The Spanish football league system refers to the system in Spanish club football that consists of several football leagues bound together hierarchically by promotion and relegation. Unlike in most other European nations, Spanish football allows reserve teams to compete in the main football league system; however reserve teams are not allowed to compete in the same tier as their senior team, and no reserve team has thus competed in the top flight, Primera División.
Men
Primera División/liga bbva
The Primera Division is the highest level in the Spanish football league system and is operated by the LFP.
Segunda División
The Segunda Division is the second highest level in the Spanish football league system and is also operated by the LFP.
Segunda División B
The Segunda Division B is the third highest level in the Spanish football league system and is operated by the Royal Spanish Football Federation.
Tercera División
The Tercera Division is the fourth highest level in the Spanish football league system and is operated by the Royal Spanish Football Federation and 17 regional federations.
The Primera División (First Division) of the Liga de Fútbol Profesional (LFP), commonly known in English as La Liga (/læ ˈliːɡə/, Spanish: [la ˈliɣa], The League), is the top professional association football division of the Spanish football league system. It is officially named Liga BBVA (BBVA League) for sponsorship reasons. It is contested by 20 teams, with the three lowest placed teams relegated to the Segunda División and replaced by the top two teams in that division plus the winner of a play-off.
A total of 60 teams have competed in La Liga since its inception. Nine teams have been crowned champions, with Real Madrid winning the title a record 32 times and Barcelona 23 times. Real Madrid dominated the championship from the 1950s through the 1980s. Since the 1990s, however, Real Madrid and Barcelona have both dominated, although La Liga has seen other champions, including Atlético Madrid, Valencia, and Deportivo de La Coruña.
A league system is a hierarchy of leagues in a sport, usually with a system of promotion and relegation between consecutive levels of the hierarchy. They are often called pyramids due to their tendency to split into an increasing number of regional divisions the further down the pyramid one descends. League systems are used in a number of sports, especially association football, rugby league and rugby union.
In North America, a similar league system exists, but without promotion or relegation. Most professional sports are divided into major and minor leagues. While baseball and association football (known as soccer in North America) have well-defined pyramid shapes to their minor league hierarchies, ice hockey's professional minor league system is linear, with one league at most of the four levels of the game. Basketball follows a roughly inverted-T-shaped three-level system.
Gridiron football does not operate on a league system, in part because of that sport's reliance on amateur college football for development of future players (other North American sports also recruit players from colleges and universities, but it is far more pervasive in professional football) and in part because the expense and injury risk of the game makes maintaining a minor football league impractical. The indoor American football system can be seen as an informal league system, but there are widespread differences between the indoor and outdoor forms of the game.