In a short article from last month’s Wired, two professors posit that major league American sports could benefit from a tiered league system, where teams that win stay in the “big leagues” and losers get demoted down into lesser leagues. Teams switch up every year based on performance, and this gives incentives for owners to build the best teams possible. It also, apparently, gives incentives for clubs to stay put instead of uprooting when fans lose interest.
What do you guys think? I don’t think this could ever actually be done - major league sports in America are a monolith and won’t be making any drastic changes any time soon. But, if it could be done - should we do it?
I like the idea but I don’t think it will ever happen. I like the idea of making teams put up or shut up (there’s no reason Pittsburgh ownership should deserve a major league baseball team the way they operate it - which is not to say the fans aren’t deserving of one, far from it), but the majors wouldn’t want to risk any chance of the Yankees being sent down to the second tier.
No. It would be a bad idea, because it would make for even less parity than we have now.
Look at the way the English football system works, for example. The bottom 3 teams from the Premier League get relegated, the top 3 teams from the Football Championship get promoted. That’s all well and good, until you note that it’s routinely the same teams getting promoted and relegated. Sometimes a relegated team continues to plummet, never recovering.
But when you look at the top, it’s Manchester United, Liverpool, and Arsenal. Every single year they make up, at worst, 3 of the top 4 teams. Parity? There is none. The relegation/promotion process keeps everybody worried about getting the boot while the guys at the top don’t have to worry about any challenges from the rest.
In baseball this would result in Yankees/Red Sox/Braves/Cardinals World Series appearances even more frequently than they happen now. Last year’s champs, the Phillies, would never, ever have gotten a shot under that system because they’d have played last year just to have a shot.
Football? Same thing. As much as I want my Steelers to win every year, it’s nice to see someone make a run every season out of the blue. In fact, the Steelers were one of the worst teams of the first 40 years of the NFL, they never would have had this kind of success if they were endlessly fighting just to stay in the league where they might have a chance at winning it all.
Europe seems to be comfortable with a near-total lack of parity. That’s what the promotion/relegation system gives you. Of course, it also opens up the possibility that Joe Blow’s club team from BFE can win it all in about 40 years after working its way up the ladder, but we all know that that is impossible. That is the falsest of false hopes.
Worse than that. Replace Liverpool with Chelsea and you have the champion for every season since 1994-95. But the discussion isn’t really about competition at the top (which, admittedly, relegation does nothing to address) but fan interest at the bottom. A race to avoid relelgation can be exciting, certainly more exciting than watching the Pirates play out the string.
I don’t follow this… why would the Phillies not have a shot last year? They would certainly not have been relegated the year before - they won their division in 2007.
I don’t see how relegation gives a lack of parity. The EPL has a lack of parity because the top teams spend the vast majority of the money. Not too long ago Chelsea weren’t in the discussion - then they got a rich owner and have been right there every year. Manchester City is trying to do the same thing. Relegation has absolutely nothing to do with it - it’s not like the teams right below the top-4 are relegated with any regularity.
In the end I agree. None of the major American sports leagues lend themselves to a relegation system. MLB is probably the closest, since it has the highest level of team saturation. The fact that the minor league teams are affiliated with major league teams, and filled with players owned by major league teams, makes it pretty much a non-starter.
One variation that is possible is dividing the Majors into two competitive divisions (say, the National and American leagues) and place the higher-quality teams in one division with a few teams swapping places each season. This I could perhaps get behind given a compelling argument.
American professional sports is too tied in with stadiums and television markets, not to mention player contracts. You can’t can’t have those payrolls, those stadiums and those markets moving in and out of relevance.
Specifically with regards to the NFL, there aren’t that many markets that can support an NFL team in the first place, and most places which can already do (Los Angeles being a notable current exception). If the Detroit Lions are demoted to a minor league (losing the television revenue it takes to sustain its stadium and its payroll), who’s going to replace them, the Fargo North Spartans?
Eh, the EPL has all those things too. The big teams, in the big markets, just never get relegated. Or, if they do, it’s either short-term or because of massive mis-management - similar to an American sports team going bankrupt and being moved/sold.
This is true - but I think a large part of the reason there are not more American football teams is because of the college game. That’s well over 100 highly-competitive football teams that play every Saturday. Certainly on par with the middle-tier English football teams. The team that replaced the Detroit Lions would (in some imaginary scheme) be the Florida Gators. Of course those are “student atheletes”, a discussion I’ll just avoid here…
I would think that college sports would be the best bet for promotion and delegation in the US. Especially in something like basketball where the teams are small and therefore are easier to fund. Organize things geographically and move up and down in your area - teams likeGonzaga wouldn’t be a “mid major” anymore, they’d be up in a top conference most likely, while chronicay underachieving teams would drop down.
Most NCAA bids would come from the power conferences, with some from the 2nd tier and maybe a few from the tiers below.
Promotion and relegation will never happen in the United States for a much more fundamental reason. While in England (and Europe in general) football clubs are individual entities which decide which league to join and compete in, American teams are franchises of a league. Unless a league structured itself from the get-go as a tiered system, with the franchises being moved up and down as needed, the concept of relegation/promotion wouldn’t work here. And when setting up a league, how many prospective owners would be happy with being placed in an inferior tier, and told to work their way up to the top flight? I mean, suppose we took the NFL, and we split it into two tiers, each of 16 teams. Would the Fords really be willing to limit themselves to competing with the teams in Seattle, Kansas City, Buffalo, Arizona, etc., unless/until they managed promotion to the tier with the New York Giants, the Dallas Cowboys, the Pittsburgh Steelers, the New England Patriots, et al?
