Many football fans regard the English Premier League as the best league in the world, probably because they’re English and their team plays in it. La Liga usually comes up second and it's a toss up between the Bundesliga in Germany and Serie A in Italy for the third best league.

But best doesn’t necessarily mean most exciting. The Premier League might catapult the most teams into the quarter-finals of the Champions League and be plastered all over television, which is great for ranking points and revenue for the clubs, but if you’re having to watch Chelsea grind out 1-0 victories and Manchester United winning another title, it’s hardly exciting.

The top leagues in Europe, and by extension, the world, are all dominated by two or three clubs, if you want to be kind you can include Liverpool and give the Premier League four, so every year it’s the same teams at the top, same teams in Europe, same teams on your television screens playing somebody or other, and it gets boring.

Arsenal play some of the best football I’ve ever seen, and on their day Manchester United are the same, but it’s the same teams again and again. You know that for an upset to happen the other team are going to have to be very lucky and hope that the big team have left half their team back at the hotel.

Yet, drop down a division to the Coca-Cola Championship, and you’ve got 11 teams battling it out to be promoted in the final months of the season. That’s more than the number of teams in the top half of the Premier League that could be promoted automatically or via the play-offs. Sure, the players might not be the world’s best, and the football won’t always haveee the flair we’ve come to love from Arsene Wenger’s Foreigner XI. But you have the excitement of one bad result seeing you drop several places, and potentially away from the play-off places, because as the Championship showed last season, any team can win against those at the top.

It’s a bit like those ladder competitions we used to have back in school when I spent my Thursday afternoons playing chess. If you played a person above you and won, you swapped places and could only challenge somebody higher than you or accept a challenge from someone below you. You could be riding high one week, and then lose and go down several places.

The thing with the Premier League is that most teams are playing to get into Europe the following season, not to win the league. If you are in the UEFA Cup then your goal is to break into the top four, even though it’s not going to happen any time soon and your players think they need to move to a bigger club like David Bentley at Blackburn.

In the Championship, though, you’re playing to get into the Premier League – into the big time, where the money is. It doesn’t even matter if you do a Sunderland or a Derby and come straight back down with the least points total in history, because you’ve been to the big league.

Of last year’s promoted sides from the Championship, only West Brom have a chance of staying up. They played some great football last year, with a good passing game that will do well in the Premier League, and if they build on last season with some new players, they can stay in the top flight. Stoke City and Hull City will come back down, though, unless Fulham and Bolton are as bad as they were last year.

Looking ahead to the 2008-9 season, it’s going to be another four-way fight for the Premier League title while it’s take your pick from about seven teams for the UEFA Cup places. But down in the Championship several teams have already bought new players for this season and Birmingham City and Reading will expect to be promoted again.

For overall excitement and unpredictability, the Championship is far better than the Premier League.