Could an English Premiership-style league work for North American sports?

Great Debates
1

Recently it occured to me that some of the potential issues regarding North American pro sports leagues could possibly be solved by moving to an English football type of setup, where there were established ‘tiers’ of teams that could travel up and down the tiers based on record. As they have it now, there are twenty teams, with, I believe the bottom three being relegated and replaced with the top three teams from the tier below. Now mind you, I’m not under any illusions that this kind of system will get adopted but I’m just curious on what other people think this type of system would do to pro sports on this side of the ocean.

Pros:
Increased competition - Even the leagues with the best competative balance (probably the NFL) could be improved by a little talent concentration. And I wouldn’t be eliminating any teams entirely, just that the most talented teams would naturally migrate to the top tier teams.

Increased exposure - Let’s say a league ‘merges’ with its minor leagues. Every once in a while, an Oklahoma City or a Richmond, VA would do well enough in the lower tier to move up to the top tier, highlighting that particular region of the country for awhile. It would allow for different levels of sports while still giving teams a chance to compete for the big time.

An end to competition complaints - The main focus of this idea. Let’s face it, some leagues are practically tiered as it is. Look at baseball; the Yankees, Red Sox and Dodgers outspend teams like Minnesota, Kansas City and Montreal by up to 4:1 ratios. Mind you, one of the lower spending teams in MLB won the World Series last year but competition for the top players is limited to just a handful of teams (vis a vis the A-Rod sweepstakes). This would just be facing facts.

Cons:
Tradition - At some point, a team like the Yankees or Red Wings is going to have a terrible season and end up falling to the bottom of the league. I doubt leagues would look kindly on one of their flagship franchises falling out of the top tier.

Potential for Self-Perpetuation - It would be tough for lower tier teams to really advance up the standings because what big name stars would willingly take themselves out of the top league? I also wonder how this would mesh with the current incarnation of talent drafts for new players. How does English football handle this?

Owner Reluctance - This is probably the reason it’ll never happen; what owner would want to revamp the system to the point where his expensive asset could be devalued by being a second tier team? There’s also the logistics of their minor leagues, as both MLB and the NHL have extensive farm systems (the NFL and NBA less so). I’m sure they’d only agree to this if the size of the new premiere division was the same size as the existing league.

So what other pros and cons am I missing? or is this idea just wholly unsuited for the idea of NA pro sports?

2

I’m not entirely sure how this is handled in Europe, but the main concern I immediately thought of was logistics.

Example: Minor league baseball team from middle-of-nowhere U.S.A. rises to the top of the field. Do they still play their home games in a tiny little stadium which may seat a few thousand, even if they’re playing the Yankees? Also, a lot of minor league teams may not even have the money for TRANSPORTATION to and from long distance games. It’s my understanding that the minor leagues (at least in baseball) are separated into divisions based on geographical area.

Anyhow, it’s an interesting concept.

3

The distance is something I definitely hadn’t thought of. According to MSN maps it’s about 300 miles from Newcastle to London, which is more or less the breadth of the country (Scotland has its own league, if I’m not mistaken). It’s a little more than ten times the distance to go across the United States (more if Canada gets brought in). Perhaps the lower tiers would be grouped by regions as well, although it makes it fundamentally more complex.

4

The best precedent for what Garfield226 comments on is Chievo Verona. A couple of years ago, this miniscule team rose into Italy’s Seria A. They simply used the ground of Hellas Verona. Indeed, groudshares are nothing unusual when a team’s own ground is inappropriate for the league they’re in, and Milan hosts both its teams in one stadium. But, of course, all this relies on geographical proximity.

Compared to the money floating around American sports, the closest comparison is the European competitions, the Champions League and the UEFA Cup. TV rights and so on in these are worth far more than domestic competitions, so for a small team to win a place in either is a huge windfall, despite the travel costs etc.

BTW, anybody out there a decent football historian, who can give details of how the English leagues used to be split into North and South?

5

I don’t understand how this system would affect talent distribution. Actually, I don’t understand how this system would improve much at all, but talent distribution in particular. Would you be reworking the entire salary structure of the leagues with salary caps? That seems the only way it would work, otherwise it’d just be a constant flow of teams between divisions, and you’d regularly see teams in the lower division that could beat the champion of the upper division. In the NFL, in particular, where teams come together and fall apart so quickly, how could this help anything without a complete reworking of the way salaries work? Take the Panthers, for example. This year they probably would’ve ended up undefeated in the lower division or something, while the Raiders went winless in the upper division. I just don’t see it as an improvement over the way it works now.

Baseball, on the other hand, would be really intriguing, although it encourages buying championships that much more- if you think the Royals and Expos aren’t really trying to win now, just wait 'til they’re in a minor league!

