This SlideShowPro photo gallery requires the Flash Player plugin and a web browser with JavaScript enabled.
Each season the twelve best rugby union club teams in England contest the Aviva Premiership. The best teams in this highly competitive league go forward to play against the other top sides in Europe in the European Challenge Cup, and the champions league equivalent of rugby union, the Heineken Cup. For the teams that finish at the bottom of the English Premiership there is relegation to the RFU Championship.
The Aviva Premiership uses a playoff system to determine the overall winner of the league. Each of the twelve teams in the league plays one another twice, home and away, for a total of 22 regular season games. At the end of the regular season the top four teams play in semi-finals, with the highest placed finisher in the league table earning a home semi against the fourth-placed team, and the second placed finisher getting the other home semi against the third-placed club.
These two semi-final games are played in May and the championship final takes place at Twickenham between the two teams that win through. Some clubs are renowned for finishing strong in these playoff games despite not finishing top of the league during the regular season. London Wasps have won the Premiership title four times despite not finishing first in the table on any of those four occasions!
On the other hand, the Gloucester Rugby club have earned the opposite reputation as chokers, as they have finished top of the log three times (2003, 2007, and 2008) but lost the Premiership title all three times.
A number of the Aviva Premiership club teams go on to compete in the European tournaments, the exact number varying each year depending on a byzantine series of rules too dull to discuss in any detail. Suffice to say that many of the top English rugby clubs play in the Heineken Cup and the less prestigious Challenge Cup.
