Soccer is pervasive in England. You can hardly go over a hill in that part of the British Isles without bumping into another soccer team.

FiveThirtyEight.com rose to prominence while appearing in the New York Times, tracking likely outcomes in elections for the past 10 years or so.

It’s a generic website now, with a sports component, which has a link to ESPN.com … which is how we know that they did a sort of primer on English soccer.

The gist of which is … England has about 7,000 teams playing organized soccer. Which is a lot.

This is not news to those of us who cover the top level of English football, but I find a couple of aspects of it interesting.

–That someone would think an American audience would be interested in plumbing the depths of English soccer, down there below the Championship … and then beyond League One and League Two, is telling. Has U.S. interest in English football reached that point? Maybe so.

But is someone on an English site explaining the levels of professional baseball? Majors, Triple A, Double A, Single A (high and low), Rookie ball … Maybe they would if relegation and promotion were involved.

–That even when a person deals with English soccer on nearly a daily basis for nine months a year, it is a bit easy to forget that football exists below the Championship, which is the second tier.

It seems as if the 20 teams of the Premier League are more than enough to keep track of, but then, yeah, you pay some attention to the Championship, especially in April, when we’re about to find out which of the three teams “down there” will be promoted to the Premier League — which takes your “number of teams sorta followed” to 24, 25, maybe 26. It gets cumbersome. And then a professional journalist, on this side of the Atlantic, is expected to know the basics of Spanish, German and Italian soccer, too.

–The FiveThirtyEight story posits English football as a giant pyramid. In a sense, yes, in that the width of the structure gets wider (more populated) the lower you go. And then we have a tiny minority playing for big money in the top division, but it leaves a person wondering: Shouldn’t a system so deep and well-organized cough up more English players at the top of the game?

English players have declined to become about 34 percent of the English Premier League. The rest come from outside England. Which seems odd if you have this system of 100,000 players. Shouldn’t England be one of the world’s top handful of national teams at all times? How can the U.S., with a vastly less systematic treatment of the game, be essentially as good as is England?

(At this moment, Fifa has the U.S. ranked number 17 in the world, with England a slot behind at No. 18.)

So, anyway, if you have an interest in how the English game is structured, have a look at the story. Then you can go back to paying attention to the upper half of the Premier League.