The NFL doesn't make much sense to an European

The Game Room
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My team, Coventry City, has utterly fallen apart. Once the third (or was it fourth?) longest running team in the top division, mismanagement on the field led to mismanagement off the field, which led to several reductions in points, which led to a couple of relegations, which led to an argument between the club owners and stadium owners, which led to the team playing in another city … it has got to the point where I sadly no longer really care. They are no longer the club I used to support and the hedge fund that bought them clearly only did so as they thought they could pressure the local council into selling them the stadium cheaply.

But I can’t shift allegiance. It just isn’t the done thing with Brits and football. “Luckily” me no longer living in the UK means it is easier to just let it go.
You can read a bit about it here if you really want.

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One factor which hasn’t been mentioned here is the financial aspect.

In Major League Baseball the annual expenses for the thriftiest teams in the league are $150 Million. This includes player salaries, lease payments, debt service, and other expenses. The median is closer to $200 Million. The majority of the teams still make a profit even with this high cost of doing business.

If you drop down just one level to AAA the most profitable AAA teams only earn about $15 Million in total income with the median below $5 Million.

If a major league team were relegated they’d lose all TV revenue, most ticket and advertising/sponsorship revenue, and be bankrupt the next day.

I am curious, how do EPL clubs handle this. Can an EPL club which is relegated pay its bills as a Championship team? Is there simply a more gradual decline in revenue from league to league? I suppose part of it is the teams which spend less are the ones which are relegated in the first place?

The answer may be in the way that player contracts are designed. My understanding is that in Soccer a relegated team could sell off their best players, an option which isn’t available to MLB teams. That doesn’t help them with their fixed costs, however.

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Newly relegated teams receive parachute payments over a few years to ease the pain. Generally they try to maintain their current team, even if it means operating at a loss, so as to try and get promoted the next season. But if they don’t manage it the team starts to sell players, both as a means of income but also to lower the wage bill, but of course doing this decreases drastically the chances of going back up.

After that you just learn to live within your means.

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Personally, what I think it’ll take is for the MLS to get better broadcasting deals; right now, IF I can find FC Dallas on TV, it’s on a UHF affiliate on a Sunday afternoon. They need to be prime-time and mid-afternoon during the summer, but they usually lose out to baseball.

I gather soccer does well in cities without major baseball presences like say… Portland, but tends to be a distant fifth in cities like Dallas, where the Rangers tend to get all the summer TV love, and other stations will show golf (golf!) instead of local soccer matches.

The MLS needs to handle their PR and media a LOT better overall. Some teams do a fair job (the Houston Dynamo come to mind), and some are abysmal (FC Dallas, I’m looking at you).

I suspect if they had advertising that was actually visible, people might be interested. But I see more advertising on buses for the Natural History Museum and the Zoo than I do any sort of ads for FC Dallas.

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This isn’t done in America either. Those Cubs fans mentioned earlier have been fans through nearly 100 years of utter terribleness. But they stick it out, because they’re Cubs fans. That is how it is everywhere with every sport. “Bandwagoners” are seriously frowned upon.

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Earlier you brought up college football as a place to look at it. Let’s look at some impacts of relegation.

  • College football at most has 4 years of playing eligibility for their players. Top players leave for the NFL earlier meaning higher turnover among those with the most impact. A college team is usually quite different from year to year as a result. The top overall team or teams in a year might not even be in the top tier. The next year when they are they might have graduated the key players that were the core of that superb team.

  • The US is huge and football is expensive to begin with. It becomes vastly more expensive (with unpredictable expenses year to year) if you suddenly get thrown in a league with teams picked essentially at random geographically. Currently most conferences are relatively geographical in nature with a few outliers. That saves on costs. Relegation is less practical than it is for soccer teams with their lower equipment and player needs. This is a good way to kill football at schools that make less (or kill the other athletic programs football funds in order to save football).

  • ISTR that there’s a facilities test for promotion in a lot of relegation/promotion systems. If implemented that would make promotion to the top tier or two exceedingly difficult for the teams that are already outside the top half of FCS college football. Stadium sizes are not even close to equal. Promotions would then tend to favor not the best but those with the right facilities. “You’re middle of your tier but you are the only one eligible for promotion. Congratulations on earning the right to get smoked repeatedly next season and then relegated back to us.”