6

I don’t think the NFL is the best example for this for the reasons you mention and more. The limited number of games in the season, the sheer number of positions neccesary, and the fact that it’s far less dependant on individual players than a team concept than the other major sports. A salary cap really wouldn’t be neccesary, I feel, with this sort of arrangement. I agree that the MLB would make the best case, with the NBA and NHL not far behind.

7

One thing nobody’s mentioned yet is that the English lower division teams are independent, not farm teams for the Premiership teams. In other words, teams like Oxford United, Wimbledon, etc… are football entities in their own right- they can negotiate as equals for talent.

That’s how many of the smaller teams make much of their money- by selling the contracts of up-and-coming young players to the upper leagues.

I may be wrong, but if a Premiership team had a superstar, and was getting relegated, they’d likely sell his contract to another team, and make a bundle in the process.

8

The big problem with the football competitions in Europe is the massive disparity in money between the big clubs and the small ones. Clubs with a perennial presence in the European competitions, especially the champions league, have and generate far more money than other clubs in the top divisions. Clubs that have a perennial presence in the top divisions, especially those of England, Spain and Italy, have and generate far more money than other clubs in the domestic competitions and so on. This disparity is widening rapidly, much in the same way that baseball is seeing the financial gap between the Yankees and the rest of MLB widen.

Not long after the European Cup became the Champions League, admitting clubs that had not actually won anything to qualify for the competition, and the Bosman Ruling (free agency for players in EU teams) was handed down, I remember debating with my English friend about how a fulltime European Superleague would eventually emerge and small club football was basically doomed because of the amount of money and interest which would be shifted to the biggest clubs. Well, there have been steps taken and interest declared in a Superleague but, as yet, it has not emerged as a fulltime competition but the disparity between large and small clubs has widened even more.

I suggested that small clubs, in order to survive financially, might need to follow the farm system present in MLB and NHL and attach themselves to a large club. Liverpool and Crewe Alexandra have some sort arrangement akin to this, I believe. Given that, with the Bosman Ruling, small teams can no longer be assured of compensation for developing players and thus there are diminishing incentives to focus on youth, it seems the only practical way that small club football can survive.

The present system in the NFL is set up to prevent all of the problems I have just outlined in the European system. With revenue sharing, the salary cap, the draft and free agency, the NFL ensures that no club falls too far behind the others in financial terms. This then flows on in terms of parity in competition and fan support and then reverberates back financially. It may not be a perfect system but it is probably the best that big time professional sports has to show.

To introduce lower league competitions, with promotion/demotion, of independent teams into, say, the NFL would raise issues regarding revenue sharing and the draft and ultimately, the whole issue of parity would have to be readdressed. The implicit goal of the competitive systems in American pro sports is parity (I believe this, even though MLB has gotten out of hand). To take up the European football model would mean a paradigm shift away from this implicit goal.

9

A major source of sports revenue is from the TV contracts, regotiated years in advance. How could a network make a reasonable bid if New York and LA might drop and Des Moines and Fargo move up?

10

Slightly OT but IMHO in terms of fairness, the biggest advantages that the NFL have over Euro style Soccer leagues are the Salary Cap and the Draft.

For non NFL savvy Dopers:

The Salary Cap means that the playing field is far more level, since however much money a club has in the bank, it cannot just buy all of the best players. (The obvious caveat is that marquee players are more likely to gravitate to the potential Superbowl pretenders, however who honestly predicted that Carolina would get so far?).

The Draft is also an excellent equaliser, since the team with the poorest season record gets first choice of the College Football graduates. This also promotes (maybe too much!) football in high school and college.

If you look at European soccer leagues, there are a clique of elite clubs who can offer the best salaries and get the best players. (Man Utd, Real Madrid etc). Unsurprisingly they also seem to be at the top of their respective leagues, year in year out. zzzzz.

Jim

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11

Even so, there needs to be more of an incentive to do well in US sports leagues. I mean, the Texas Rangers have only gone to the playoffs ONCE in something like 20 years, They’d have long been relegated under a Euro-style system, and rightly so.

Maybe the gap between the Rangers and a REALLY good Triple-A team is still huge, but I have to wonder sometimes. At least a good Euro-style system would encourage teams to actually win, not just turn a profit with ticket sales, merchandising, TV, etc… Without the threat of relegation, profitable ass-sucking teams are still a net win for their owners.

US football’s not a good example- there aren’t really lower leagues to draw players from. Yes, there’s NFL Europe, but the majority of players of any consequence start in the NFL, not start in Europe and move up. In baseball, most players start low and work up after a few years.

