It takes a very bad season to drop a rank. A team that’s been that bad could use a break from being beaten by better organizations, and so could their fans. Do we really suppose that the top and bottom teams in the present MLB are properly counted “in the same league”? They are not, and pretending that they are serves nobody but the top teams who get to pad their schedule against these Pirates and Royals. On the other hand, the Pirates and Royals are good enough to compete against AAA teams, which is not bad at all. AAA is a long way from college ball.
As I understand how it works in European football, the bottom X teams in a league each season are demoted to the next lower level, period. Every year, then, there are a few teams which have, in your words, a “very bad season.”
In 1990, the New York Yankees, arguably the crown jewel franchise of MLB, finished dead last in the NL East (and had the worst record in the American League). It was an outlier year for them, but that would theoretically have been enough to get them demoted to AAA. Just an interesting thing to think about; it’s a very different mindset from how Americans think about pro sports.
The problem with this is that the Pirates and Royals are extreme outliers. A system of relegation that had any meaning wouldn’t just demote the Pirates, it’d demote teams that had a legitimate shot at winning a World Series in the next few years.
The difference between good and bad teams in North American pro sports is in fact not that great. A relegation system would certainly have hurt the chances of the Saints to win the Super Bowl, the Marlins or Giants (or, indeed, the now-vaunted Phillies) to win the World Series, the Blackhawks to win the Stanley Cup, and so on. As has been pointed out, the Yankees in the late 80s and early 90s were a truly atrocious team and would have gotten relegated - which in North America would have resulted in a huge PR hit and loss of revenue, making it hard for the team to build the franchise it become in the 1990s while some AAA team like Louisville or Buffalo got promoted and spent at least a few years in the majors making big bucks.
If we look ast baseball (convenient for me) almost EVERY franchise has been awful in the recent past, even the ones that are powerful today. By contrast, Manchester United essentially never has a bad season. I don’t see how that system ensures more parity.
That’s right. Under typical distributions of baseball results, I’d say that the fraction of a baseball league’s teams that would be relegated is smaller than the fraction that have “very bad” seasons. I would favor a conservative system under which the teams changing levels are those that have abundantly demonstrated that they belong elsewhere.
AL East. Your better example might have been the NL Braves, who in '90 had an even worse record than the Yankees, and whose relegation after that season would have prevented their single-season “worst-to-first” transition and the classic 1991 World Series. Instead they would have torn up the International League for a year, been promoted back, and then presumably had a '92 similar to what they did have. The “worst-to-first” would have taken twice as long but shown a bigger margin between the low and high points–in literary terms we might call that a more “epic” story, so it’s basically a matter of taste as to which scenario is more fun for fans.
In any case, my feeling is that promotion and relegation would bring so many benefits to fans in different cities and of different leagues that it would be worth any such “losses.”
Except that, even in baseball, we don’t really have “minor leagues” anymore, the way we did before the major leagues went coast-to-coast, and TV made it more feasible to be a MLB fan in a smaller market. Today’s “minor leagues” are largely developmental leagues for the MLB teams.
There are currently two US-based AAA baseball leagues: the International League and the Pacific Coast League. Every one of the teams in those leagues are affiliated with a specific MLB team. Let’s say that you promote the Tacoma Rainiers, who won the PCL championship in 2010, to MLB. Tacoma’s the AAA farm team of the Seattle Mariners. Setting aside the fact that they share the same media market as an existing MLB team, a number of Tacoma’s players are under contract with the Mariners (probably including most of their best players). If the Rainiers suddenly become a direct competitor of the Mariners, how do you handle that? If the Mariners are allowed to “pull back” the Rainiers players which they have under contract, that Tacoma team is now likely significantly weaker than the one which won the PCL (and thus, earned promotion to MLB).
Yeah, my typo.
The point I was making with the Yankees is that it’s been a traditionally strong franchise (though there were certainly down eras, such as the late 60s / early 70s, and late 80s / early 90s). The Braves became a very strong team through the 1990s, yes, but had been largely down for many years before then.
Manchester Utd were relegated in 1974 only 8 years after winning the European Cup (the highest club soccer tournament in the World). They won the Second Division as it was called then the next season and were duly promoted back to the First Division (now called the Premier league) where they finsihed 3rd out of 22 in the first season back up. That’s the only season they’ve spent outside of the top division since 1938.
In reality if a genuinely big team slips out of the top divison after a diasterous season, a penny to the pound they’re back the next year. For example Juventus, one of the biggest clubs in the World were relegated for the 2006-07 season and given a 9 point deduction for that season as punishment for match-fixing. Despite the 9 point handicap they won the Serie B with extreme ease and were promoed back to the Serie A.