  • Stratification already exists within college football talent pools. Even the bottom of the top half in FCS rarely loses to a team from the lower half. The top three tiers probably would look an awful lot like the current Power 5 conferences split up differently. They’d just play musical chairs at the end of each year.

  • Tradition. It’s huge to many college football fans. My most treasured game of the season is an instate rivalry that dates back to the late 19th century (and all but 2 years since 1910). Relegation be damned I want to see my Alma Mater play Michigan every single year. I admit that a World War was sufficient reason to skip two years but I don’t have to like it. Hell I’d sign up to be tasered every year at midfield before kick off if that’s what it took to ensure the game happened. Relegation? No! Just tase me bro.

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Hence their new $90mil deal with ESPN, starting this year.

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This is important. A club, university, or municipal government with a Tier 1 team that got relegated to Tier 2 would not be able to afford to keep their Tier 1 stadium.

Likewise, a Tier 2 entity would not be able to afford to acquire the Tier 1 stadium needed for promotion.

The only solution I can think of is to allow relegated team swap stadiums with promoted teams, in which case you’ve just created a complicated and expensive way to maintain the status quo.

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In England that situation has actually happened. I short, teams in the Premier League, Championshp, League One or League Two are no as ‘league’ teams. Teams I. The divisions below them are known as ‘non-league’. Teams can get promoted from the top non league division to League Two (and relegated in he opposite direction).

Non league stadiums have a different required standards than league stadiums and on at least three occasions in the nineties (and possibly since) teams that finished top of the non league division were not promoted purely because their stadium was not up to scratch.

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This guy is no dummy.

Russell Wilson, QB of the Seattle Seahawks. Non-Americans might be interested in the technical nature of American football. This video is after his college career and before he was drafted into the NFL.

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I’m not entirely sure I followed your explanation.

But just to elaborate on a point I made before. In America, a professional sports league is a commercial operation, and the league wants to maximize its value. That means it will want to be able to capture the most lucrative geographical markets.

That means as a general matter, it’s not just the team that’s Tier 1. It’s the geographical market that that team serves that is Tier 1. So the Tier 1 league is going to want to dominate all (or most) of the Tier 1 geographical markets. And it also means that a Tier 1 league wants to limit wasting a franchise on a Tier 2 geographical market.

This dynamic is another one that makes promotion-relegation unacceptable to the league itself.

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Short version that wasn’t typed on an iPad keyboard:

Teams have been denied promotion, despite winning the league, in the past purely due to their stadiums not being good enough. That seems to me like a Tier 2 team not being allowed to become Tier 1 as they couldn’t afford the stadium (or upgrades to make the stadium Tear 1).

This is a particularly sensitive issue in the UK as there have been several disasters involving large loss of life that could, in a large part, be put down to how the stadiums were built. Most people have heard of Hillsborough (poor entry areas funneled lots of people into small areas, fences around the pitch stopping people escaping, although obviously there were the policing issues too), but there was a similar incident at Ibrox, Glasgow Rangers’ ground in 1971 and then there was the horrendous fire at Bradford in 1985.

The TV Footage of the Bradford disaster is a shocking example of how quickly fire can spread in old buildings, especially when there is a layer (IIRC) of burnable rubbish lying around.

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But that just bears my point out. That’s not particularly amazing when it comes to US sports TV deals. 90 million a year divided by 20 teams is something like 4.5 million per team. That’s slightly less than what the Texas Rangers get in baseball- 4 million per year, and they’re a good, but not awesome team.

The Yankees, by comparison make much more than that.

The NFL by comparison, gets upwards of 5 BILLION dollars a year for their broadcasting contracts, which is upwards of $156 million per team per year.

The NBA makes similarly insane money, although only half of what the NFL makes.

Even theNHL makes twice what MLS does, and hardly any Americans play hockey!

Even those hillbillies with cars have a much larger TV contract.

That’s my point; MLS is sort of encroaching on soccer… maybe… in a few isolated places. Otherwise, it’s an also-ran league.

I’ll make a statement- until I see more MLS advertising than I do city zoo or science museum advertising, homegrown professional soccer will never have a chance in hell of catching on.