Baseball or hockey are probably our best comparisons- several levels of play and wide disparity between town sizes makes it similar. The farm-team system is what makes them different than the Euro leagues, although there are some independent AAA-level hockey teams (Houston Aeros?) who do work similarly to Europeans soccer teams, except that they’ll never get promoted to the NHL.

12

Promotion/relegation can be thought of as the free-market answer to professional sports organization. No salary cap, no guarantees; you lose and you’re relegated.

Continuing this analogy, Major League Baseball would be closest to the Premiership, since there is minimal revenue sharing among teams; however, there’s no disincentive to perform poorly, since you know your team will still be playing in the major leagues next year.

The NFL, with its revenue sharing and salary cap, would be more akin to socialism. There’s lots of parity and seemingly always an upredictable season. I’d fit the NBA in here as well, due to the salary cap, but I don’t know about revenue sharing.
Really, the only obstacle to implementing this in the US (but it’s a big one) is generally the franchise system. A guy buys a team in the NFL or MLB, and he’s basically bought the right to play in the league, permanently. This artificial scarcity is why pro sports teams are pretty much the domain of corporations and billionaires. Conceivably, if there was a new league that started from the ground up with this system of promotion/relegation, it could work. But this assumes that there is a sport out there without a “major league” already, that could support an infrastructure of about 60-90 teams throughout the country. This sport would need low startup costs, probably a low number of players on each team lest talent get diluted, and huge community enthusiasm (since TV revenues would likely be minimal and a team’s income would be derived mostly from the gate).

So US football wouldn’t work–you have to outfit 53 players in body armor; there’s already the NFL, so people wouldn’t care about a “minor league”; and there’s only 8 home games in a season, which wouldn’t provide nearly enough gate receipts.

Baseball wouldn’t work, either, because the major leagues are already established. There’s been a few upstart football leagues (AFL, WFL, USFL, XFL) in the past 40 years, when TV money started flowing into sports, but no new baseball leagues (to my knowledge) since the Federal League in the late 1910’s.

Basketball? Maybe, since there’s already a lot of enthusiasm for the sport at all levels, but the arenas tend to be small (meaning low gate revenue) and there’s competition not only with the NBA, but also NCAA basketball.

Frankly, the sport with the best chance to go Pro/Rel in the US would have been . . . soccer. Plenty of players to draw from, you could use football fields so you wouldn’t have to build large stadiums, each team has maybe 20-25 players on the payroll and the only equipment you’d need is a ball (and shinguards).

However, Major League Soccer has assumed the crown as the top American soccer league, and the only way its investors would put money into a sport that really hasn’t ever broken through the public consciousness (as a spectator sport) is with a guaranteed monopoly–i.e. franchises, not clubs. Maybe, after the demise of the NASL in 1985, if there was a strong central organization willing to put a superstructure in place for locally organized teams throughout the country, this might have happened. But it didn’t.

(Oh, and WRT aahala’s comment about New York and LA teams possibly dropping out of the top league and the effect that would have on a TV contract, in this scenario a team wouldn’t have the LA or New York “franchise”, but instead anyone could organize a club anywhere, so conceivably there could be several clubs in each city, minimizing the possibility that an entire city wouldn’t be included in the TV contract.)

13

I think the OP is overestimating the amount of competition that exists in English football.

In the NFL, Carolina can go from being the worst team in the league to the Superbowl in a couple of years, whereas only two teams, Manchester United and Arsenal, have won the English Premiership in the past 8 years and that looks set to continue this year. While it is theoretically possible for a small town team to progress through 9 or 10 levels to the very top, the chances of that actually occuring these days are very slim indeed.

The competition for players issue is also, again, something that is already better addressed in the NFL than the Premiership. When David Beckham was leaving Manchester United there were literally only a handful of teams in the whole of Europe that could realistically expect to sign him (and arguably no others in England, although Chelsea would now).

Raygun99

Generally the greater talent does gravitate logically to the top. Often, if a club with ‘star’ players is relegated from the Premiership, such players will demand to leave (West Ham being an example last year) - if the player is under contract the club can negotiate a fee for the transfer. One of the roles that lower league clubs have traditionally played is in the development of young players. In the US, if you want to be a professional sportsman, you generally go to a University (I think, I know for American Football this is the case, I assume for the other sports too?), there is really no equivalency of this in England. A teenager who wants to become a professional will join a club at school leaving age, where he will receive an apprenticeship - this could be one of the big clubs, but equally could be a lower one. If he progresses into the first team, he then has the opportunity to attract the attention of the big clubs. A lot of clubs have traditionally used this as a source of revenue - develop a lot of young players and occasionally happen on a very good one who they can sell on to a big club (Crewe Alexandra are a good example where a number of future England players started their careers). The development role of lower clubs has diminished in recent years, however, as the bigger clubs have larger and better equiped academies and, also, as clubs have more access to cheaper and more proven overseas players.