On the other hand of course sometimes big teams do go into longterm decline (e.g. Preston Northend who dominated the English league in the first few seasons and Nottingham Forest who won back-to-back European Cups in 1979 and 1980) and on the odd occasion a team that really has no external reason to go into decline can be relegated due to bad management (e.g. Leeds Utd, European Cup Semifinalists in 2001, relegated in 2004 and relegated again to the third tier in 2007, currently in the process of bouncing back). But for me that’s all part of the drama of soccer.
There are differences in the way that soccer and American sports operate of course as there’s no draft, clubs develop their own players and, whilst there is free agency nowdays, clubs can sign players contracted to other clubs by offering transfer fees. This all means that in soccer there isn’t the natural equalization there is in American sports so promotion and relegation would have a different effect.
On the other hand though I really find it hard to get into US sports as the draft system and allowing franchises to transfer from city to city seems to rob teams of their individuality. In soccer teams can become known for playing in a certain styles over decades and their local fanbases are seen as synonymous with the team itself.
I’m curious as to what they are.
If we’re using the Premiership as our example, the same teams finish at the top of the league every year. It’s not like North American sports, where you have some franchises that have been winning a lot and some that have been losing a lot but there’s some movement; in the EPL, it’s Man U, Arsenal, Chelsea, and usually Liverpool. You don’t have any mobility from top to bottom. For all we complain about that here, North American sports do have that.
Under a relegation system the Tampa Bay Rays’ success can’t happen. Relegated within a few years, they’d have just danced up and down over that line. Without major league status no draft pick would have signed with them; without a draft, they’d be even further behind.
Relegation rules appear to simply esconce a small group of franchises at the top of the league forever.
We do have a fair amount of the latter here in the States, as well. While we do have franchises which have changed cities (some more than once), they’re honestly in the minority.
In the NFL, for example, 22 of the 32 teams have never moved (or have moved only a few miles, such as the Boston Patriots moving just down the road to Foxboro and becoming the New England Patriots). If we look only at moves in the last 40 years, 26 of the 32 franchises have stayed put, and many teams are known for their loyal fan bases (the Cheeseheads in Green Bay, the Dawg Pound in Cleveland, etc.)
I don’t think promotion or relegation have anything to do with it. They provide excitement and consequences and opportunity which every football fan in the UK sees as their birthright. It is something that a small team supporter in the USA can never aspire to.
I think there are three other reasons why the EPL has cemented power with the top clubs.
Firstly, the amount of money going to the top clubs has increased hugely since the early 90’s. Because of television money and wealthy external benefactors. Couple this with the effects of the Bosman ruling and you have players being pushed out of the reach of most.
I would personally be in favour of a wage cap and a requirement to be financially solvent. A simple cash in > cash out.
As it is, UEFA is bringing the latter in and I think that will help redress the balance.
This is a topic for another thread (and has been of course) but NFL teams move due to stadium issues more than anything else, the stadium issue being how much of a brand new one the team can extort from the population where they are versus how much they can get from somewhere else. Currently Buffalo, Jacksonville and Minnesota are threatening to move, AFAIK. Of the others, they’ve pretty much succeeded recently in extracting new stadiums from the current locales so they’re staying put for the time being at least. Saying only 6 of 32 have moved is a bit of an understatement, given that two of those 6, the Rams and Raiders, have moved twice in 40 years. (Rams: Los Angeles to Anaheim to St. Louis, and the Raiders: Oakland to LA to Oakland).
Yup, that’s the list that I’ve seen, too.
Of the three, I think that Minnesota is the one that’s most directly related to attempting to get a new stadium, as it has been for a number of years.
The Bills are in a small, blue-collar market. They’ve been trying to expand their fan base into Canada (playing a regular season game each season in Toronto), though I’m not sure how successful that’s been, given that there’s already a CFL team there. Conventional wisdom seems to be that when Bills owner Ralph Wilson passes on, his heirs will sell the team, and the odds of it then being moved are high.
The Jacksonville situation has been discussed in other threads here. The problem there doesn’t seem to be the stadium so much as that it’s a market which probably shouldn’t have been awarded an NFL franchise in the first place. It’s not a huge market to start with; it’s surrounded by markets which had well-established NFL teams (making it difficult to expand their fan base beyond the immediate Jacksonville area); and college football is already very strong there.
I did note that some teams have moved more than once, though the Rams’ move from LA to Anaheim almost doesn’t count, as it kept them in the same media market. And, in the case of the Raiders, they simply returned to where they started.
Threatening to move is a required part of the posturing prior to a stadium lease renewal. It actually happens so rarely that the threat is simply not taken seriously by virtually anyone. Even the availability of the LA market is easily countered by pointing out that they don’t even have an NFL-caliber stadium.