Premiership (Tierrador)

Premiership

Organising body	National Football League (Premiership)
Founded	1964 (1964)
Country	Tierrador
Confederation	UCFA
Number of teams	20 (since 2006)
Level on pyramid	1
Relegation to	NFL Championship
Domestic cup(s)	Tierrador Cup
International cup(s)	UCFA League of Champions UCFA League of Crona
Current champions	Colt .45s (2nd Premiership) (2036)
Most championships	Qapitol (25 Premierships)
Most appearances	Vinny Hernandez(622)
Top goalscorer	Aphío Attelets (522)
TV partners	QBC/CSPN TBS/UQC TV5 List of broadcasters
2036 Premiership

The Football Tierrador Premiership, commonly known simply as Premiership in Tierrador, and officially as Premiership presented by Palmtree Electronics for sponsorship reasons, stylized as Premiership, is the men's top professional football division of the Tierradorian football league system. Administered by Football Tierrador, it is contested by 20 teams, separated into 2 divisions, with the lowest-placed team in each division at the end of each season being relegated to the NFL Championship and replaced by the NFL's finalists. The competition was founded as the FT Premiership in 1945, following the decision from six TCL (which was the top-tier league from 1889 to 1945) clubs to split from their respective TCL divisions. Despite this decision, the Premiership is still tied to the TCL, with three clubs being promoted and relegated to and from both leagues. The Premiership takes advantage of a lucrative television rights sale to QBC and Television Cinco: from 2026 to 2027, accumulated television rights were worth around $3.1 billion per year, with QBC, TBS, Televisión Cinco, and CSPN securing the domestic rights to broadcast 208, 82 and 70 games, respectively. The Premiership is a corporation where chief executive Yanelí Tangetta is responsible for its management, with the member clubs acting as shareholders. The Premiership (along with most sports leagues in Tierrador) follows an open league system, in which the clubs operate as independent organizations, separate to the league itself. The clubs are responsible for marketing their brand, with the option to include the Premiership branding, though the Premiership cannot overtake any kind of business operations, unless absolutely necessary. As part of the unequal revenue sharing agreement, clubs were apportioned central payment revenues of $3.4 billion in 2035, with Taisgol-Qapitol receiving the most at $164 million. A further $343 million was directed in revenue-sharing payments to NFL clubs.

The Premiership is the most-watched sports league in the world, broadcast in 165 territories to 1 billion homes and a potential TV audience of 7.7 billion people. For the 2029 season, the average Premiership match attendance was at 71,322, the highest average attendance in Crona. Meanwhile, the aggregated attendance across all matches was also the highest of any association football league at 29,508,981, and most stadium occupancies are near capacity. As of 2032, the Premiership is ranked first in the UCFA coefficient rankings based on performances in Cronan competitions over the past five seasons, narrowly ahead of the Alstinian Major League Football. The Tierradorian top-flight has produced the second-highest number of Cronan Cup / UCFA Champions League titles, with a record seven Tierradorian clubs having won seventeen Cronan championships in total. Forty-eight clubs have competed in the Premiership since its inception in 1945. Twenty-two of those clubs have been crowned champions at least once since 1945. Taisgol-Qapitol and S.D. Ambaqwe share the title of most Premierships, winning twelve each. The Miccubo Colt .45s are the current title holder, winning their second Premiership in the 2036 Premiership Grand Final, over S.D. Ambaqwe.