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I think you misinterpreted the article you cited in a way that actually understates your case. The Ranger’s deal was for $80 million per year. (I think you divided that number by 20 years when the number was already a per annum). The article was actually refuting a rumor that they were going to get $150 million a year when in fact they were only getting $80 million.

Of course this just makes your argument that the MLS deal was a pittance compared to baseball money even stronger.

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The thing is, it doesn’t need to be the NFL or MLB. It needs to be profitable and it appears to be headed in the that direction right now - Major League Soccer’s Money Problems | The New Yorker

An interesting point in that article is that players have contracts with the league, not individual teams, and teams own the rights to players in perpetuity, all in an effort to control costs. There are exceptions but in general there’s no such thing as free agency in MLS.

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That deal is literally triple the worth of their previous deal. In addition a dedicated Saturday game of the week on ESPN (and Univision, but they’ve always had a Sunday Game of the Week), which allays any concern of only finding FC Dallas on a UHF station. It is kind of definitionally a “better broadcasting [deal]” by spades.

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Well, the Chicago Fire are certainly doing their part…during the season you can’t use public transportation here without seeing multiple Fire ads. And they actually got all their games next season on a basic cable channel. Now all they need are some better players.

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I’m harping on this, but it’s such a basic concept in American sports that you have to understand it to really understand how things work.

In America, a team in a non-Tier 1 league is always considered a provisional team, one you get because your city is not good enough to be a Tier 1 city, or failed to get a Tier 1 team because of historical accident.

If you have a Tier 2 team in your city and the Tier 1 league decides to grant you a franchise, the need for the Tier 2 team is ended. Nobody cares about it. Local loyalties will automatically switch to the new Tier 1 team.

This has happened in ever case in which a non-Tier 1 city became a Tier 1 city.

1953: The Boston Braves move to Milwaukee and become the Milwaukee Braves. No one misses the AAA team Milwaukee Brewers that were pushed out. When the Braves choose to leave in 1966, Milwaukee is upset, and remain unsatisfied until they get a new Major League Milwaukee Brewers in 1970.

1954: The St. Louis Browns move to Baltimore and become the Baltimore Orioles. No one misses the AAA Baltimore Orioles that wwere pushed out.

1955: The Philadelphia Athletics move to Kansas City and become the Kansas City Athletics. No one misses the AAA Kansas City Blues that were pushed out. However, when the Athletics choose to leave in 1968, a U.S. senator threatens Major League Baseball with disadvantageous legislation until they agree to grant a new major league franchise—the Kansas City Royals—in 1969.

1958: The New York Giants move to San Francisco and the Brooklyn Dodgers move to Los Angeles. No one misses the non-major league San Francisco Seals, the Los Angeles Angels, and Hollywood Stars that were pushed out. However, New York is up in arms until the New York Mets are granted the franchise in 1962. Los Angeles was considered a big enough market for two big-league clubs and a new Los Angeles Angels was created in 1961.

1961: The Washington Senators move to Minneapolis and become the Minnesota Twins, pushing out the Minneapolis Millers and the Saint Paul Saints. This one is kind of an outlier, because no one missed the Millers, but more than 30 years later, a AAA Saint Paul Saints was reincarnated. But in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, the Twins and the Saints are not rivals of each other. You can be a fan of both clubs.

1966: The Milwaukee Braves move to Atlanta and become the Atlanta Braves. No one misses the AAA Atlanta Crackers that were pushed out.

1969: The Seattle Pilots are granted a new franchise, pushing out the AAA Seattle Rainiers, which no one misses. The franchise was a failure and moved to Milwaukee the next year. In 1977, Seattle is granted a new big-league team, the Seattle Mariners. A new major-league San Diego Padres push out the old AAA San Diego Padres.

And so on …

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In AFL we have players ranging from 167cm (5’5") to a player at 211cm (6’11"). I think a lot of sports have these variations dependent on position, even basketball (NBA) has players ranging from 5’9" to 7’6" playing today.

What I don’t think you see outside of NFL (and rugby union/league) is massive range in weight.

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Muggsy Boggues - 5’ 3", 141 lbs
Shaquille O’Neal - 7’ 1", 325 lbs