League System
Around 450 registered football clubs play in the Argentine Football Association (AFA) league system, which is organized into a pyramid of eight leagues, divided at the third tier between the Greater Buenos Aires conurbation and the rest of the country (Interior). Below the fifth level there are a further 250 regional leagues which are affiliated with AFA and compete for the right to enter the league system at the lowest tier.
The Primera División is the highest level of club football in Argentina. It was founded in 1891 as an amateur competition, and founded again in 1931 as a professional league by 18 teams which were dissatisfied with the amateur system they were participating on until 1930. This group of 18 founding members of the present league included nearly all of the most prominent clubs of those times, unified by the idea that full and compulsory amateurism was no longer sustainable (many of those teams are still today among the most popular clubs in Argentina). For many years since the foundation of the professional Primera División, the only winners were the so-called "big five" (Boca Juniors, Independiente, Racing, River Plate and San Lorenzo de Almagro). This dominance was finally broken in 1967 by Estudiantes de La Plata; since then, ten other teams have won the championship, resulting in a total of 16 teams having been champions of Argentina as of 2012. River Plate have the most championships with 33. The only teams outside the Greater Buenos Aires conurbation to have won the championship are Rosario Central and Newell's Old Boys from Rosario, and Estudiantes de La Plata from La Plata.
The Primera División uses the Apertura and Clausura format, which is the standard in Latin American football, consisting of two championships or tournaments per season (seasons are one-year long): Apertura is the name of the championship or tournament that opens the season, Clausura is the championship or tournament that closes it, and relegations and promotions from the lower tiers are defined at (or just after) the ending of each Clausura. In the particular case of Argentina, the Apertura is contested in the second half of the calendar year, and the Clausura is played in the first half of the following year (in order to synchronize the seasons with those of the European football).
The Argentine Primera División league is made up of twenty teams, and each Apertura or Clausura championship is organized in a single round robin schedule, resulting in a total of nineteen rounds per championship and ten matches per round. If two given teams face each other in the Nth round of the Apertura championship (where N is a number between 1 and 19), the same given teams will face each other in the Nth round of the Clausura championship, but swapping the conditions of home and away teams.
At the end of each Clausura, around the middle of each year, the most successful teams of the whole season qualify to play in the Copa Sudamericana, and the least successful teams of the last three seasons (i.e., a period of three years instead of one) are either relegated to the second tier, or compelled to play two additional end-season matches with a team of the second tier (Primera B Nacional league) in an away and home format, wherein the winner after these two matches gains the right to play the next season in the Primera División, and the loser is condemned to the second tier. This system of two end-season additional matches is named Promoción, Spanish for Promotion or Graduation. Each year, two Primera División teams are relegated immediately, and two others are forced to play Promoción; therefore, depending on the Promoción results of the latter two teams, the number of relegated teams per year varies between two (if both Primera División teams win their respective Promoción) and four (if both Primera B Nacional teams win, as happened at the ending of the 2006-2007 season).
The qualification for the Copa Libertadores follows an irregular criterion: the most successful teams are not defined on a season basis (mid-year to mid-year), but on a calendar year basis instead, taking into account the Clausura championship of the previous season and the Apertura championship of the current one.
Below the Primera B Nacional the league system is regionalized, with a further three divisions for the Greater Buenos Aires, and three tournaments covering the so-called Interior (the rest of the country). Even below these eight leagues, the Argentine football outside the Buenos Aires metropolitan area is further regionalized into nearly 250 regional leagues, consisting of teams which participate in championships and tournaments not directly organized by the Argentine Football Association in order to obtain the right to enter the Torneo Argentino C (a.k.a. Torneo del Interior, at the 5th tier of the league system).
Read more about this topic: Seasons In Argentine Football, Club Football
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