single table done only once a year, as in most of Europe, playoff systems are not used to determine champions, although in some countries such systems are used to determine teams to be promoted to higher leagues (e.g., England) or qualifiers for European club competitions (such as Greece and the Netherlands).

A test match is a match played at the end of a season between a team that has done badly in a higher league and one that has done well in a lower league of the same football league system. The winner of the test match plays in the higher league the following year, and the loser in the lower league.

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