That’s what it looked like to me, and to the fans around me who were screaming their heads off about the quality of the play.
I don’t blame them. It sounds like when you go to a concert, and the band is drunk, with the lead singer unable to stay in key or forgetting the words, and the instruments sounding awful.
Haha! Yup.
Anyway, I can see management playing different players if they don’t want the stars to get hurt right before the playoffs, but the players they use will be working their buns off to try and become starters.
What I don’t recall seeing is the players themselves totally slacking.
My understanding is that there are (usually?) affiliated junior teams (under 18 and under 21) associated to the main club.
That is my understanding, as well, but junior teams and leagues are (AIUI) developmental teams for the “adult” clubs, and are different from the professional adult teams and leagues which play at lower levels in the English system. In other words: an EPL team can get demoted down to a lower level such as EFL Championship, but they can’t get demoted into a league of “junior teams.”
Here’s how I think about relegation and demotion, as an American sports fan who has very little experience outside of American sports.
In most of our major American sports leagues, you have some kind of limited postseason. In the regular season, everyone plays a regular schedule, however many games it is in that particular sport. At the end of the regular season, a small number of teams have a record that is strong enough to qualify them for the postseason, and then they enter a sort of bracketed tournament format, where teams get eliminated each round, until fewer and fewer are left, and finally there is a championship that determines the winner.
We make a distinction between teams that qualify for the postseason, and those that don’t. Those that don’t are at a lower tier, and hope that next year they will be good enough to qualify for the postseason to compete for a chance to be champions.
Imagine that it doesn’t reset each year though. That teams that make the postseason are still teams that are in the postseason, and can continue to compete at that level, unless they do so poorly they will fall out again. But it will likely take more than just one good year to qualify, they have to work up to it. And conversely, one bad year isn’t likely to eliminate them. That would be equivalent to promotion and relegation.
And then imagine it’s not just teams who make the postseason, but multiple levels of qualification. You have to have sustained success to climb the ladder to eventually compete at that level. So it’s not just a simple case of sitting things out at the end of the year, but a case of seeing how well you rate and what level you are able to be at. You have more to root for than being the league champion.
It’s almost like taking the idea of a sports dynasty, as we see in American sports, where a team consistently keeps being a contender or even a repeat champion, and formalizing that. Or conversely, taking one of the awful dumpster fire teams that has one losing season after another (yeah, you know what teams I am talking about) and formalizing that as well.
The funny thing is, that runs counter to what American sports strive for. Most leagues work to achieve some kind of parity in various ways, whether it’s through salary caps, or giving compensatory draft picks for losing certain players, or being able to choose earlier in a draft based on having a poor record. We like the idea that any team can theoretically win every year, or fall every year, despite how well they did the previous year. We don’t necessarily want the same team to be great year after year after year, or awful year after year. Yet, we still see that in most if not all sports to a degree.
The idea of embracing that, formalizing it, and yet also giving you something to root for other than simply making the postseason, I find that very interesting. I like the novelty. I like the idea of at least one major sport being run like that in the US.
The franchise system of American sports is designed to maximize franchise value by capping the number of franchises.
That cannot be done in a national organization with an unlimited number of clubs.
Altoona should have a club, fighting for promotion and a chance at the big boys in Harrisburg and Binghamton. Or fighting to keep from being cast down into the darkness with the likes of Biglerville.
I won’t even argue the merits of pro/rel with any of you. This is a matter of personal values.
If we look back 70 to 100 years in American professional team sports (which was mostly baseball and football at that point), it was, in a certain way, more like what professional association football (soccer) is like in England.
No, there wasn’t promotion and relegation, but there were large numbers of professional teams and leagues, particularly in the smaller cities and outside of the Northeast and Midwest, which competed with each other, many of which had fervent, if local, fan bases. It was an era in which there were no MLB teams playing west (or south) of St. Louis, and no NFL teams playing west of Chicago and Green Bay. This was partially due to cross-country travel being much lengthier in the time before widespread use of airliners, but also because the U.S.'s population was far more centered in the Northeast and Midwest.
The “minor leagues” in baseball were generally independent of the majors, until teams like the Cardinals and Yankees began to establish their own “farm systems” of minor-league teams in the 1920s and 1930s. Baseball fans in, say, Kansas City, Dallas, or San Francisco might pay attention to what was happening in the majors, though primarily via print coverage; most of them were more likely fans of their local minor-league teams.
The Pacific Coast League was a “minor” baseball league, but by the 1940s and 1950s, the level of play in the PCL was getting to the point where it was creeping up on MLB in play level, up until the Dodgers and Giants moved to California. Similarly, by the late '40s, there were NFL (and/or AAFC) teams in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Plus, in baseball, there were the Negro Leagues, which, of course, came to be because blacks weren’t allowed to play in the white leagues.
