Another aspect of English-style leagues is that they play for a championship with no playoff. You play a double-round robin and that’s it. Home and home with every other team in the league, then you are done and whoever is at the top wins. The single-elimination stuff is left for a season-long tournament, with a different winner. Makes the regular season actually MEAN something.
And as for college v pro teams, the day that all senior graduating players from Florida get drafted is the day I’ll suspect that Florida has a chance against the Lions.
Can someone who understands this whole relegation thing explain it to me in terms of – say – American baseball?
Let’s say you have a perennially bad team – in baseball terms, the Kansas City Royals. Over the prescribed time period (one year, five years or whatever) the Royals suck. So they get relegated to the next lower league (in baseball terms, the International or Pacific Coast League) and the strongest PCL team (let’s say Albuquerque) gets promoted. Am I following this, so far?
Let’s say that even a bad MLB team is still a very good team in the Pacific Coast League, and the Royals win the championship. They get promoted back to the Major Leagues and another team (Albuquerque or the Pirates) gets relegated. Right?
Then another year goes by and the Royals still suck at the MLB level, while the Pirates are good enough to win at the lower level. That would mean the Royals get relegated and the Pirates get promoted?
Meanwhile, a few times like the Yankees, the Red Sox and the Dodgers remain competitive every year and never have to worry about relegation.
Exactly who does this system benefit? There’s always going to be a best team, and there’s always going to be a worst team. Isn’t the end result that the Royals, the Pirates and Albuquerque end up shuffling leagues while the good teams still play for the championship?
And since it’s the MLB teams that participate in the draft, doesn’t getting relegated hurt the worst teams even more, since they don’t participate in the draft during their relegation years?
You have the basic setup exactly correct (except that generally more than one team gets relegated - for the EPL it is three - although the three going up come from the top five, I think, in a playoff of sorts).
And you are also correct that it doesn’t really help the bad teams compete for titles. The European model doesn’t really even claim to be interested in the “parity” that is so desired by American leagues (hence the “socialist” comment above). The very best teams have (generally) been the very best for a long time, and nobody really has as problem with that.
There are no drafts in the English Premier League, and in fact young talent is routinely scooped up by the top teams at very young ages to play in their youth academies.
As far as who it benefits - well, it nominally benefits the fans. If a team in a lower league manages to assemble a quality, compelling team their fans are rewarded by winning their league and then competing against better opponents the following year. And maybe a Hull City sticks around for a few seasons and becomes more of a fixture in the top-flight league - this is a massive win for their fans and the team.
Also, it incentives competitiveness, or at least disincentives massive failure. You can’t mismanage your team, rake in revenue sharing dollars, and suck every year. There is a great reward for not being the worst, which makes those bottom-half teams fight very hard for their placement (certainly harder than the Royals did this year).
The top teams do tend to stay the same. However, there is much more movement than your hypothetical scenario would suggest. In the English Premier League this year, of the 20 teams only 9 of them were in the EPL in the 1999/2000 season. However, 8 of those 9 occupied positions 1 - 6, 8 & 9 in the league last season.
Just noting that European relegation is even more impossible in American baseball than in any other sport, because all of the teams in the second-tier league (and most of the teams in even lower tiers) are farm teams for particular top-tier teams.
So what happens in American baseball is that individual players get promoted if they do well, say from the AAA Pawtucket Red Sox up to the major (top) league Boston Red Sox. And similarly, players not performing will be sent down (though of course most individuals will retire before being sent down too far, and teams are probably slower to send someone down than to bring them up). But relegating a team would disrupt the whole system.
How would free agents work in this system? If I were looking to get a big payday or a long contract, I sure as hell am not going to want to be signed to a team that looks like its going to fall out of the league. Wouldn’t that just hurt these weaker teams unfairly?
In any given season, free agency isn’t going to help most teams (the NFL is somewhat of an exception). Looking at baseball, teams like the Yankees and Red Sox can benefit from free agency every season to reload and add what they think they need. The majority of the league can’t look at it that way. They have to go through a cycle of developing prospects and building a competitive team. It’s only when they’ve built a competitive team that a big free agent signing or two makes sense. It really doesn’t matter if the relegated teams are barred from acquiring the big name free agents because they have to build a team first.
It may even provide a benefit to a relegated team. I’m thinking of a team like the Orioles, who won the AL East in 1997 and haven’t been to the post-season since. Up until a couple of seasons ago they kept blowing large chunks of their payroll on big name free agents to try and stay competitive with New York and Boston. If they had been relegated (maybe after the 2001 season, when they went 63-98), perhaps they could have taken a deep breath and restocked their farm system.