History

1963–1985: Split from the NFL

Before the Premiership was established, the main league pyramid of football in Tierrador was the Tierradorian Commonwealth Leagues (TCL), with regional division based solely on the 18 commonwealths of Tierrador. In 1945, many TCL clubs would split from the league to form the NFL Championship, which served as Tierrador's top league until 1963. For most of the NFL Championship's tenure as the highest-level, it would not add any extra competitors to the original sixteen founding members, in which the clubs were content with this ruling until the NFL's expansion process would begin in 1959. As the NFL would fall in the same hole as the TCL by adding more competitors and over-saturating the on-field product, representatives from twelve clubs would meet at the UCFA's headquarters in Taisgol, to discuss another split, this time from the NFL. The UCFA eventually allowed for Mineros, Lámparas, Ambaqwe, Qapitol, Prismarine City, Olímpico, Tawakee, Porvaos City, Guerreros, Norwalk Town, Topaqoí, and Naihungo City to withdraw from the NFL, and would form the Premiership, which in turn became the only Tierradorian football competition to be sponsored by the newly-founded UCFA, along with its continental competitions. Originally, this was met with heavy resistance from Football Tierrador, the governing body of the sport in Tierrador, but would eventually be resolved by implementing the Premiership as the top level for the sport.

The Premiership would make its first major move by signing an exclusive television deal with the Qabóri Broadcasting Company immediately after its founding. At twelve clubs, the Premiership was divided into an Eastern and Western division, with all clubs playing the other five clubs in their division twice, along with every club in the other division once, for a total of 16 matches. In its first decade of existence, the Premiership was dominated primarily by clubs from Taisgol, with Qapitol and Olímpico sharing most of the Premiership titles in the 1960s and early 1970s. Their shared dominance from the league would be broken for two years by S.D. Ambaqwe, who, led by the Larapet twins, Ulo and Iaka, finished the 1969 and 1970 seasons 16–0 and 15–1, winning back-to-back Grand Finals in both years. Ambaqwe would not win another Grand Final until 1983, though these teams were well-known as one of the greatest of all time. The 1970s featured a little more parity, with four different clubs winning their first Premierships in this decade, including UD Wadičaq in 1973, Guerreros in 1974 and 1975, Prismarine City FC in 1977, and Norwalk Town in 1979 and 1980. It was also in this decade that Qapitol, Olímpico, and Guerreros would win Tierrador's first four UCFA Leagues of Champions, combining for four straight in 1972, 1973, 1974, and 1975, along with a fifth honor won by Prismarine City in 1977.

The Premiership would remain at twelve clubs, expanding by small amounts every decade, going from 12 to 14 in 1970, 14 to 18 in 1980. Despite the frequent additions, the Premiership's schedule would remain at 16 matches throughout, with division formats and cross-division play eventually being eliminated when the league expanded to 18 clubs in 1976. In the 1980s, newcomers Tarhogun City FC, UD Piseron and Magoas would win three Premierships. The Premiership's unique football structure and subsequent unpredictability would allow for it to skyrocket to global popularity.

Competition format

Premiership's competition format follows a round-robin format. The season usually takes place from August to December, with matches being played on Fridays, Sundays and Mondays. Member clubs play only other clubs in their division twice, once home and the other away, for a total of 18 matches, over a total of 20 weeks (each club receives two bye-weeks). Clubs receive 3 points for victories and no points for losses. Like most top leagues in Crona, the Premiership does not award points for draws, meaning that competition records include wins and losses only, with a 30-minute period of extra time, followed by a penalty shootout if the match is still tied. While points are awarded, they are mostly disregarded in favor of each club's win percentage, the only football league in the world to implement this system.

After the regular season is finished, the top four clubs in each division compete in the Premiership Postseason, which consists of three total rounds with the Premiership Grand Final taking place on Christmas Day. The Premiership is also very unique as no trophy or championship is awarded to the club with the most points, or best record, rather, only through the Grand Final. This is primarily based off the system seen in Major League Football in Alstin, with 32 clubs separated into eight divisions of four teams. Because of these unique competition systems implemented in both the Premiership and TCL, the leagues have often been criticized for supposedly "Tierradorizing" the sport, and disregarding the cultural characteristics intertwined with traditional Levantine/Sarpedonian systems, despite Football Tierrador never attempting to make changes to the sport's actual rules. While there have been attempts to expand the postseason to ten clubs, they never got that far. Since the postseason expanded to eight clubs in 1983, there had been little desire for there to be more spots added in the future.

