Relegation: I'm Envious
Just watched Everton battle to remain in the Premier League - what an intense, amazing game, all for the team struggling to be in last place! And poor Leicester City - relegated, despite winning in the other match going on that mattered.
What I'm wishing for: relegation in some US sport. How can we get there? It would be awesome to have, in say, the NFL or NBA.
Your thoughts? Is it just me that's enthralled with this structure, or would you all like it, too?
I almost commented that way when people were complaining about the Pistons not getting the #1 pick.
In a different world they would have been relegated.
And then they would lose Cade and Ivey. Relegation isn't a way to rebuild your team. It's a trap that's hard to get out of. Once you get sent down, your team gets gutted. The stars don't want to play in the second tier, and you can't afford them anyway since TV revenues are 95% lower.
Because there's zero parity in European sports leagues, relegation becomes the new challenge. Forget winning a title, the goal is to finish in 18th place! Woo-hoo!
I'll pass.
I think Sparty has basically been relegated.
Can we send them to the MAC?
No, we like the MAC.
“Coach MeLLLLLL - Conference USA is on line 2.”
Then give them another easy win. Imagine WMU and CMU crushing them.
Imagine WMU and CMU crushing them again.
FIFY 😊
Melegated
To the tune of $95 million!
I have family in town this weekend and we got into this same discussion. Our takeaways were that the big money organizations (top leagues in the sports) would never agree to relegation. The estimated difference between the EFL and EPL is over 150M.
There is no way an NFL team is going to agree to be relegated to an XFL franchise (not the same but you know what I’m saying)
Seems like it would be a tough sell for the NFL to have a top tier and a bottom tier for money reason but also cultural. A major idea of the NFL is parity and the hope that any team could win any year. With relegation this would not be possible as the lower league would need two years.
So… maybe.. if the NFL owners started another league and got money from teams in both? But eventually, the Ford’s would have two teams in the lower league so I still don’t think the money and momentum would allow this to happen without an “Act of God”
However, it would be stinking cool and make the season more meaningful as the lower teams stop quitting /tanking and keep fighting to stay in the top tier. Like a playoff run for the bottom teams.
I think the answer is if an American pro league expands enough where you could have the top half from the previous season eligible to compete for the championship at the beginning of the season and have a mid season relegation/promotion tournament. Something where everyone is in the same league but there’s stakes for being terrible.
Hasn’t there occasionally been talk of a Liga MX/MLS merger? That league would be so unwieldy that relegation would almost have to happen. Now to persuade a top-flight club that it’s actually a second-division one in the new arrangement!
No NFL running back would ever log a single carry for a team in the second tier.
If a player only has 1200-1500 carries in a career, who's going to spend 150 of them in Birmingham?
US leagues don’t have the same structure. If a professional team gets relegated, where are they going to go, and what teams do you move up?
It would be funny to see the AAA A’s replace the MLB team.
Are there some really good AAA teams that could beat the A’s this year? I know in the MLB you’re playing the best of the best, but my god are the A’s atrocious this year
Meh, no thanks. Soccer parity is trash.
Sure, There are parity issues at the very top of the soccer pyramid. The top five or six in the EPL. The top what…three?…in Germany, Spain and Italy? But you think that doesn’t apply to the Dodgers and Mets against the Pirates and Reds?
As my avatar attests, I support Brentford. The Bees spent decades in lower division wilderness until promoted to the Premier League in 2021. Now they have finished their second year up and came in ninth out of 20. My years of support have been rewarded. That could never happen in America. No matter what happens, the Louisville Bats will never be promoted. And the Oakland A’s will never get relegated.
It’s better over there.
Your years of support have been rewarded with obscurity and irrelevance in a different league - one that you have zero chance of winning. That's not much of a reward.
You have to ignore decades of history to conclude that a team like Brentford has "zero chance of winning". Leicester City worked themselves up from the third tier to winning the Premier League from 2008 to 2015 . . . and have now managed to get themselves relegated. It's not reasonable to just look at the last 4 years and conclude the Brentford has zero chance of winning.
Lol, just because you can name a sport without great parity doesn't mean you've proven soccer isn't worse. And finishing 9th is your reward? Again, no thanks.
Now they have finished their second year up and came in ninth out of 20. My years of support have been rewarded.