GorillaMan

It has never been regionalised at the top levels, but there has always been, and continues to be, a regional set-up at some level of the league ‘pyramid’. In the early 1920’s the full football league consisted of First Division, Second Division, then Third Division North and Third Division South (same level, but regionalised). In 1958, these two ‘third divisions’ were amalgamated into third and fourth division on a national basis. In 1979, a further national division was added below the four divisions called the “Football Conferance” (initially there was no automatic promotion and relegation between this and the main league, but there is now), below that level the leagues are still regionalised. As of this season there are three regional leagues at the same level below the conferance, from next season there will be two, which are going to be called ‘Conference North’ and ‘Conference South’. With these, as with the other times leagues have been regionalised, any imbalances in numbers following promotion and relegation will be corrected by shifting clubs in the middle of the country between the two leagues.

14

[nitpick] Three times in 33 years. [/nitpick]

Someone’s got to stick up for my beloved Rangers, even though bump’s point remains true.

Pash

15

Another pro I haven’t really seen touched on above is that it keeps things interesting for lower level teams pretty much right up until the end of the season. Generally in American sports, once a team is eliminated from the post-season, interest, attendance, and competitive drive drop off dramatically. With relegation, bottom-dwelling teams still have something to fight for and even top-ranked teams can’t take late-season games against bottom-dwellers for granted. It combats a bit of the “we’ll just give up this season and get them next year” mentality often displayed among losing teams with guaranteed spots.

16

Some good points have been raised with regards to the viability of this system. I think the most important point of note is that, despite the so-called competitiveness of the relegation system, there is a surprising disparity between the top 2 or 3 teams in each major European league and everyone else. Like someone mentioned, Manchester United and Arsenal have won the Premiership something like 10 out of 11 times since it was formed (I believe Man U has won 8 of those, and Blackburn the other one). Hardly an even competition. This year only the addition of Russian oil money has given Chelsea any hope, and that’s fast fading (go Arsenal!). It’s the same for the other major leagues: Real Madrid, Deportivo and Barcelona dominate Spain for the most part, the Milan teams and Juventus dominate Italy, Bayern dominates Germany (all over time, not necessarily every year). That’s hardly a system I would want to see the NHL or MLB take on, especially since there is enough dominance there already from the Yankees for example.

Also, an important point in the development of the division tier system in Europe is population density. Europe is packed to the gills with people, they’re busting at the seams, and so there has always been inter-town rivalries and in-town rivalries that naturally have led to the formation of football clubs. Most of the English FA clubs are 80 or 100 years old or more (I think West Brom is something like 130, but I could be thinking of another club). The league and system developed out of that closeness and density of teams, where a tightly packed population had very distinct regional rivalries. I’m not saying those don’t exist in North America (just watch Toronto and Ottawa play in the NHL), but it’s not the same in terms of development of a league. It seems highly unlikely that any of the pro-sport leagues (I’m thinking NHL, NFL, MLB and NBA, mainly) could support that number of franchises in enough cities and generate that level of fan interest and loyalty and rivalry between them. If it was viable, you can be sure there would be more franchises in the league already. In fact, the NHL and MLB are starting to notice that they may have over-expanded and are facing some difficulty keeping interest up in some areas. Where would the other franchises go?

I think the best answer would be for all the leagues to adopt the NFL model, because even though I don’t like North American football (US or Canada), they’ve got it right on the business end. It would be better for European football too, if they adopted a salary cap and revenue sharing, but my main concern is the NHL right now, because things just don’t lool good for the future.

17

That’s true duality72. As a fan of an English team generally bumping around the second of third division (Northampton Town) I can vouch that the experience of avoiding relegation after a season of being regularly beaten provides an entirely different shade of euphoria to winning a championship!

18

**Most of the English FA clubs are 80 or 100 years old or more (I think West Brom is something like 130, but I could be thinking of another club). **

West Bromwich Albion were founded in 1878, so are pretty old. The oldest (and oldest league club in the world) are Notts County, founded 1862.

Agree, to a certain extent. Don’t really see this happening until the advent of a European League, which would probably mimic the NFL in being ringfenced as well. In the Premiership, there is simply too much disparity between the clubs at the moment in terms of stadium size and financial turnover to make this viable (although there is revenue sharing to some extent in the form of the TV rights which are shared fairly equally between the clubs).

19

Can we have Marc Richards back please. :slight_smile:

V

20

The four goals in 20 minutes were just a fluke :wink:

Vetch , are you planning on changing your name to Morfa or White Rock anytime soon??