Contrary to the top four, the last-place club in each division is relegated to the NFL Championship, still following the geographical alignment of FT-sponsored competitions. Every Premiership club participates in the Tierrador Cup, which runs from August to December, along with every other FT-licensed club. The majority of Tierrador Cup winners were Premiership clubs, winning XX out of the last 100 editions of the tournament. The Premiership semifinalists, along with the Tierrador Cup winner, make up Tierrador's five automatic bids to the UCFA League of Champions, making the Premiership the only football competition in the world to award continental competition bids via a playoff system.

Promotion and relegation

The Premiership follows a system of promotion and relegation with the NFL Championship and the Tierradorian Commonwealth Leagues. The three lowest placed teams in the Premiership are relegated to the NFL Championship. The top team from the Championship's two conferences are automatically promoted to the Premiership, with the third team promoted following a series of playoffs involving the second, third, fourth and fifth place clubs in each conference, with the of each conference playing for the third spot. From 1945 to 1986, the Premiership was contested by eighteen clubs. In 1986, the league was expanded to twenty-two clubs, following the mass joining of several newly founded clubs. Four of these newly-founded clubs were assigned to the Premiership to balance out the competition, an extremely controversial decision amongst numerous clubs, who believed that the new clubs were getting an easy route into the Premiership and perhaps the UCFA League of Champions by simply "getting lucky." Football Tierrador's board of governors simply ignored these complaints. The Premiership was then reduced to twenty clubs in 1995. In 2014, UCFA requested that the Premiership, along with several other Cronan football leagues, be reduced to 18 teams by the 2018 season. This was met with heavy resistance, and even got to the point where Football Tierrador threatened to depart the UCFA. Eventually, the UCFA halted its demands of reduction, and the 2018 season kicked off with twenty clubs, where it has been locked at since then.

Clubs

Team	Location	First season in Premiership	No. of Premiership seasons	First season of current spell	No. of seasons of current spell	Premiership titles	Most recent title
Puerto Rosario	Puerto Rosario, Moscakee	1945	66	2004	20	7	2012
Anloiya	Anloiya, Ulunkheria	1989	24	2019	5	0	–
Topaqoí	Topaqoí, Telohakee	1945	72	1987	37	10	2021
Prairies-Kaligrusky	Kaligrusky, Telohakee	2036	1	2036	1	0	–
Ambaqwe	Ambaqwe, Auqali	1945	76	2001	23	12	2030
Cuervos	Hugo, Qaleqa	2006	18	2006	18	4	2023
Qapitol	Hacienda, Taisgol	1945	79	1945	79	12	2033
Olímpico	Valle Oeste, Taisgol	1962	57	1990	34	7	2016
Platino	Ciudad Platino, Taisgol	1978	23	2017	7	2	1999
Sevier	Sevier, Ulunkheria	1993	29	1996	28	1	1997
Norwalk Town	Norwalk, Bogocía	1951	24	2021	3	2	1980
Prismarine City	Prisamarina, Ulunkheria	1951	68	1981	43	5	2000
Tawakee	San Cristobál, Tawakee	1946	40	2019	5	1	2035
Palacio de Oro	Vernaza, Telohakee	1991	20	2011	13	3	2034
Porvaos City	Porvaos, Porvaos	1954	58	1973	51	0	–
Lámparas	Ominasky, Alcosky	1947	70	2001	23	3	2003
Oaroa	Oaroa, Saukhin Islands	1994	27	2036	1	3	2006
Mineros	Qabór, Las Rozas	1967	43	2023	1	1	1995
Guerreros	Sačia, Aracadó	1977	41	2023	1	0	–
Winnecomac	Winnecomac, Ulunkheria	1983	7	2036	1	0	–

Champions

Main article: Premiership Grand Final

Premiership clubs in Crona

TBA

Sponsorship history

TBA