I bow to your “compete with hockey” argument and concede that it can be a niche sport in the US.
There is no reason to believe that a sport that is 5th or 6th in the market will effect change in American tastes or spending habits.
Baseball’s legendary antitrust exemption has been a moot point for almost as long as I’ve been alive and in 1998 legislation was passed removing it from employment matters. It means nothing anymore.
Other than perhaps NFL football and Star Wars, there isn’t anything that the MAJORITY of the US public is interested in, and yet many other forms of entertainment are clearly “successful”, which is what the thread title asks. You are moving the goalposts to the third ring of Saturn.
Oh, we’re doing this thread again? OK.
To the OP, I find the pro/rel system intriguing and wish that MLS had used it from the start, when it could have been easily coordinated with the existing minor leagues. The reason for MLS’ relative unpopularity, though, has nothing to do with that, but with the fact that the players aren’t as good as in the major Euro leagues, which is inevitable given the massive difference in the leagues’ revenue.
I have been following soccer for 25 years, and through that whole time, it had slowly but surely gotten more popular in the US. There have always been people saying that it is suddenly going to get huge, and others saying it will never get more popular than it is at whatever time they are in, and they have both always been wrong.
I certainly don’t see any established US sport going to a pro/rel system, because there isn’t any demand for it. I think it would work great in baseball, but I’d be happy just to see the minor leagues become actual leagues instead of glorified development systems again. Nobody cares about minor league baseball with the intensity they care about college football or basketball, and why should they, when the people running the teams aren’t motivated by trying to win games and championships, but by developing players for some other team in some other league?
Sure you can. Baseball basically does all of this. Baseball prospects are usually sent to the minors first, and players are often traded for cash or future considerations. Yes, pro players are usually traded rather than sold, but that has more to do with the MLB being a singular league rather than a balanced international sport. For example, few top flight soccer are sold via intraleague transactions.
Which brings me to the real reason soccer doesn’t have a draft: minimal collusion is possible because it’s a truly international game. It has nothing to do with regulation and everything to do with the fact that one league cannot collude to ensure competitive balance within their league when players have 5-10 countries or leagues who will pay them a competitive wage without the strings attached. Someone like Neymar would never agree to be drafted into the Premier League, and risk being drafted by a lesser club, when he can just go play for Barca, Real, PSG, Juventus, etc, etc. Relegation doesn’t even enter into the conversation.
Baseball prospects are usually sent to the minors first… because those minor league teams are owned by the professional teams. The draft is only done among the pro teams. They aren’t done by every single team playing baseball.
Players are sometimes traded for money in the minors, but not usually. And future considerations are acceptable players. And yes, it is because it is a singular league, but that’s what is considered commonplace in American sports.
This hasn’t always been the case. In the early 1900s, you didn’t have players moving from country to country except for the top talents who moved and acquired citizenship in those countries. Generally speaking, the English First Division had English players, Italy’s Serie A had Italian players, etc. up until last few decades. But there was no draft… why? How do you set up a working draft for 60+ teams?
In addition, a draft is designed for benefiting teams who have finished poorly the year before in order to increase competitive balance. In a pro/reg system, poorer teams deservedly drop down to the next lower level. To offer them another hand up runs counter to the entire philosophy behind the system.
To demonstrate this, the MLS, which is a single level league has, indeed, a draft in order to ensure competitive balance within that league, even though there still exists an international market for players. The best players drafted in the MLS Superdraft could definitely join up in Liga MX if they wanted to avoid the draft, but the league still has it and the players still, for the most part, enter into it.
My point was that when you said, “good players would blanch at being put in the 3rd division with its much lower revenues and salary” as a rationale for why drafts wouldn’t work, you clearly erred. Your argument is greatly weakened by the fact that baseball players do it all the time. The salient point as I mentioned is collusion.
They same would apply to pro soccer presumably.
Trading for money is basically commonplace. One reason people don’t recognize it is because many of these transactions include players as placeholders for purely superficial league rule-based budgetary reasons. That’s why so many trades involve players who are immediately released/traded. It has nothing to do with teams not wanting to sell players for money.
Agreed, but that has nothing to do with the comment. The issue was why international soccer leagues could not have an effective draft system, not why one never evolved.
The same way you do for 32 teams or any other number? How exactly would this be any sort of stumbling block?
