Promotion and relegation battles are always huge in football around the world and add an element of danger/excitement to the sport. Why did this never take off in the US?
Promotion and relegation battles are always huge in football around the world and add an element of danger/excitement to the sport. Why did this never take off in the US?
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The university sports system and the draft.
We like to watch the strong dominate the weak.
Because team owners hold all the power in the leagues they’re in and would never agree to a system where their team’s value drops precipitously because they got relegated.
Same reason we have salary caps and drafts and revenue sharing and progressive taxes on teams spending “too much”.
It’s profit protections over sport.
A closed league system where teams are franchises mainly. The competition would be terrible. The worst NFL team would beat the best UFL NCAA D1 team, as would the best NBA, MLB team. The USL however is implementing pro/rel which should be interesting
The big 4 US sports leagues are built on a closed franchise model, and the threat of dropping down would break the value of the financial franchise no owner or league would ever allow that.
I wish we did. I think it would be cool to see MLB do this
Because that’s simply not how it developed here.
The billionaires that own the Major League franchises are VERY protective of their investments. Also helps that the way professional sports developed our “Minor Leagues” are generally either college athletics (see Basketball and Football) or directly tied to Major League teams (Hockey and Baseball). Players move up and down between Major and Minor leagues all the time in some sports, but by design the ownership never will.
We don’t have the various leagues necessary for that. Our athletes nearly entirely come from the college system.
When we did have separate leagues, like NFL Europe, the second league was normally full of developmental and has-been players trying to find their way back to a roster. Those teams would never have a competetive chance in the “real NFL.”
For MLB, their farm system is based on “levels” and players get promoted through the levels (A to AA to AAA to the MLB). Players can move between the levels but teams never would because the minor league teams are affiliates of the major league clubs.
Money
It’s just a different model.
We do have relegation in the sense that MLB players can get sent down to the minors but the whole point of the minor leagues is to rehab and to develop young talent. Same with the NBA G League. The NFL doesn’t really have an analogue but the best American football players play in college for four years first. And the NFL can, for the most part, cut players Willy nilly.
If a team is truly failing, it can fold altogether.
Ultimately this all goes back to the fact that the model is purely capitalistic and not wholly about winning and sport.
I’ve always thought that a relegation model would be more fun as a fan, though.
There’s not enough competition in our football for there to be relegation.
The worst teams winning 1-2 games are MILES ahead of the best teams’ backups
American society could not handle it
The ownership structure is different. The teams are franchises, meaning the owners purchase the rights from the league to operate a team in a specific area. They’re willing to do this because the league’s administration guarantees them participation in the league and all that comes with it, specifically TV and streaming time and Intellectual property sales – clothing, video games, etc. The anti-relegation argument is that capitalists wouldn’t be willing to shell out the money if they weren’t guaranteed a spot in the league, no matter how shitty they are.
We are getting there with college football.
By now, tradition, and the university sports system, along with the draft system. Originally, I would chalk it up to private ownership from the get-go (nobody would volunteer for a system where your investment basically loses value) and geographic distance.
As a soccer fan. Pro/rel fucking sucks.
Our first big sporting league was baseball. The Baseball system is a legal monopoly that uses a farm league system to develop players, not teams. You have a promising player, you contract for the rights to that player and move him through the system until he’s good enough to play on your highest level team. Hockey has essentially the same system.
Football, and basketball to a lessor extent, do it but use college athletics for player development. Football in particular has a very steep learning curve and specialization. An offensive linemen won’t develop his full potential until his junior or senior year while a skill player might be good his freshman year. The upside for them, free development and less invested in star players until they are ready.
From this, team ownership has agreed to keep the league fixed in size and teams. They revenue share across teams also. It’s also why they are franchises not “clubs”.
The system wasn’t originally set up that way, and you’d not be able to enforce it on existing franchises. If you tried they’d oust the league leadership.
The USL here is implementing pro/rel, but they’re not really competitive with our main soccer league, MLS.
https://www.uslsoccer.com/news_article/show/1334700
OP just wants to see the Toledo Mud Hens go full belt-to-ass on the White Sox.
Man, if we had relegation the Browns would be a Pee-Wee team by now.
It’s always amusing to see this get brought up on occasion. Because at the same time the top European clubs have tinkered with a Super league of their own. Where the teams involved can’t get relegated. And it would already include the top and wealthiest clubs.
The teams are owned, are a business with a purpose to make money, and you’ll never get all the owners in the league to agree on relegation.
We don’t have a club system; it’s a closed franchise system.
Others have weighed in on the whys, but I will also offer that promotion and relegation in professional football/soccer, while exciting, has seemingly hurt small market teams more than it has helped.