And, in the case of football, it was college football which had the big fan base, and was seen as the most important level of the sport, up until the 1950s; the NFL and other professional leagues had a comparatively niche appeal. College conferences were all very regional in their memberships, and unless it was in the handful of postseason bowl games, playing schools from another region wasn’t common.
All of that changed when the NFL and MLB moved teams to the west (and, later, to the south), when air travel made it more feasible for teams to travel across the country to play each other frequently, and when radio and (especially) TV made it easier to follow teams that weren’t based in your city. The minor leagues became quaint oddities, farm systems for the majors, or died out.
My WAG is that college association made it easier to be invested in a team than some arbitrary professional league team. The oldest still-existing NFL teams are the Bears and Cardinals (with the Packers just a year younger). The Bears were initially the Decatur Staleys, a company team for A. E. Staley food company. Likewise, the Green Bay Packers were originally a company team for the Indian Packing Company.
And the Cardinals were originally the Morgan Athletic Club formed by a neighborhood group in the South Side of Chicago, which was bought by a painting and building contractor who moved them to Normal Field on Racine Avenue, and they became the Racine Normals. They then got uniforms that were considered “cardinal red” in color, and were renamed the Racine Cardinals, then later the Chicago Cardinals.
Funny enough, the Staleys/Bears uniforms were old University of Illinois uniforms, which were blue and orange, and that’s why the Bears uniforms are still that color (though darker shades of those colors). The Cardinals uniforms were old faded uniforms from the University of Chicago, which used the maroon color, and that faded maroon was rebranded to “cardinal red”. So both teams were basically imitating existing college teams in appearance.
To get back to my point, though, company sponsorship (which was the origin of early pro football in the US) isn’t something that’s likely to spur a rabid fanbase as much as being part of a college. It seems crazy now, given how different things are today (with NFL football being the biggest sports league in the country) but looking back it makes total sense why the college level was so much more popular at the time.
And the Packers originally wore blue and gold – and those were frequently their colors up through the mid '50s – as founder Curly Lambeau had played at Notre Dame.
I didn’t know that, so interesting!
Those AAA teams are raided of their best players to support the MLB club whenever the situation calls for it. The goal of a AAA player to be called up to the Show, not to win games for the Durham Bulls. The managers of those AAA teams know their job, and it’s not to win games. It’s to develop talent for the parent club. Winning games along the way is fine but that’s the purpose of the farm system. They are fundementally unable to support themselves without the direct investment from the major league clubs, and the level of play in incompatible with direct competion with an MLB club.
Those teams have small stadiums in small cities, no significant fan base and no draw when they travel. Who wants to see the Dodgers play the Toledo Mudhens? The historic model of how farm teams and league driven sports developed in the US is fundementally opposed to regulation.
This isn’t to say regulation isn’t a fine way of running things, but there’s too much historical inertia in the US model for it to work here.
Not in England, but in Spain, reserve teams play in the same league system as the parent teams.
Has a reserve team ever met the parent team, in, say, the Copa del Rey?
I don’t think reserve teams are allowed to participate in the Copa del Rey.
I know they’re not allowed to play in the same league. I don’t know what happens if Barca B was in the Segunda Division and then Barca A got relegated. Force relegation of B?
I know how the system works now, but my question is, why would promotion/relegation only work in a system where teams were tied to the city (say, the Brooklyn Dodgers were unable to move). That was one of the reasons someone stated about why pro/rel wouldn’t work in a franchise system – if the teams aren’t tied to their city then, something?
Also in Germany. We have three pro-leagues, 1st, 2nd and 3rd Bundesliga (and a semi-pro league, Regionalliga, divided into 5 regional divisions). Second teams of clubs that play 1st or 2nd league cannot play higher than 3rd league. Most second teams of the 1st Bundesliga clubs play either 3rd Bundesliga or Regionalliga.
It has happened in the DFB Pokal (the equivalent of the Copa del Rey). In 1977, Bayern Munich played against their own second team and won 5-3. This isn’t possible anymore, nowadays second teams are no longer allowed to play the DFB Pokal.
(sorry, only German link)
This is why America will never really compete on the world stage. I’m amazed at how many teams football teams Germany has!
Out of curiosity, what other team sports are big? Basketball, I guess? Handball? Field hockey?
The biggest draws spectator-wise are the three football (soccer) pro-leagues. (Ice-)hockey and handball compete for the second most popular sport, basketball is a close fourth. Although our national teams (men and women) traditionally are in the world class, field hockey as a spectator sport is rather niche.
Note that I only mentioned the men’s pro-leagues, we have many more clubs and teams that play amateur leagues. Google tells me that there are 24,000 football clubs in Germany, with 135,000 individual teams playing in the league system (including women’s and youth leagues).