The other big plus of the promotion/relegation system is it stops the carpetbagging and stadium extortion that takes place in American/Canadian Leagues. If Oklahoma City wants a top tier team, then they can start a team and earn their way to the top and not steal a team from Seattle.
Another problem with promotion/relegation is that, at least in baseball and hockey, there are minor league affiliations.
If MLB teams get sent down to International/Pacific Coast League or NHL teams down to the AHL, then what happens to the affiliated team down there? Are they ordered to drop games to the previous major league team in order to prop up their big club, or send all of their prospects over?
They could if the American leagues weren’t socialist collectives. As it stands now, though, Oklahoma City most certainly cannot start their own team unless they manage to convince MLB/NFL to let them. Good luck with that.
Free agentry is relatively new in the European soccer leagues, and they are only just beginning to work out the kinks in the system. In the past, a player was essentially owned by a team. When a team wanted to get a new player, they paid the team who had the rights to the player a transfer fee. That is, they bought the player, then signed him to a contract, but the catch was that he couldn’t go anywhere else after the contract ended. Now, that’s no longer true, so teams have to calculate when to sell players’ rights in order not to be stuck allowing good players to leave on a “free transfer.” We’ve been dealing with it in the US since the 70s, and we still don’t have it down.
One issue with relegation/promotion is financial. A team trying for promotion can end up splurging on players in an attempt to get promotion through sudden talent increase. Even when it works, it isn’t a guarantee that the financial boost from promotion to a new batch of more prestigious opponents, with its increased revenue stream, will result in enough revenue to cover the promotion splurge. Hull City right now are balanced on a knife’s edge, because two seasons ago they splurged in an attempt to make the Premiership. They made it, but are hanging around the bottom of the table now for the second year in it. If they get relegated, they will have to sell a bunch of players to have enough money to pay the bills that are coming due. And even if they stay up another season, there is no guarantee that the money they will get from being in the Premiership will keep them solvent. :eek:
The club was promoted in 2007/2008. During the calendar year 2007, Hull spent precisely £1.6 million on transferred in players, £1 million of this being invested in Caleb Folan who was bought from Wigan. In 2008, up to the time of their promotion in May, the club spent nothing whatsoever on new players.
While baseball and hockey have the ideal set up for a relegation system because they already have minor league facilities in place, those farm systems also, paradoxically, are the reason relegation would never work in those sports unless the MLB/NHL could be persuaded to sell off their farm teams to the locals.
Frex: The Minnesota Twins would divest themselves of any interest in the Rochester Red Wings, and the latter would become an independent organization in its own right. Which doesn’t mean the Twins wouldn’t have its own youth development team a la European football. I can conceive of a set-up in which “a day at the ballpark” is a whole day: The JV teams play in the morning or at noon, the varsity plays the afternoon or night game.
Now I like baseball but I sincerely doubt that even the most dedicated Yankees fan pays any attention at all to what’s going on in Scranton/Willkes-Barre - they’re a local PA team; their fans are from PA, not NYC. I can imagine that even casual baseball fans would appreciate seeing their up-and-comers on a regular and local basis rather than a “Where’s that guy from?” sense.
Some American high school leagues have used promotion/relegation; I think it works fairly well there since generally there isn’t much choice about the athletes that are coming in, so shifts are likely.
I agree that it might work well for college, though there’s the problem of scholarships. Currently part of the distinction between the various divisions is in the availability of sports scholarships; it’d be strange to have the team’s performance and when the sport is played alter who gets accepted for the next year (or worse, cause students to be kicked out if the team loses).
Sort of, yeah, but the point I garbled was that it would be theoretically possible to set up a promotion/relegation system for American sports, but it is not possible to allow a city to just arbitrarily decide to form a team and join in on the fun.
For example, this year’s NFL season is a perfect example of haves and have nots. They could split up the league into three tiers pretty simply, since there are around 8 quality teams, 8 worthless teams, and 16 middle of the road teams. Toss the top two and bottom two from the middle group to the upper and lower tiers and you’re good to go.
This would be an example of a promotion/relegation system in American sports. You said one of the advantages of such a system would be allowing an Oklahoma City to start their own team. This is not the case, since they would not be able to without permission from the NFL.
Maybe I’m reading you wrong so please correct me if I am.
Are you proposing that, with your version of promotion/relegation, the entire football system is composed of no more than 30-something teams just as it is now? If that is so I think you’re missing something. There are 20 teams in the UK’s top flight - call it the NFL. There are another 72 teams in the next three levels (24 in each), never mind the hundreds of teams in the conference level and below. Oklahoma City could easily start a team and if management is good enough they’d gradually get promoted up to “the NFL” and eventually take the place of the Detroit Lions.