Yes, which was the point of this entire discussion: why international soccer leagues are more top heavy than most North American sporting leagues. It’s in part because they don’t have a draft, not because of regulation or the lack thereof.
Actually, no there is not an international market for players typically drafted in the MLS. That is why they play in the MLS. The vast majority of the time, any player good enough to play in a top league doesn’t get drafted, or if they do, they go overseas. Most of the top talent that has ever played in the MLS have been a designated player who is exempt from normal salary rules and draft rules.
One potential alternative is not really a market given the obvious downsides of having to leave your country to play in Mexico. Your example actually highlights my point of why the MLS cannot have an effective draft that actually retains top talent.
… They do it because they are drafted by a big time professional team. And eventually will make their way to that team. That’s a faaaar sight different than being drafted by a 3rd division team and hoping to be sold to a bigger team at some point later.
But they seem to be one in the same. Why did every American league develop one? Including the American soccer league.
32 teams in one league. Not spread out over multiple.
A few most definitely have had offers from overseas after college.
In addition, the question goes the other way from Mexico. Why doesn’t Mexico have a draft while your quibbles can apply equally to them? There isn’t an international market for most players in Liga MX.
Not at all. Only about 10-15% of drafted players will play in the majors. I can’t imagine most players after the first few rounds really think they will eventually make their way to a major league roster. There are 40 rounds in the MLB draft (down from 50 rounds), so they cannot all possibly make a roster.
Because the history of our sports are different. Namely, the centralized control our leagues typically have in addition to the regulatory exemptions many of our leagues received at some point. International soccer teams have historically had far more independence than your average north American sports team. There is also the difference of how our amateur sports leagues are run.
Why would that make things extra complicated? If need be they could have separate drafts.
And most take the offer if they actually have a chance at an elite playing career.
Your objection doesn’t make any sense. Mexico doesn’t have a draft because they don’t have a draft. Yes, Liga MX could have a typical draft (they have a weird thing they call a draft already), but it would be just as burdened and ineffectual as the MLS draft. In fact, it would be worse as they don’t have a clear pipeline like college athletics in the US as far as I know.
No, not especially. Besides, even if there were, the market generally becomes an issue when it exists in conjunction with a traditional draft. Therefore the point is moot.
It appears you are switching back and forth between arguments. You speak of the Neymar’s of the world, but not the ordinary average Brazilian player, who plays in the Brazilian league. The top prospects in baseball most definitely due think they’ll make a major league roster and get paid quite hefty signing bonuses.
Yes. Exactly. The centralized control of our leagues have prevented a pro/rel system of even being feasible and if a pro/rel system had ever developed, centralized control of even close to the same level would not have been possible.
Though the regulatory exemptions have generally come later with the exception of baseball.
Interestingly enough there is indeed a European league with a draft, the KHL (the Kontinental [European] Hockey League, generally considered the second most premier hockey league in the world after the NHL) - it also does not have a promotion/relegation system, which is what probably allows a draft to exist in Europe even though the history of their sports is different (as you point out):
This makes absolutely no sense. The draft was designed to promote competitive balance. The first draft started in the mid 1930s because the worst NFL teams (namely the Philadelphia Eagles) were complaining that no one was coming to games because they sucked. Since they were a closed league, it was generally acknowledged that whatever benefited the worst team benefited the whole.
A pro/reg league operates under a completely different set of basic assumptions, ones that don’t involve raising up the lowest teams in a higher league (that sort of issue is supposed to get worked out due to them being relegated and the newly promoted teams hopefully being better run).
Yes. Exactly. And there is a reason it didn’t develop, because the same things that give an impetus for a draft doesn’t apply in a pro/reg as it does in a closed league system.
Sure, it’s moot today. But its existence did a huge amount to affect the development of the game. It’s the reason that baseball has minor leagues while the other sports really don’t, for one thing.
I assure you that most of the darfted players THINK they’ll make the majors, or are very hopeful they will.
The point remains that the reason North American baseball players - even the top end prospects, who are far more than 10-15% likely to make the majors - accept being drafted and assigned to low level minor league teams is that it’s the route by which they make it to the major leagues. They’re being drafted by the Detroit Tigers, not the Kalamazoo Dorks or whatever Detroit’s low-A team is called. If Kalamazoo was independent of Detroit, no top flight prospect would ever sign with them, and Kalamazoo couldn’t afford them anyway.
