I didn’t want to further hijack the other thread, but I’m hoping someone could explain:
The advantage/disadvantage of promotion/relegation vs. having one major league and one or more minor leagues.
Why it matters whether the teams are tied to their home city. @griffin1977 has been super patient with me over in the main thread, but I still don’t get it.
In the US, the 2.5 of the major sports leagues (MLB, NBA, and NHL as the 0.5, since I don’t know if it still counts as a big sport here) have the major leagues and various minor leagues (the farm system in the MLB, the G- and D-leagues in the NBA, and the AHL and ECHL (at least) in hockey. All of those leagues draw talent from the lower leagues, but don’t risk relegation to them.
In the UK (and elsewhere, I imagine), teams that do poorly are relegated to a lower league and lose money, status, other stuff I imagine.
What are the advantages/disadvantages of that system? In the other thread, very patient @griffin1977 ties it to the fact that EPL teams are tied to their city, so they can be relegated and promoted without, I don’t know, losing their fan base? I still don’t see why being tied to the city is in any way related to whether a league would have pro/rel. The NY Rangers, Orioles, Pirates, Jets (both teams) were at various times awful for decades but still kept their fans.
People who follow EPL seem to think that relegation is critical and I just don’t get it.
Not just “draw talent” – the minor-league (“farm”) teams are directly controlled by the parent major-league teams, and most (if not all) of the players on those teams are under contract to the major-league team.
The easiest way I think it is to understand the pros of pro/rel is to consider being a fan of a minor league baseball team. I’m in Indianapolis, so I’ll use that as example. Last year, Paul Skenes started the season with the Indianapolis Indians (let’s ignore the current MLB contract system for a moment and assume the Indians actually held Skenes under contract). It was cool to go see him pitch, but I was under no illusions that he was an Indian - he was a Pirate-in-waiting. In fact, over the last 20 years of going to Indians games, I’ve seen a lot of talented players come and go, only to be absolutely wasted at the major league level by an incompetent team.
It would be a lot of fun to see the Indians actually be able to keep and develop that talent, build a fan base around that sort of team, and see them get promoted.
Of course that’ll never happen, because there’s simply no way to disentangle MLB from its current farm franchise system.
I think that non-American fans of Pro-Rel don’t understand the American Farm System (and I’m referring to athletic talent, not agricultural crops). The entity that owns the Chicago Cubs also owns a number of “farm” teams. The biggest farm team, in the biggest secondary league, is the Iowa Cubs, in AAA (our second tier of baseball), produces players who will, maybe, one day play for the Chicago Cubs. Or they’ll get traded, moved to other farm teams, picked up by another MLB team, etc. Same is true for the players on the Knoxville Smokies (AA), South Bend Cubs (High A), and Myrtle Beach Pelicans (A). They’re all part of the Chicago Cubs system. The same is true for every other MLB team and its farm system.
Where as the business entity that owns Machester United (EPL) does not own any teams playing in lower-tier leagues. Or maybe they do, I don’t know. But regardless, a player playing for, say, Milwall (EFL Championship) is not the “property,” so to speak, of any EPL team, and his career prospects aren’t determined by the Front Office of any EPL team. Manchester United is its own thing, Milwall is its own thing, and so on and so forth.
I suppose an argument could be made for Pro-Rel in Major League Baseball. But it would require dismantling the farm system, else there could be a situation in which, say, the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp are competing against the Miami Marlins. But Jacksonville is Miami’s AAA affiliate, so basically two teams owned by the same entity would be competing against each other. That would be weird.
College football absolutely acts as a minor/developmental league for the NFL; the other distinction, of course, is that, unlike minor league baseball, the NFL and its teams have no direct (or even indirect) control of the players before they leave college, and no control over the college football teams and leagues.
It’s become a mutually-beneficial (if technically unofficial) symbiotic relationship for both levels.
As I mention in the other thread I think it’s two fundamentally different and incompatible ways of deciding which teams get to play in the top tier…
The franchise system that the US uses for all its domestic sports. Where the league is all powerful. It 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.
In system 1 if you want a top tier sports team playing in your home town you lobby the people running the league. Invite them to expensive weekend trips to your hometown, showing how vibrant and sports loving it is (over all expenses paid dinners), and try and convince them to take a team away from another town and move it to your town.
In system 2 if you want a top tier sports team playing in your home town you invest in your small local team, that’s playing in the lower leagues, in the hope that with a few good players and a decent manager they can rise through the leagues and end up in the top tier
Or, at least over the past 60-ish years, try to convince them to award an expansion franchise to your town. That said, the four major North American sports leagues are unlikely to be doing a lot more expansion at this point; MLB (currently at 30 teams) is still looking at adding two new teams in the next few years, but there doesn’t seem to be serious talk about the NFL, NHL, or NBA adding more teams in the near-to-mid future.
I really appreciate your patience with me on this, but I still don’t see why it matters whether it’s a franchise system or not.