Frankly, it all comes down to money. American sport leagues developed top-down, being established by organized investors rather than a widespread network of amateur teams that joined together to form a grassroots league. Since these sports leagues were pitched as investments, owners wanted guaranteed and stable participation. Relegation would dramatically devalue franchises that are worth billions now. Furthermore, the leagues are set up where they can make the most money possible at a nationwide level. This means targeting audiences in large media markets. For example, a market like New York City or Los Angeles has a lot of potential viewers. If their teams got relegated in favor of a team from a smaller market, the league would lose out on all those viewers. So it’s in the leagues financial interest to keep bad teams from large markets in the league just to tap into those viewers. And lastly, since Americans have only ever experienced the closed franchise model, it would be pretty jarring now to suddenly switch to promotion/relegation, there would likely be a lot of backlash from fans of the first set of teams that got the boot
Reasons for this aside, I simply could not fathom how depressing it would be to see my D1 university have to go play D2
2 main reasons – the American sports leagues started in a closed system without promotion/relegation, and the leagues and team owners (particularly the NFL) make so much money in this system that they aren’t ever going to change it
This video goes into the topic
Because we don’t want it and I’m tired of being told we should.
For major sports there, there’s no competing financially. It’s like “do you want want to make $150,000 playing for a minor league team or do you want to make $110 million playing in the major league?
Nobody watches minor leagues on TV. I imagine some people might watch Champions league or League 1 on TV maybe? TV contracts are huge and are what drive the huge salaries of players.
The odd exception is that college sports are huge and get lots of TV airplay, but they are more like the Championship tier. They function more like a 2nd tier sports league where people can see “the stars of tomorrow” and it’s not really anything to do with colleges except in name only for the most part. College football and college basketball are huge but you can also catch college baseball, hockey, or volleyball on TV as well.
Promotion and relegation seems weird to me. That means that the best players in the sport aren’t always in the highest league correct? Like you could have the 10th best football player in the world on a bad team and he would be forced to play in a lower league? I’m not sure I like that.
The USL (different than MLS) voted to implement a relegation system this year.
There would be no market for 2nd division games. American sports fans generally don’t have an appetite for anything other than highest-level play.
If I was the billionaire owner of the Detroit Red Wings, and someone told me that my team is now playing in the same league as the Flint Firebirds and the Kitchener Rangers, I’d be PISSED. No one is going to come to those games. My investment is now mostly worthless.
We just took a different path.
In the UK there were competing leagues, and they agreed to go to a first division/second division model. That became the way to structure football leagues across Europe, because the UK went first.
In the US, we hade competing leagues in baseball, and they agreed to run parallel competitions and then play the World Series do determine a winner. Eventually they merged into what is now MLB. That set the model for the other pro leagues. Realistically, only baseball has ever had the number of teams and leagues that it might make sense to use pro/rel. It’s too hard to play American football at a semi-pro level, and there have been limited attempts to develop semi-pro basketball. We have college sports that fill the gap. Also, the country is so big compared to the UK and other European countries that it would be very difficult to have had national second and third division leagues due to travel. Maybe now, but when these things were developing many decades ago, it was hard enough to have a high level league sending people around the country. so there was a pretty clear bifurcation between the big league and the regional leagues.
I view relegation as a way to achieve some amount of parity. Many US leagues have different ways to achieve parity that I would argue are far more effective.
In La Liga for example (Football in Spain), relegation allows the bad teams to fall out of the league, giving other lower league teams a chance to lose to either Barcelona, Real Madrid, or rarely Athletico Madrid. Literally those 3 clubs have won La Liga every year from 2025 all the way back to 2004. Premiere League isn’t much better, they’ve seen 6 different league winners since 1996. Relegation makes the worst teams even worse by taking them out of the spotlight, giving them minimal attention and advertising, and making them less attractive for top talent as they aren’t even in the good league.
In the NFL, the draft allows the worst team to pick first from the college system, allowing the worst teams to improve rather than just kicking them out so they get worse. The NFL playoffs include 14 teams, and its not unheard of for 7 of the last year’s playoff teams to miss the playoffs, bringing new blood to the system. While dynasties still exist, since the year 2000 there have been 13 different teams winning the Superbowl resulting in a better mix of dynasties and one off winners.
Promotion and relegation system hampers investment into teams fighting to stay up. The amount of money lost due to a relegation is seismic and makes investing in those teams super risky. Franchise system makes for much greater parity in professional sports and is far superior to promotion and relegation.
It fundamentally doesn’t make sense for sports like Football and Baseball especially when factoring in the college sports system.
USL is trying to change that
Technically speaking, America does have that system, but it’s not on based on the team’s performance…it’s actually on the individual athletes on their performance on the field/court/ice.
Baseball is the best example where players start off at college (or maybe high school), get drafted by an MLB team. Rather than going start to the MLB team, the draft player will go to the Minor league system usually Rookie league. As the player progress in ability, he is then promoted to: Low A/High A, AA, and then AAA. If good enough, the player then gets his final promotion to the MLB team.
However, keep in mind, a player can only stay a certain amount of time in Rookie and Single A before he times out and is released.