I am not switching back and forth. You are confusing two distinct points: star players will not play for terrible teams that draft them when there are multiple better or equivalent options in other leagues, and the rebuttal to your claim that “good players would blanch at being put in the 3rd division with its much lower revenues and salary”. While the broader point about lack of collusion making the draft ineffectual applies in both cases, the specific examples stated were responses to different points.
Which is probably why I said: “I can’t imagine most players after the first few rounds really think they will eventually make their way to a major league roster.”
Again, you are missing the point. This isn’t an argument about the history of various leagues and why they have the rules they currently do. The question was about why there is such a lack of parity in international soccer relative to say football or baseball. The biggest reasons are because the former by and large doesn’t have a and/or playoffs. Furthermore, the could not now institute a draft in say, the Premier League, for the reasons I outlined. Those reasons do NOT include the presence of relegation/promotion. The history of the matter has little bearing on the dynamics as they exist today beyond creating the system and rules we have before us.
A draft and promotion/relegation have nothing to do with one another. KHL likely lacks a promotion system because there is not enough interest and money to justify having multiple leagues worth of second rate hockey teams.
Yes, competitive balance WITHIN a league. If English Football decided to have a draft or multiple drafts, there is no reason the Premier League and the Championship cannot have different drafts, with the top league drafting first, followed by drafts for successive divisions. The point being that the Premier League would have more competitive balance in all likelihood as a result of giving the bad teams in the division a shot at getting the best prospects.
But once again, a draft would not work for completely unrelated problems to the ones you raised. It not logistics that would be a concern but rather economics (broadly speaking).
YES! Which, AGAIN, is why there is little competitive balance.
Which is an accident of history largely that has little to do with anything.
I sincerely doubt that. They may be irrationally confident like most athletes at that level, but most are not running up credit cards with the expectation that they can pay it off with their big league checks that will arrive shortly thereafter. If you want to argue that their confidence actually means they earnestly believe they will make a MLB team, so be it.
They accept it because they have no other choice. That’s the point. If there were 8 other leagues largely identical to the MLB that would offer a no strings route to a pro team, most would do that instead. It’s not an act of voluntary humility on their part, they don’t have better options.
I think they have just about everything to do with each other. You keep talking about ‘collusion’ - that sort of working together exists due to a closed system. Pro/rel removes that sense of working together as teams may easily drop off the top league. I don’t think the evidence shows it was an accident of history, but rather the American style was for closed leagues rather than a more open system, which necessarily had to evolve to pro/reg (since there were too many teams to keep in one league - and they didn’t want to make some leagues be permanently “minor”).
It seems to be that the proof is in the pudding that a draft and a pro/rel system do not correlate with each other well at all - if it did, one of the pro/rel sides would have likely done it, but pro/rel systems don’t necessarily care that much about competitive balance in a league and a draft is all about competitive balance within a league.
As your original argument was “dominance in international soccer is less because of relegation and more because there are generally no playoffs or player draft” - I disagree with the notion that relegation and entry drafts can peacefully co-exist in a manner that makes sense to the aims of the pro/rel system.
Depends on what you mean by closed system. It’s not as if I can create a new English football team to enter any of the leagues. The point is that the effectiveness of collusion has more to do with the market for players and whether alternatives exist.
This is just wrong. Look at how the premier league functions. First, relegated teams are given parachute payments because both leagues recognize the relegation system cannot really function ideally without them. Second, half the broadcast revenue is split equally between the teams, and the rest is split such that the top team only receives about 50% more than the bottom team. Teams work together in any functional league, so you claim is largely baseless. What English football alone cannot do is control what the 5 or so other comparable leagues do, which means control of player movement is greatly hindered.
I was an accident of history as the larger professional sports in many cases lagged in popularity to college sports. This eventually morphed into colleges acting as the feeder system to pro sports leagues. Additionally, you can note that some American soccer leagues use/used relegation (eg. NASL, USL) whereas other leagues don’t (eg. MLS). Also note that amateur drafts started only a few decades ago. The first baseball draft was in 1965. the NHL started drafting in 1963, the NBA in 1950, and the NFL in 1936. All of these occurred well after the leagues themselves were created, further supporting the fact that relegation and drafting is not an either/or situation.
That’s not a necessary outcome at all. For example, when the ABA and the NBA merged, they dealt with the issue of “too many teams” by just folding a bunch of teams.
