I’m sure they do. The fact that North American leagues are different does not mean all the people who support them are stupid. It’s okay for things to be done differently, you know.
That said, the relegation/pr0omotion system is a hell of a lot MORE permanent, if you will, that being abysmal usually is in the North American system. European premier soccer leagues have a level of competitive imbalance which American (and Canadian) fans would absolutely not accept. The top soccer leagues are always dominated, for years on end, by a handful of teams, to an extent with no recent comparison in North American sports.
I think this is definitely the case; in US pro sports, the parity enforcement mechanisms tend to squash dynasties out pretty effectively over a long period. There are still teams that are perennially good (Patriots) and bad (Browns) , but those are more due to the effects of management and coaching, rather than just getting past some kind of tipping point where you make so much money that you always have the best team, and therefore, have the cash to keep ensuring that you always do.
Actually, it is more having a very well-off owner who can bankroll the team. To try and combat this UEFA has brought in rules regarding how much of a loss a team can run to:
The section on “Wealthy Benefactors” is of particular interest.
Look at Chelsea. They were in the second tier in the late 90s. In 2003 they were sold to Roman Abramovich and then they win the 2004-5 and 2005-6 seasons due to massive spending and running the club at a loss, as well as four FA Cups in a six year span.
Then there’s Manchester City. They were bought in 2008 by the Abu Dhabi United Group. After the 2008-2009 season they went into overdrive, spending an insane amount of money. Word is around 1000 million GBP was spent on players and facilities (mostly players). Now let’s look at how their league positions changed:
2001-2002 1st in Division 1, promoting them to the Premier League
2002-2003 9th
2003-2004 16th
2004-2005 8th
2005-2006 15th
2006-2007 14th
2007-2008 9th
2008-2009 10th
Crazy Spending starts here, although a fair amount was also spent during the previous season
2009-2010 5th
2010-2011 3rd
2011-2012 1st
2012-2013 2nd
2013-2014 1st
They went from mid-table also-rans to serious contenders for five seasons in a row (and right now are second) purely due to their owners being able to run them at a huge loss as a vanity venture. THAT is the huge, huge problem, not teams earning so much that they have the best team.
I wasn’t insinuating that they were stupid as much as I was wondering if they were aware of how it worked. The replies in the last page or two indicate that they mostly understand it but still make some assumptions based on how American sports are structured now.
One trade-off that we haven’t discussed much is that the price we pay here for parity is having a limited number of teams at the major league levels. It was noted that you simply pick a team to support if you don’t happen to live in a town with one of its own and everybody is supposed to be ok with that. An open system certainly has competitive imbalances in the top level but by nature clubs find their own level of competition and everybody can have one of their own. We can’t wrap our heads around that concept here but while everybody may want to see Chelsea play Arsenal, the exploits of Rochdale AFC matter even more to the humble few residents of Rochdale.
Relative to the size of the country there is no tradeoff. The English Premier League has twenty clubs playing top level soccer in an area that has a tiny fraction of the physical area covered by a North American sports league and maybe one seventh the population. The Bundesliga is much less dense (18 teams in a larger country than England) but still vastly more teams per person than in North America. The NFL, just to cover the USA, would have to have over one hundred teams to match the level of service the Bundesliga does. There are far MORE top league teams proportional to the fan base in Europe.
Every town has a sports team of some sort. People in Toledo cheer for the Mud Hens, even though the Hens are not a major league team; they also cheer for the Detroit Tigers, the major league team that’s closest by. People in Sidney, Ohio cheer for the Ohio State University football team, which is in effect the level below the NFL. People in London, Ontario cheers for the London Knights, the junior OHL hockey team, but also choose from a range of NHL teams to root for. There’s always a local rooting interest.
Essentially, the top professional league in a North American sport is treated as a separate market, a separate thing, than lower leagues.
That means I can root for my college team, my local Single-A minor league team in my small city and my local major league team, an hour’s drive away.
I can be loyal to all of them and those loyalties don’t conflict. Each one is in a league that represents a different level of play and is thus essentially a different sport.
But American sports fans already have reasons to be joyous. Our college team can win its conference. Our local minor league team can win a championship. And our local major league team can be (ahem) world champions.
And at each level we can be part of a different affinity group representing a different phase of life. It gives us multiple chances to celebrate and form bonds with different groups of people.
Why would we ever exchange that for a chance to celebrate being promoted to the second division? That seems like cold comfort.
No, we are not. Going to promotion-relegation seems like it’s just taking something away from us without giving us anything in return.
I’d argue that that is a HUGE problem with FFP. It’s basically the already rich clubs saying that other teams can’t join the party, at least not easily. Why isn’t it a good thing that rich billionaire owners have made Chelsea and ManCity competitive? Yes, they’ve taken on lots of debt, but there is absolutely no fear that the teams will default on the debt.
And now there is more competition at the top. Nothing wrong with that at all. I like it that ManU, Arsenal, and Liverpool have more competition and (at least in ManU’s case) don’t win the league every year.
Relegation is stupid. There, I said it. It’s not something to strive for. It’s an artifact of the way the leagues came to be and not something to have just because. Sports that use it shouldn’t.
