Football is in my experience football (aka soccer) is increasing in popularity in the US (I am brit living on West Coast since 2003). But despite what is now a fairly widespread appreciation for the beautiful game, among almost all the yanks I know who follow football the MLS is held in a pretty poor regard. I would say US football fans I’ve met who follow an English Premier League team outnumber those who follow an MLS team by a lot.
My thought is that a solution to this is to replace the US style franchise system the MLS uses with a proper league system.
Rather than having a major league with a set of handpicked franchises, where you only get to have a major league by convincing another franchise to move to your town or convincing the league to expand, your major league is just the top of a hierarchy of leagues. If your team finishes at the bottom it’s relegated to the league below, regardless of how “big” a team it is and who is backing it, it is replaced by the team that finished top of the league below. Titans teams can fall and minnows can reach the top.
It seems like this way you could improve local support and take advantage of the considerable grass-roots support for football in the US. If you support your local “minor league” team and it does well it can get promotion to the major league.
I suppose the main problem is distances involved (I guess this is why US don’t traditionally have leagues that work this way). The mythical “Wet wednesday night in Stoke” is a bit more of an ordeal if its a wet wednesday night in New York and your team is San Deigo.
Has this ever been tried in the US, in any sport? Would it work?
You might persuade some smaller-market folks that promotion is a great idea, but I have grave doubts that American fans will ever cotton on to the possibility of relegation.
Its good business actually. It creates interest in relegation zone teams. And its a check on greedy owners who want to live off tv money and invest as little as possible in his team
The problem with promotion/relegation is that it is counter to how sports have been set up here.
In an ideal world, it would work especially in college sports.
However, as much as Americans like to brag about how someone can come from nothing and achieve limitless success, which would be the meritorious promoting/relegation system, the fact is our country is controlled by privileged elites.
Over the past 30 years, the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB, as well as Major League Soccer have sold franchises, or new teams, to cities for millions and millions of dollars, regardless of their ability to field a competitive team
I think this is unfair considering how spread out the population of the US is.
I’m sure the New York Cosmos and the Ottawa Fury (the league champ and the runner-up of the US’s “Division II” league) would love to be promoted, and they probably could be, but the stadium infrastructure for most teams in the league couldn’t support an MLS crowd. Most teams in the league can barely sell 10,000 tickets per game. Their stadiums are just too small.
Conversely, the stadiums for MLS teams are much too big to be relegated to a lower level.
Americans love soccer, so all the assumptions made by the OP are a bit off base. From Major League Soccer… “Average MLS attendance exceeds that of the National Hockey League (NHL) and National Basketball Association (NBA).”
The only problem the MLS has is that the Premier League is more popular with US fans, which makes total sense as it offers a higher level of play and most of the international stars we see in the World Cup.
How is that disingenuous? Yes, outdoor stadiums are typically bigger than indoor stadiums, but if soccer is as horribly unpopular as most people believe, that shouldn’t matter.
Relegation doesn’t necessarily mean an attendance hit. For one thing, you’re now likely to start winning a lot more, and there’s now a meaningful objective in getting back. Ticket prices might have to be cut though.
But generally, organizations’ fortunes should rise and fall by merit. Teams that win promotion and then keep winning ought to sell out their games, raise their prices, and eventually upgrade their yards.
The country’s size is a bit of a red herring. In larger countries the pyramid looks like a, well, pyramid, with a greater number of divisions at the lower levels to reduce travel costs.
That’s not going to be a comfort. Major-league status is tied up inseparably with the identities of the club, it’s fans, and the city it represents. They’re not going to agree to that system in which it can be lost.
Major league status can, at least in theory, be lost under the present system, when a franchise decamps for a greener pasture, or is contracted.
Whereas with promotion and relegation, a reasonably interested town can be pretty much assured of always having a team somewhere in the system, with (ALIT) the long-term chance at an overall championship under their own name (rather than as a leg of someone else’s organization). Right now, most American cities have no chance ever at that.
Promotion/relegation has far more stakeholders than the fixed ML structure.