Hello? They generally cannot do it. Why is this so hard to understand? Even putting aside the fact that these leagues/teams don’t seem to feel they need or want to have a draft, they couldn’t do it even if they wanted to. Now before you retort about how they could have 100 years ago if they wanted to, you’re probably right. However, that fact doesn’t imply the two systems cannot coexist, but rather that some people prefer one over the other.
Exactly! Why have you essentially been arguing this point then?
Even if you disagree, the comment was not about whether the two systems can co-exist but rather if one in isolation provides more competitive balance than the other. You keep debated this point that wasn’t initially asserted at all.
I’ve known professional athletes in the minor league system and I assure you their belief in making it cannot be overstated. Confidence is perhaps the wrong word; “faith” is a better one. It’s irrational, but if it wasn’t there, they wouldn’t bother to play in the minors. Every low draft pick believes he’s the next Mike Piazza, Albert Pujols, or Jeff Kent.
You say “they accept it because they have no other choice” but of course they have another choice; they could get a different job and play recreational baseball. If in fact they don’t believe they have a chance at making it, that would be the rational decision for any ballplayer who isn’t a premier prospect. Sure
What you’re suggesting is the same system, just a bit more chaotic. Rather than being drafted in the 17th round and languishing in AAA for years, someone like Jim Negrych would just have signed with Buffalo or Toledo to begin with. But that’s not really a better option, it’s just a slightly different route to the same place.
The NFL has exactly this, really, they’re just called the CFL and Arena Football. If a player isn’t good enough for the NFL or doesn’t want to be a low draft pick, he can wander off to the CFL and play for Calgary, or play arena football. If someone proves sufficiently that the NFL made a mistake in the first place - as with Warren Moon or Kurt Warner - maybe the NFL gives them a call. I don’t see how it’s a BETTER system, though.
Of course one sport is not like another, and a key element of baseball is that the game is difficult to master the finer points of and can’t really be dominated physically, so most players really have no choice but to play at three or four levels before being able to play in the major leagues.
It’s merely profit sharing.
In all of this, where do you indicate that relegation and entry drafts were both done at the same time? You’ll note that in all of those leagues, the least successful teams petitioned for a draft because they were unable to get the quality of players and thus fanbases that the bigger teams could get. In a relegation system, those teams would simply… get relegated.
In addition, when did the NASL and USL have promotion and relegation? Because I don’t think they ever have.
Well unless I see concrete evidence otherwise, I’ll continue to believe that the two systems simply cannot co-exist.
You indicated relegation wasn’t to blame, but lack of drafts was. I assert that lack of drafts is something that comes with relegation. I have seen nothing to indicate otherwise.
So have I. The reality is that that faith is generally belied by their actions. But either way, it’s not a point worth arguing.
Those aren’t comparable options.
No. What I am saying is that if there were 8 professional leagues just like the MLB with similar pay, competition, etc., but without the draft system that makes even can’t miss superstars play minor league ball in almost all cases, many future superstars would play in those leagues to avoid languishing in the lower ranks. Playing for Toledo is not at all comparable to playing for the Cubs.
Once again, you missed the point. Those leagues at not at all comparable. Those aren’t comparable options for a future professional.
Or “working together as teams”. The whole point of the enterprise is to make profits, so sharing them is significant cooperation in any sense. Besides, they work together in tons of other ways as well.
I didn’t say they were both done at the same time.
And your point is?
My apologies, they are discussing it and desirous to start the system.
Why? Please explain exactly why they cannot co-exist using any logical argument? Additionally why should the burden of proof be on me to prove they can co-exist? You are the one assuming they cannot just because they haven’t as far as I can tell.
Which, once again, even if it was true, is completely unrelated. Even if I agreed they could not co-exist, it would have no bearing on whether one system begets more parity than another. Why you keep missing this very basic point is beyond me.
The USL is definitely not. There are multiple teams that have a ‘relationship’ in the league to MLS sides, including B reserve teams to MLS teams.
The NASL is the only one talking about pro/rel because the MLS is freezing them out.
I already have through this entire page.
I have no clue how you can miss the obvious that if lack of drafts prevents parity (as you’ve asserted) and if promotion/relegation systems prevent drafts then promotion/relegation systems have quite an important bearing on preventing parity. I mean this is basic stuff. You can disagree as to whether they can’t co-exist, but its quite evident that if they can’t, it falls right into your argument about why there is lack of parity