In English football, your place in the Premier League is never guaranteed. Finish near the bottom and you can go down. Finish near the top of the league below and you can take somebody else's place.

If you're used to American professional sports, promotion and relegation might be the biggest difference you'll encounter when you start following the Premier League.

There is no closed group of franchises.

Every season, clubs are fighting to move up — and fighting to avoid going down.

And immediately below the Premier League sits a competition you may already be more familiar with than you realize.

The EFL Championship, usually just called the Championship, is the second level of English football.

The Premier League is level one.

The Championship is level two.

Below that are League One and League Two, followed by further levels of the English football pyramid.

Unlike American major leagues and their minor-league systems, these aren't developmental teams belonging to Premier League clubs.

They're independent football clubs competing to move up the pyramid.

And the prize at the top of the Championship is enormous:

A place in the Premier League.

If you've watched Welcome to Wrexham, you'll recognize one of the clubs currently competing in the Championship: Wrexham.

The Welsh club's rise has introduced millions of American viewers to a part of the English football pyramid they might otherwise never have followed.

And Wrexham's journey helps demonstrate exactly what makes the system so different.

A club isn't permanently assigned to one league.

Perform well enough and you can climb.

Perform badly enough and you can fall.

That's the basic idea behind promotion and relegation.

This part is remarkably simple.

There are 20 clubs in the Premier League.

At the end of the season, the teams finishing:

18th
19th
20th

are relegated.

The following season, those clubs play in the Championship.

There is no playoff to save them.

There is no draft pick waiting as compensation for finishing last.

You're down.

And because Premier League status carries enormous sporting and financial value, the battle to avoid those three positions can become one of the biggest stories of the season.

Three Championship clubs are promoted to the Premier League.

But this is where things get particularly interesting.

The teams finishing first and second in the Championship earn automatic promotion.

They're going up.

The third promotion place is decided through the Championship playoffs.

Teams finishing third through sixth enter a four-team playoff.

The winners eventually meet at Wembley Stadium in the Championship Play-Off Final.

Win that game and you're promoted to the Premier League.

Lose and you're back in the Championship the following season.

It can be one of the most dramatic games on the English football calendar.

The same basic principle continues further down English football.

Think of it as a ladder:

That's one of the reasons stories like Wrexham's capture so much attention.

You're not watching a team trying to become good enough to be invited into a closed major league.

There's already a pathway.

Keep winning and you keep climbing.

This is where understanding relegation changes how you watch the Premier League.

Imagine it's April.

One team is sitting 17th.

Another is 18th.

Neither has any chance of winning the Premier League.

They aren't competing for a playoff position.

But if they're playing each other?

It could be one of the biggest games of either club's season.

Survival can depend on it.

That's why you'll hear phrases such as:

"Relegation battle."

"Six-pointer."

"Survival."

"The drop."

They're talking about the fight to remain in the Premier League.

And suddenly a game between 17th and 18th can matter enormously.

You'll hear this one constantly during a relegation battle.

A normal Premier League win is still worth three points.

Nobody actually receives six.

The phrase "six-pointer" is used when two teams competing directly against each other meet.

If you win, you've gained three points while preventing your rival from gaining three.

The swing between the two clubs can therefore feel like six.

You'll hear the same expression used in title races and battles for European qualification too.

This is one of the things we want new Premier League followers to understand early.

Don't only watch the top.

The title race is obviously important.

So is qualification for Europe.

But once you understand promotion and relegation, the bottom of the Premier League table becomes an entirely different competition.

For some clubs, finishing 17th can mean everything.

And somewhere in the Championship, another club is having the season of its life trying to replace them.

That's English football.

Your team played in the Premier League on Saturday — so why are they playing again on Wednesday in a completely different competition?

Next, we'll explain the Champions League, FA Cup, League Cup and European competitions — what they are, how they fit alongside the Premier League and why they matter.