La Liga, Spain’s top professional football division, was founded in 1929 and has run continuously ever since, making it one of the oldest top-flight leagues in European football. Like the Premier League, it uses a 20-club, single-table, home-and-away format across a season, with the bottom three clubs relegated each year.
What sets La Liga apart in global perception is its concentration of historically dominant clubs — Real Madrid and FC Barcelona chief among them — whose rivalry and individual European success have made the league a fixture of international football conversation for decades, well beyond Spain’s own borders.