So the equivalent of losing in the first round of the playoffs in North America. This may be a thrill now, but what happens going forward? If they're not bought out by the royal family of some country, do you see them getting any better?
Funny you mention the Louisville Bats (Cincinnati's AAA affiliate).
I heard this stat the other day: they won on Thursday to get their record to 24-23. It was the first time since 2015 that there record has been above .500 at any point!
So, you're right: they aren't getting promoted! As a Reds fan, this also sadly explains the Reds.
I've never understood the obsession with relegation models. American sports are designed to enable parity -- salary caps, draft orders, scholarship limits, etc., all intended to give teams equal opportunity to win. It keeps the sport fresh and makes it all the more impressive when a dynasty like the Patriots or the Warriors emerges and dominates. European soccer is the opposite -- you have the same brands, funded by obscene amounts of money, rolling over the competition year after year. Sure, you occasionally have blue moon outcomes like Leicester City in 2016, but for the most part, it's the just the ultra-rich clubs playing with their food.
I greatly prefer the American model, and I hope that relegation is never introduced in our sports leagues, especially not in college sports.
Weird right? Americans prefer a more socialist type of sports platform while the Europeans prefer a more capitalistic form.
Things that make you go hmm…
Not really. Capitalism is alive and well in American sports.
The NFL, for example, is really just a single entertainment business that is competing with other entertainment business.
The competition is not the Cowboys versus the Eagles or the Chiefs versus the Steelers. The competition is the NFL versus MLB or NBA or NHL or NASCAR or whatever else is on TV.
They are managing their product to be maximally entertaining, to compete with other entertainment options.
There's nothing "socialist" about American sports. It just uses a franchise model, like a big business, rather than the European method of treating the clubs like a bunch of rival businesses.
Facebook is leaking apparently
Seems to me you're conflating two things. Yes, the English Premier League is, these days, dominated by teams with outrageous foreign spending, and it's resulting in the phenomenon you describe.
But that's unrelated to the relegation model. That's like saying, "I don't like the English habit of not going to commercials during their televised sporting events -- our model is designed to enable parity."
In other words ... what does the "relegation model" have anything to do with Man City winning this year's title?
The connection is that the only reason relegation is tolerated in EPL is because there’s no significant risk of it happening to a major brand. In practice, relegation is reserved for the minor brands that have no shot at dominating the league, even if they were to stay in the league for an indefinite amount of time.
Relegation is a punitive measure that makes no sense in a parity-based league where the rules are designed to give an edge to the weaker teams so that they can have a fair shot at supplanting the stronger teams. Relegation is an effort to keep the league fresh even though the teams at the top are the same year in and year out; there’s no need for this in American leagues where teams are constantly cycling in and out of contention.
To answer your question more directly, what the relegation model has to do with Man City winning the title is that instead of strengthening Man City’s weaker opponents with high draft picks or an easier schedule, the relegation model merely replaces them with other, equally weak cannon fodder.
I think this is accurate and a stumbling block to any possible change. currently the weaker teams in The US are rewarded with advantages to access better talent (draft order).
In the relegation model they are punished for being bad (relegation).
This makes the path to improvement linger and more expensive and makes parity more difficult to achieve IMO.
No, it's tolerated in the EPL because it was established long before there was any such thing as an "established brand."
On a different note, the younger crowd here might be surprised to know that up to the establishment of the EPL in 1992, Huddersfield Town had more top flight titles than Manchester City. Sheffield Wednesday had more titles than Tottenham and Chelsea combined; Sunderland had twice as many. Derby County had won two titles in the 25 years since the last title for either Manchester club. Chelsea had nearly bankrupted themselves with a stadium overhaul (they did bankrupt the developers), were damn near relegated to the third tier, and were sold for a single pound in 1982.
The established brands are a slowly rotating group.
Relegation is also terrible from a financial standpoint. Revenues collapse when your club is relegated, so you have little choice but to conduct a fire sale. So sometimes a team finds itself not even able to compete in the new, lesser league, because it let so many players go in an attempt to save money. Some teams end up relegated two consecutive years.
Meanwhile, teams on the brink of relegation will make lots of short-term moves to save that precious 17th place, adding a bunch of old guys in a desperate attempt to stay afloat rather than try to rebuild, because the North American concept of rebuilding isn't really feasible.
