UK football clubs have an interesting system that moves football clubs from one league to another if their performance is sufficiently good or bad. The top N clubs are promoted to the next higher league, and the bottom N clubs are demoted to the next lower league.
Could this work for American sports teams? I find most pro sports to be boring. It’s mostly the same teams every year. What if, every year, the worst teams were demoted to the minor leagues and replaced with the best minor league teams? I think it would add some excitement to pro sports. Rather than coasting at the end of the year, underperforming teams would have to fight to avoid the trap door in the cellar.
Honestly, I would love to see it, but with the the money at stake (stadium construction, TV contracts, merchandising, etc) the team owners would never agree to it.
I doubt the cities involved would be into the idea, either. You spend $500 million in taxpayer money to keep a team in your city, and then they drop to triple-A? Granted, it might work to put an end to that nonsense.
Sublight’s right, it wouldn’t work. It has to be built into the system from the beginning. That said, I love the idea, and it might go some way toward addressing a perennial problem, where there’s an incentive for losing teams to keep tanking so they get better draft picks.
It would also solve, or at least mitigate, the problem of payroll disparities. The markets where ownership can’t afford to compete, like Pittsburgh and Tampa Bay, would eventually get relegated and replaced by up-and-coming markets like San Antonio where the ownership was willing to spend more.
But of course, “you can’t get there from here”. The small-market owners paid hundreds of millions of dollars for their teams, and cities spent hundreds of millions of dollars on stadiums, on the premise that they had permanent major-league franchises. They have no incentive to give that up.
How did this system come about, historically, in Great Britain? Are stadium subsidies an issue? What happens if and when the multi-tiered league expands? Is relegation common in continental Europe?
Let us not ignore the fact that for the most part, it’s the same teams who get sent up and down every few years. Only rarely does a team get promoted and then set the league on fire.
Is there any reason to believe that Buffalo, Toledo, Tacoma and Oklahoma would have more success in the majors this season than Tampa Bay, Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Colorado (last year’s 4 worst teams?)
There’s also the issue of minor league players being under contract to major league clubs.
In baseball and hockey, the lesser leagues are all farm teams for the big clubs. It makes no sense to relegate the clubs when the players are clearly better than the teams that would replace them. If you promote a Yankees farm team what does that do to the leagues integrity?
There are no other leagues in football and basketball except for the developmental leagues for the big leagues. They’re not intended to be “real” clubs in any real way.
Most of the money for US sports leagues are from TV revenue. The networks would scream if they lost a major market team that was replaced by Toledo.
When I was a sportswriter in the San Francisco Bay Area, the area high schools had an upper division and a lower division, and each year the worst team in the upper division and the best team in the lower would trade places. So the idea has already percolated to parts of America.
That’s true of the NFL, which is more a television show than a live sporting event. Baseball and hockey, however, derive the majority of their revenues through ticket sales (overall; that might not be true of a few individual teams.)
Relegation systems would work just fine if you could convince a sports league to just completely and totally reorganize itself. There’s no particular reason why you couldn’t, say, start up 26 new baseball teams and then have two leagues of 28 teams with some being promoted or relegated every year. It’d be kind of cool, and I think fans would warm up to it. It’s just fiscally and legally impossible. The system would work only if you allowed teams more latitude to move - for instance, I think you’d need to allow someone to move a team into Brooklyn to compete with the Yankees and Mets, if he wanted to. But presently those teams have the right to refuse to allow someone to do this.
It might be more possible in hockey; the NHL already has at least three or four teams in deep trouble and a sub-league could accomodate those teams as well as teams in unserviced northern markets (Seattle, Portland, Milwaukee, Hartford) and smaller Canadian cities (Hamilton, Quebec, Winnipeg, Halifax.) The league could use a shakeup anyway.
It’s happened this year in the Premiership. Wigan, promoted from the Championship are in the top ten and vying for a European placing.
Bolton is also doing very well too, after being in the Premiership not that long. They’re also in the top ten vying for another UEFA cup/Champions league place. Once a team gets a foothold, they tend to do as well as any other.
I don’t know how it’s done in the U.K., but professional sports teams in the U.S. are franchises. The owner purchases rights from the league to participate in that league.
If the league were to start telling owners “Sorry, you’re not competitive enough to be a part of our league anymore. Good luck.” it would generate a lawsuit before the letter was even delivered.
I like the concept, but there’s no way it could ever work.
If the New York Mets or Los Angeles Dodgers or Chicago Cubs finished in last place (which is FAR from unthinkable), do you think owners who shelled out hundreds of millions of dollars for those franchises would agree to be demoted to the minor leagues? And do you think the television networks who want the large viewerships those teams bring would blithely let them be replaced by some minor league squad from Oklahoma City?
And how would you do a draft? Say the Texans draft Reggie Bush this year. Then yet again next year they have the worst record in the NFL and are demoted. Now you end up with a guy that many expect to be the most electrifying RB to enter the league in years and he’s not only in the minor leagues, but he has a huge contract that the owner will have trouble paying because of significantly decreased revenues.
They don’t happen in the way they do in America, and probably wouldn’t be allowed to anyway. Where a local authority assists, the usual arrangement is that they retain ownership of the stadium, and the club becomes tenants. For example, the City of Manchester Stadium is owned by the city council, and Man City have a 250-year least. And a local example of a much smaller club - Colchester Utd are getting a new stadium, with the full assistance of the local council, who bought their existing ground 15 years ago to lease it back to them, saving the club from bankrupcy.
Good question. That Wikipedia article gives an idea of all the changes to the English structure over the years, but almost always they’re shuffling around at the bottom end. It’s easy to have a one-off increase in the numbers being promoted to make room in the lowest league for new members.
Yes
Ditto West Ham. And going in the other direct, of the three relegated last year, only Crystal Palace are still in the running to bounce right back, while Southampton and Norwich have ended up mid-table. And lower down, Southend only sneaked into Division 1 by the playoffs, yet took it by storm.
Not knowing the details of the American system, I can only presume that something similar to the transfer market would be needed, where in-contract players can be bought & sold. A team dropping out of the Premiership will often sell some of their most expensive players.
English footballers do have the PFA. They don’t have any clout at the top level, although out of the spotlight in the lower leagues, they probably do have a reasonable job to do as a representative for rank-and-file players.
The significant thing is that they don’t see transfers as wrong, but as an integral part of how the game works. Again admitting my ignorance, but I’ve no idea whatsoever what “go back to the reserve clause after getting free agency” means?!
The biggest problem with relegation in U.S. sports is that I can’t scrape together a lot of money and start my own baseball team and then place it in a lower division league and try to work my way up the ladder.
Baseball is a monopoly. If you want to play with the big boys, the big boys have to invite you in. Once you’re in, they rarely kick you out. There haven’t been any major league franchises folded since the 19th century. The last halfway serious competitor to MLB was the Federal League and it lasted two seasons before WWI.
There are baseball leagues in the U.S. outside of the MLB aegis, but they are quite smalltime (like the Northern League) and those teams will never be any higher than they are now. (Around A level.)