Let’s say you took all the AAA teams in baseball and made them the lower tier teams. Then, when the Pirates and Orioles come in last, they are relegated and the top AAA teams come up. What does that have to do with whether it’s a franchise system and whether the teams are tied to the city/town? Promotion and relegation would still be based on performance.
One advantage of pro/rel: better teams make the big leagues, so teams that are perpetually awful get put down to the lower tiers.
Disadvantages: The loss of money, disruption of rivalries and fan bases – I don’t even understand how a team comes back from that. If a team like Arsenal were relegated, how could they even afford their players, their giant stadium, etc. Let’s say they spent 5 years in the woods – how do they ever come back?
Arsenal is one of the “Big 6” in EPL: the six teams (the others are Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Liverpool, and Tottenham Hotspur) which dominate the league, and have much deeper financial resources (and generally better players) than the rest of the EPL, much less teams in the lower divisions. If Arsenal has a horrible season, and gets relegated to EFL Championship, odds are high that they will still have the resources and players to dominate play in that league, and get promoted back to EPL pretty quickly.
The Mets have tons more resources than smaller-market teams and consistently do poorly. Having a bad front office, over-paying for talent that doesn’t pan out, etc., can make any team bad.
Oh, absolutely. My point was that if an Arsenal somehow got relegated, I doubt that they would be out of the EPL for very long.
If relegation were a thing in baseball, and the Mets got relegated to AAA ball, they would undoubtedly still dominate play against teams at that lower level, and be right back in MLB in short order.
I’m sure you’re right, because that has been the case for generations now.
But, going back to the Mets, they have a huge expensive stadium and one of the highest payrolls in baseball. If they got relegated and lost a big chunk of their revenue, how do they even survive with those expenses?
In the EPL, some players have no relegation clauses – does the team just lose their contract and they become free agents? Let’s assume the Mets’ best players had those – now, they have a huge expensive stadium, still a lot of payroll, and have now lost their best players. What’s next?
As I noted in the edit to my previous post: even if they were relegated, they’d be back in MLB in a year or two. They’d take a financial bath in the meantime.
A proper relegation fight is one of the most exciting things in sport. Several underperforming teams desperately scrapping to avoid catastrophe. It creates a jeopardy with a different type of excitement than that found at the top of the league. It means that games are seriously meaningful all the way through the league. It creates upsets as the better teams hardly ever play someone with nothing to fight for. And it also creates an enormous reward for the winners of the lower divisions.
Manchester United, Juventus, River Plate, AC Milan, Chelsea and Liverpool have all suffered relegation at some point in their histories, plus probably every other club you care to name. It’s healthy. Manchester City have been relegated ELEVEN TIMES from the top division in England.
Whether or not it’s currently right for US soccer is something I cannot say. But it’d be a great statement of intent if they managed to make something like that work.
I have to admit, it’s weird to see how little effort a soccer team will put in if there’s nothing on the line. I went to go see an Arsenal game in person, and it was some home/away thing that they just had to lose by less than four or something, and they just didn’t try. The crowd was furious.
I don’t recall seeing something like that here in the US. Even teams that are suspected of tanking in order to get a better draft position seem to play pretty hard.
You’ll see a lack of effort towards the end of a game (called garbage time) if the game is essentially won by then, but I haven’t seen it through a whole game the way Arsenal just passed it around without seeming to try to win.
Oh I have. I watched it this year. In Major League Baseball, the Seattle Mariners clinched the #2 seed in the divisional round of the playoffs and had no chance of getting the #1 seed. This happened with another series still to come, where the Dodgers would be coming to Seattle to close out the regular season.
Seattle used that series as an opportunity to rest some of their key players, and also give some starting time to players that they wanted to get a little extra game time ahead of being called in as reserve during the playoffs. The focus wasn’t on winning the games, and they got swept. I’m not saying that the players themselves showed zero effort, but the gameplan was clearly not with a focus on winning, because winning didn’t actually matter for the club at that point.
You also see that in the NFL, when a team clinches a playoff spot before the end of the season and they pull just about all of their starters for the last game or two of the regular season. Because they don’t want to risk injuring someone important in a game that ultimately doesn’t matter. Same with preseason games.
Now, if what you’re describing is accurate, where players were just goofing around on the field and not even really playing, just passing the ball to run out the clock as a formality, I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of anything that dramatic. Professional athletes are going to be doing their best at everything they do, because that’s part of being a professional. Unless it’s done for a very specific reason for a particular play, like a baseball player bunting or a football player intentionally avoiding a touchdown to maintain possession and run out the clock. But those particular plays are still being made with the goal of winning a game.
IIRC, one reason “tanking” teams in America still play hard is because the players want what benefits their career. Even if for a lost season with no playoff hopes, a running back knows he may be able to land a big free-agent contract in the offseason if he can get 15 rushing touchdowns in a season or something like that.