Overall I agree that relegation is not the preferred model for sports leagues. But while rebuilding isn't really possible in relegation leagues, neither is tanking. That's probably the strongest point in relegation's favor.
Tanking is not awesome, but teams should be allowed to rebuild. Relegation makes that very difficult.
I think it would work really well in college sports. I couldn’t imagine it working in professional leagues here with how they are currently set up.
No, it would be awful for college sports. Imagine the 2021 Michigan football team playing in the MAC.
The cool thing about college sports is that we kind of do have relegation and promotion, but it's voluntary. Think of UCF, Houston, and Cincinnati moving up to the Big 12. They WANT the tougher competition, and the powers that be (TV networks mainly) have to buy in as well. Conversely you have programs like Chicago downgrading themselves to Division 3.
Chicago relegated themselves out of the sport altogether. It was thirty years before the Chicago admin thought it was safe to sponsor a football team, even at D3 level, without compromising the mission of the university.
Charge hectic of student doc
Aside from the obvious financial reasons, the college and minor league systems already in place in the US make it impossible. Small clubs in small European towns have been there for 100 years and have devoted fanbases that keep them alive, and stick with them through relegation. You can't plop a "pro" team down in say, Ann Arbor or Columbus, and expect it to survive.
They have it in the MLB AL. Every team but one in the East or West divisions would be leading the Central.
I think it would be cool if some of the major conferences could borrow from minor conferences every year. You would never get it done unless all of the current members automatically make it to the top tier. But you could have two spots in the Big 12 for example go to the best two teams in Conference USA and AAC, and have those two teams play at the end of the season, and one of them gets relegated and one of them gets to be in the Big 12 the following year. You might get some small schools but you'd get more interesting games.
With conference expansions and disregard for traditional conference make-up, it seems like we are heading towards a slow moving economics-based relegation system in college football.
MLS should have relegation.
The MLS just announced San Diego is getting an expansion team. It's probably going to be a good market for the league.
But the reported expansion fee? $500 Million!!!
Although Man United and Liverpool (and their like) are valued at Billions and Billions of dollars --- nearly half the Premier League members (those for whom the EFL is a possibility) have estimated valuations under what San Diego is paying to enter MLS.
And that's why MLS won't have relegation. Nobody is paying $500,000,000 if the USL is a possibility.
I don't follow MLS closely (or at all for that manner) but that seems destined to fail?
Americans for the most part don't care about soccer and I feel like the ones that do are just as likely to support a European team as an MLS team (case in point - I have been to multiple games in the past 12 months....none of them were in the United States).
MLS is working right now. They really don't have a ton of national fans --- most fans are only fans of the local club, they won't watch other clubs, even in the playoffs. Those local fans (mostly) understand that their club would have no chance against a top-tier European club, but the MLS team still provides good, fun, relatively inexpensive entertainment along with a source of community.
The community is a selling point. A lot of these fans are also getting in "on the ground floor" --- and then develop an attitude not unlike those of independent bands.
(Hey, I was there with <<<fill in blank of recent MLS expansion club here>>> from Day 1, I just didn't jump on the bandwagon when they started playing Coachella!!!!!!)
That said: $500MM seems crazy to me --- but a number of cities want franchises right now, and San Diego is being funded by a (corrupt) foreign Billionaire and a local Indian Tribe that has tons of $$$ from their casinos. So $$$$ isn't an object to them - and I can't really blame MLS for taking it.
I think the considerably more interesting long-term MLS question is their Apple+ TV Deal. It's generally harder to watch matches, most matches get shoe-horned into 7:30 PM local Saturday starts, which isn't ideal for many clubs, and the schedule will be pushed all the way into early December (!!!) because they're taking a whole month off in the prime of summer for a huge tournament with the Mexican League.
I suppose that's fair. It's just a hard league to really get into I guess. The talent pool just is not there. The history isn't there. I really can't imagine the fans compare to European fans either. Case in point - I went to Liverpool earlier this year to see them host Manchester United. After Liverpool scored their third goal the old man next to me literally hugged me. The fans didn't stop singing/cheering until well after the match was over. There's no jumbotron and while there's technically a PA announcer to announce goals and substitutions you couldn't really hear him.