Another aspect of America that makes it more difficult to tier is geography. In England, even if you are in the fourth tier, travelling to the other end of the country to play a team isn’t that big a deal; maybe a four-five hour drive at most. But here, if you were in the fourth tier of baseball (for example), that would be the equivalent of, say, AA baseball. Can you imagine a AA team travelling cross-country? It would be out of the budget of most teams at that level. But if you regionalize the lower tiers, then you have to constantly adjust the alignment as the mix in the lower tiers changes with relegation.
I will note that some of the issues raised by others above me do not differ fundamentally from issues English soccer is facing. But I will note that the current situation at the top of the Premier League is a relatively recent phenomenom. Promotion/relegation have been around from the beginning, but prior to formation of the Premiership, the championship of the top flight was contested among a number of different clubs. And it is not really true that the same clubs get bounced from the top flight to the second tier and back: ask Leeds about this, and while you are at it, ask Fulham FC about that as well.
I watch the Buckeyes on Saturdays and the Browns on Sundays. Yeah the guys are much bigger in the NFL but at least the kids on the Buckeyes can catch a ball.
They wouldn’t get a chance with the QB on his back.
In any case, relegation could work for college football, so Vanderbilt could get kicked out of the SEC… But, really, relegation sounds good in theory, but doesn’t improve anything in practice.
I think it’s a great idea but it’ll never happen. Arguably being the most capitalist country on the planet, American sports teams operate in a very socialistic model.
Baseball is mind numblingly boring to begin with. How people can go to games that have no meaning is beyond me. I think that’s the reason stats became so important in baseball, to justify people paying any attention at all.
Add Chelsea to get the big four. But I don’t think that has anything to do with there being promotion and relegation. It is because European sports are not managed to create any semblance of parity. There are no drafts, roster limits, salary caps, unbalanced schedules. If a team can afford to go out and buy all the best players, it can (and does).
Personally, I like promotion/relegation because it adds an extra dimension of excitement to the second half of the season. Without relegation, most of the matches after Christmas would be meaningless. Plus it allows small clubs to rise through the divisions and have their moments of glory (e.g. Hull, Burnley).
It would be harder to do in the US where minor league teams are often just the reserve teams of the big clubs. This does not happen in the EPL where the reserve teams play in their own league and cannot qualify for promotion to the big leagues.
Agreed. I was not addressing the quality of the play, but rather the notion that America could not support more pro football teams than we have. The huge crowds at college football games shows that there is a market for football at a level lower than the NFL.
But what if USC could pay their players, and sign any players not on a pro team? Could a team with the funding of USC or Texas put together a team that could beat this year’s Rams? Yeah, I think they could.
Gotcha. I agree with you that there are other markets that could conceivably support a pro team (cities like Oklahoma City and Boise come to mind), but I don’t think there’s nearly enough talent to go around. Look at how many pro teams have quarterback issues. If we can’t supply 32 teams with competent players at probably the most popular and sought after position in all of American sports, then there’s no way we’d be able to fill out the rosters of even more teams.
Which leads me to another argument against a relegation system: what about the star players with big contracts and endorsement deals stuck on a relegated team? Are you going to let them out of their contract? Is Nike going to be happy paying some guy big money in endorsements when he’s not even playing in the best league?
It depends on your definition of competent. You already said that the best college team is much worse than the best NFL team. And yet hundreds of thousands of people go to watch these inferior teams every week. Clearly there is a market for “lesser” football.
This is a legitimate problem. As I understand it, in most European leagues teams can sell players (not trade, sell) during transfer windows. If your team is relegated then you generally sell some of your better players to top-division teams (or the players demand a transfer).
Although I’m pretty sure Nike would be all over an endorsement deal with Tim Tebow right now if the NCAA would allow it…
Both the team and the player have to protect themselves. A team dropping out of the EPL is unlikely to be able to afford top players. This article is a couple of years old, but even then the average revenue for a Premier League team was £69m and Championship team £13m. Hence teams have clauses in their contracts to reduce the pay of players should the team get relegated, and in return players have get-out clauses so they can leave if the team is relegated.
Those fan bases are attached to established tradition, and connection to those schools, though. The Notre Dame fan base is not going to show up to see the South Bend Beavers League 2 football team.
I think those fan bases are too inextricably tied to those colleges to divorce them as pro clubs separate from the schools.
If I was benevolent (OK, mostly benevolent) dictator of the U.S., I’d institute relegation for college sports, particularly football. That way, rather than arbitrary groupings, teams are grouped by actual ability. And we’d see competitive games every week, rather than one or two interesting matchups and a bunch of blowouts. Teams could only schedule games against teams in their tier, or possibly one tier up or down, depending on how large the tiers are. And there’d be provisions for playing out games scheduled before relegation/promotion happened, and possibly even some exceptions for longstanding rivalries (though with provisions to keep teams from gaming the system).
Of course, that will never happen absent a dictator, because the Miami (Florida)s and Ohio States need their 5 guaranteed pad-our-stats wins each year against the South Illinois Technical Junior Colleges.
Unless of course, all the sportswriters and coaches in the country who vote on polls all stop being lazy and actually look into teams’ schedules enough to decide if a 8-0 team that played six cupcakes is really better than a 6-2 team that played seven strong teams.
