Which are the world's easiest and hardest pro sports leagues to get into?

The Game Room
41

For anybody who does’t remember Ali Dia, I would suggest reading about Ali Dia.

Ali Dia was basically a con man who convinced a Premier League football club to give him a contract and who managed to get on the field in a premier league football match. In short, he pretended to be a cousin of genuine superstar George Weah, blagged a short term contract and ended up playing when the team were desperately short of players.

The problem being that he was utterly useless, was nowhere near PL standard and had to be taken back off the field when that became clear to everybody.

That was in the 1990’s and would perhaps be less likely to happen in todays more connected times, but the fact that it could happen at all surely means that soccer must be the easiest top league to get into, simply due to those sort of gaps in their procedures and quality checks.

42

Exactly. Plus you generally need to have grown up rich.

43

This is hilarious. No one figured out that he was a fraud even during practice or warm-ups? I saw his Wikipedia page, and he was on many much-lower level clubs, so I guess he could fake it just enough.

44

Just a reminder that this man still has a job. (I’ve seen a couple videos of him in action, and his sumo prowess is somewhere between Eric Cartman and a drunk street derelict.)

I think there needs to be a distinction between how hard it is to get into a league at all and how hard it is to make decent money in it. The NFL is a prime example. There are plenty of roster spots, but the league minimum is far from impressive (a low six figures last time I checked), and careers are definitely on the short side. Play less than a full season, like the ever-notorious Bob Sapp, and you make skilled laborer money for one year and then have to get a real job like everyone else. Every year the PGA Tour receives dozens of young, hungry, bright-eyed rookies from the junior tours… many of whom get bounced right back to the junior tours in an identical state. Winning a tournament is hard (just ask Colin Montgomerie :grin:), and the only other avenue for keeping a PGA Tour card is earning enough FedEx Cup points, which requires consistently good results. Baseball has an extensive minor league system, but, as kenobi_65 already pointed out, they pay slave wages, except AAA which pays burger flipper wages. In contrast, the NHL is a strictly cold-weather sport and requires all kinds of special skills and equipment which don’t translate to anything else (those weird boots with the knives on the bottom, for example), but even a journeyman NHL player can pull in seven figures for 25 seasons.

Sumo is an unusual case. The four tsukebito ranks, jonokuchi, jonidan, sandanme, and makushita, receive no wages whatsoever, but all sumotori get to live in a clean, comfortable home and eat two hearty meals a day. (Of course, the tsukebito are the ones making the home clean and comfortable and cooking the meals, but that’s another story.) In the old days, a stablemaster would have to give a jonokuchi scrub the boot when it became clear that he wasn’t cut out for the sport, but modern sumo bosses have a lot more leeway. Couple that with the fact that sumo isn’t really an attractive option for a jock with any real ability (the days of Chiyonofuji are long over), and it’s not hard to see how a 51 year old could be active in jonidan and nobody has a problem with it. He may not ever be able to afford a nightclub or a Ferarri Enzo, but he’ll never have to sleep on the streets.

The NBA is also a weird one because no matter how great an athlete you are, your chances are zero if you don’t have the right body… tall, excellent hand-eye coordination, and can jump high and get up and down the court quickly… but if you do have the right body, you can probably worm your way through a few seasons even if your skills aren’t there. How else do you think a snivelling putz like Bill Laimbeer was able to last as long as he did?

45

NFL league minimum is $510k. MLB is $563, NBA is ~$900k, and NHL is $700k.

46

No journeyman NHL players will play 25 seasons. Given that only three men have played that long and all three are all time greats, I’d say you are rather substantially overestimating how easy it is to be an NHL player.

A just-OK NHL player can expect to play five or six years.

47

I think you’re overstating it some. He’s much worse than that. He couldn’t move Eric Cartman unless you were talking about the paper he’s animated from. He’s won two matches legitimately (and his opponent just fell over accidentally in a third without being touched), and lost to those same two guys many times over. Those two guys would be by far the worst in sumo without Hattorizakura.

He’s so bad that he has intentionally tried to lose but they didn’t let him!

“So scared was Hattorizakura of one opponent a few years ago, that he deliberately tried several times to lose by falling down without being touched, but ringside judges made him redo the bout until he lost in a conventional manner.”

And yet he gets meals, shelter, and health care for as long as he can put up with being the low man on the totem pole and doing all the worst of the housework, and showing up 7 or 8 times every 2 months to get thwacked.

48

50% of tournaments someone near the bottom of the rankings gets an 8th match to even out the numbers. Only one other person in history (well, since they went to the current system) has 8 losses in the lowest division, and Hattorizakura has done it 3 times.

49

Well, yes and no. True, the Elite rise to the top and can stay there. But if your Daddy is a Billionaire or you are the best driver in your country who’s nationalized oil business is the major sponsor of a team, you can take the spot of a driver who is much more qualified to be on the grid. You may only be there a season or two, or until the money runs out, then move over for the next rich kid.

But no worries! Go be an Indy Car Champion after washing out of F1! :smile:

50

As far as the easiest side of the question, I took it to include sports leagues you could buy your way into. If any highest ranked national league is considered a top-tier league, then there are probably tons. Football/soccer is probably the easiest for someone who’s willing to be a bench-sitter to buy their way onto a top league team simply by paying the team’s wages in a small country.

If we’re talking about one of the top professional leagues in the world for a particular sport, then the two general sports categories that come to mind are equestrian sports and sailing. More specifically, I’d nominate polo and yacht sailing. Polo’s an incredibly niche sport, and it seems that being a top player is about as much about having connections as having actual skill. For yacht sailing, it’s changed in the past few decades, but in the America’s Cup used to be able to enter the competition as a skipper by being the guy who could buy the best boat. You couldn’t do that now, but could a rich guy fund a team and be a crew member who was basically moving ballast? Maybe not in the finals, but I’d say it’s possible for a round in the qualifiers.

If we’re going by Rick Jay’s definition, then I wonder if one of the easiest elite sports to get into would be Australian Rule Football.

This comment isn’t to bash the sport because the players at the elite level are incredible athletes. But from a numbers game, you have a mid-size country that is the only country playing that game at an elite level and large teams in a big league. A rough number is (25,500,000 / 2) / (18*47). So, a bit less than 1/15,000 but if you take out all the people who’ve never played in an organised youth or lower level league, then it’s certainly much smaller.

Hardest to get into, I agree with everyone stating the NBA. No way to buy yourself onto a team, massive competition, global sport, and really one elite league.

51

Glowacks - Thanks for the that bit of trivia…certainly helps put things in perspective.

Another important distinction of sumo that a lot of Westerners have trouble wrapping their heads around (along with the whole start-as-a-disrespected-unpaid-servant-and-probably-stay-that-way-for-years thing) is that as the national sport of Japan, it’s steeped in Japanese tradition and values. In most leagues, a general manager that kept a completely abysmal player on the roster would be subject to harsh criticism, and no matter how much he liked the player, eventually pressure from the owner, shareholders, or fans would compel him to cut the deadwood. But a stablemaster is the king of the castle. If he says the boy stays, the boy friggin’ stays, and nothing short of the boy holding up a bank or schtupping another stablemaster’s wife can change that.