The theory is that instead of sports teams being “franchises” that chosen by big business, and can be moved around at will. They are inherently local institutions, tied to the local community. If you are a small town who’s community really cares about their football team, the support combined with a good manager and a bit of luck, will mean your team will rise to the top tier, at the expense of the big city team who’s over paid journeymen are underperforming.
Of course there would be a lot of issues in practice. The main one IMO being is it relies on grassroots support for local small town football teams in the bottom tiers. That just doesn’t happen in the US (that niche in the sporting market is taken by College and High school* sports in the US). Plus the teams would still be franchises presumably, so if it did happen there would be nothing stopping the owners moving the team out of the small town into the big city to make more money
‘*’ - this is one of the weird unexpected things coming to the US. The idea that you’d follow your local high school sports team even if you didn’t have any kids in the school, is super weird to people outside the US. In the UK if a random adult, with no connection to the school, turned up to a school sports game they would get a talking to by the police.
We definitely do not have enough qualified club teams in the US for relegation to work. Is there even a minor league?
So, the theory is that Arsenal could never be moved from that arena? Is that true? Could Man City relocate to, I don’t know, Edinburgh if some billionaire owner wanted to do that?
Nope. It would unthinkable (moving to another arena in the same area happens a lot, including Arsenal recently who moved from their old ground Highbury to The Emirates, but it would be unthinkable to move to another region).
It’s been done once in the English league. Wimbledon FC a legendary overperforming small London team (famous for their “energetic” defending, and where Vinnie Jones made his name) that went bankrupt and was relocated to Milton Keynes as the MK Dons. It was massively controversial and MK Dons are still a pariah in some circles. They were replaced by a new team in Wimbledon (Wimbledon AFC) which are currently in a higher league than MK Dons
OK, but it seems to me that promotion/relegation is orthogonal to how tied a team is to a city. That is, you could have promotion/relegation in, say, the MLB (especially since baseball has the most extensive minor leagues), but still move teams around willy-nilly.
Yes, with a link in Post #6 explaining things. We have four leagues, not (eight or nine or ten or however many the UK has). But there is no movement between the leagues. Ozark FC in Rogers, Arkansas (population: ~60k, like Wrexham) will remain in the fourth-tier league for eternity, or until Pro-Rel is instituted in US Soccer.
It seems like that wouldn’t work. Like why would you keep the franchise in the same town after relegation? (or promotion for that matter). It would make the most business sense (in many cases at least) to just swap franchises between the promoted and relegated town and the whole system would break.
Because that’s where your fan base is. The Cubs didn’t win the World Series for multiple generations, but they still didn’t move. If they were relegated, but still had Wrigley Field and their fan base, they wouldn’t move.
I find this all very confusing – I really don’t see the tie to the city has being relevant to whether you have relegation, but maybe this is too far afield for this thread.
On the topic of this thread, I can’t even imagine how empty the seats are for the games below the MLS, and certainly two levels down. We don’t have the fan base, and we have too many competing sports, to make that work here, if you ask me. And, I’ll reiterate that trying to compete with the NFL and NBA (and NHL, I guess) seems like a mistake.
I agree. I have absolutely no idea what is compelling an investor (or group of investors) to put money into putting a team in Rogers Fucking Arkansas. Yes, NW Arkansas is more progressive than the rest of the state, but these things are all relative, and I just don’t see the people of that region caring enough about soccer to fill a stadium so many times per year. So either someone did their market research and concluded that Rogers is ready for a professional, 4th-tier soccer team, or somebody has money to burn on their hobbies and is running this up the flagpole to see if anyone salutes. The people of Rogers would much rather spend their free time watching TV, watching college football, or watching MLB Baseball (I guess they’d support Kansas City or Maybe St. Louis).
IMO Fundamentally it’s two different ways of deciding who gets to play in the top tier..
The franchise system that the US uses for all its domestic sports. Where the league decides which teams should play where, and moves teams from one region to another and adds teams, as they see fit.
A league system with relegation and promotion. Where teams drop down to the division below when they finish bottom, and are promoted when they finish top.
a “Center” division of 12 teams that play 22 home/away games within the division and 9 games against the “outer” division teams
the multiple “outer” divisions play a similar type schedule but, being smaller, play more single games against teams in other outer divisions
all the Center division teams qualify for a 3-game cup-style round, along with the top four outer division teams, which determines cup playoff contenders
Center division promotion/relegation scheme is partially dependent on the cup round results, as it is the tail part of the regular season: if a team is 0-3 in the cup round, it must be moved to/remain in an outer division
The Center division promotion/relegation pattern would, unlike non-American leagues, be a more elaborate calculation and would probably be more dynamic (not a fixed number of teams). A team might be promoted to Center if it failed to make the cup round but a team that might not have otherwise been sent out was blanked in the cup round.
Right. College football is probably the best example that would work for US sports, with teams like the Texas Longhorns and Oklahoma Sooners moving from the Big 12 to the SEC being a kind of de facto promotion, since they would likely make the playoffs as the 3rd or 4th best team in the SEC bout would almost certainly miss out of the playoffs as the 3rd or 4th best team in the Big 12.
It is possible for a club to disaffiliate with one league and reaffiliate with another, but that’s a business decision rather than a sporting decision.
Discussions of a pro-rel system for U.S. soccer usually happen on a basis similar to this:
Pro-rel advocates point out the advantage that the system gives for competitive soccer, keeping more matches meaningful for at least one side of each match late into the season.
Naysayers will point out that pro-rel was a historical development from a time when professionalism was only beginnning to affect the game, when clubs were literally just that (rather than modern corporate entities), and in a location where travel costs in terms of finances and time were lower than they were in the U.S. Forcing MLS into a pro-rel system would tend to dry up investment in league franchises (which are trying to generate returns in a hugely competitive sports market), making player acquisition harder, and ultimately undermining the growth that the sport needs to thrive in the U.S. Assertions of the competitive advantage of pro-rel fly in the face of the fact that there have been only 7 Premier League teams to have won the league in 34 years of existence, while 8 MLS teams have won MLS Cup in the last ten years (ditto for the Supporters’ Shield, a perhaps better analog as it is the “regular season points” award).