While this is true, you might get looked at funny by those whose team loyalty extends all the way through the farm system. I’m a Mariners fan, but live in a Kansas City farm city. If the Rainiers come here to play the Storm Chasers, I will BY GOD be wearing my Rainiers gear and rooting for the visitors.
(And yes, I have gone to KC to root against the home team, when the M’s were visiting. Got a few funny looks myself. That’s OK. We’re not violent flaming assholes out here in the Great Plains, so I never felt my life was ever in danger.)
But I’ll admit both ways of doing team loyalty are good. Especially the part when you can maintain a set of loyalties completely independent of where you happen to live at this moment. Maybe that’s the American thing… where you happen to live isn’t necessarily where your heart is. We’re a mobile culture, and we choose our loyalties, rather than having them imposed by accidents of geography or birth.
There’s all sorts of things wrong, from basically being able to pay to win to the issues the English National Team may well be having with such a large percentage of the top league being foreigners (the argument is that there are not enough English players at the top level, meaning a smaller pool of players playing in the elite league to choose from).
FFP is a long term thing. Yes, some clubs will have profited from the pre-FFP days but the players they bought will get old and then even those clubs will have to play by the rules.
I don’t think anyone will be looking at anyone funny.
But again it’s all about geography. The major league team has been close by (50 miles) for more than a century. We have always been in its natural home-team and media market and loyalties to it are strong throughout the entire region.
Had the nearest big league team had been too far away to be local in any truly practical sense, then we might have been in a different situation.
Plus, the local Single-A minor league team, while well-loved, is only about 15 years old.
Double-plus, the local minor league team has always been an affiliate of the local major-league team. Marge Schott insisted on it before granting permission for the A-League team to enter her franchise territory. And the fans were cool with that.
There are lots of different ways to legitimately acquire team loyalties. There only dishonest one is to choose a geographically distant team based on its success or its having a popular player on the team.
I even consider choosing a team because you like its colors of mascot to be legitimate.
Much easier to stay on top if you are already there. The player may get old, but you can cycle them out at staggered rates (and of course the new TV deal is going to make it easier for Chelsea and ManCity to continue to stay on top). FFP is just a way to keep the rich rich and prevent poorer teams from competing if a rich person purchases them.
As for “too many foreigners” - I don’t understand wanting a worse league just to make the national team potentially a little bit better (no guarantees - aside from 1966, how did England do before the EU?). Besides, its impossible anyway unless the UKIP somehow gets elected into government and Britain leaves the EU.
Choosing the best team solely because the best is “bandwagoning.” There’s only one exception… you have to be under 10 years old. When you’re a little kid, you can pick a favorite team for any reason or no reason, but an adult who didn’t previously have a favorite team and then picks the best team in the league is deserving of mockery.
Still, it’s the teams that have the most money to spend from whatever source, that tend to win.
And if teams were required to “eat what they kill” without help from wealthy owners, the biggest teams would remain on top by virtue of marketing money and TV deals.
That’s why there are salary caps in most US sports- they more or less level the playing field and prevent one team from becoming dominant by virtue of having deep pockets, rich owners or whatever.
Agreed that it’s shallow, but “dishonest” touches on an important element of why bandwagon fandom is looked down on. I think the word “insincere” is closer to the heart of it: you don’t actually care, it’s just the current fad and you’re swinging with it.
(Although “shallow”, in the romantic sense, also conveys the element of insincerity.)
Yeah… a lot of words come in for bandwagon/T-shirt fans. “Lame” and “Douchey” come to mind. But I do see where you’re coming from; it’s particularly inflammatory in college sports, because it seems like by definition, the bandwagon/t-shirt fans never attended the institution in question. It’s like they’re pretending to be part of your club without actually being part of it.
In pro sports, it’s hard to really get worked up; there’s nothing that defines what a “Cowboys Fan” is or ought to be. (or insert any pro team there). All I’d say is that if you do choose a team rather than have it happen by circumstance (family fandom, hometown, current residence), you ought to stick with that choice. Where it becomes douchey is when you’re a Steelers fan in 2007, a Giants fan in 2011, and now you’re a Seahawks fan. Stick with your team.
I don’t have a problem at all with people in markets without a particular sport picking a team to support. That’s what my friends and I did back when there weren’t local teams to support in soccer and hockey. We basically each chose good, but not awesome teams in both sports, and do our best to keep up with them. We chose good but not awesome teams because it was lame to choose say… the 1986 Edmonton Oilers, but it was ok to pick the Penguins or Flyers because they were still good and would be shown on ESPN, but they didn’t have Gretzky and weren’t dominant.
I actually had the Flyers as my team; it was interesting to see them in their good 80s years, and then their 90s slump and resurgence with Lindros and the Legion of Doom.
Here they’re referred to as “Pink Hats” - a reference to the pink Red Sox hats produced for and worn by many of the female bandwagon fans when the Sox started winning in 2004. It’s really not about women, but about anyone who doesn’t know the team well enough or care enough to wear the proper blue hats rather than merchandise that caters to fashion sense. There are plenty of male Pink Hats as well.
IMO, a fan is a fan. I’ll think less of you if you switch allegiances frequently, but it’s no direct concern of mine.
