Do you want Promotion/Relegation in your pro sports?

32 comments

1. I don’t even want pro/rel in my soccer.

2. Not really. The NFL, for example, has rules in place that make the league much more competitive than European soccer. For instance, salary caps. Manchester City will never be threatened by Southampton because of a lack of rules like this.

3. The only people that want relegation in American sports are Europeans. It’s trying to find a solution where no problem exists.

4. For most sports there isn’t anywhere else for them to be relegated to. Although I like the idea, our sports work the way they are.

5. I was fascinated with the idea of promotion/relegation when I first learned about it, but I don’t think it’s the best system for sports in today’s environment for a few reasons.

   After serving a rookie contract players are free to go wherever they want and no good player is going to choose an inferior league.

   With so much money to be made in television, the difference between the top league and inferior leagues is drastic.

   One of the good things about American sports is that leagues keep parity among the teams by giving the worst performing teams first picks of the upcoming rookies. In a relegation system, being the worst performing team is crippling to future success.

   I think in a sports world where players stayed near their hometown and there wasn’t so much movement of talent, promotion/relegation would be a lot of fun, but in today’s world? No.

6. No. Where you find the lack of jeopardy uninteresting, I find the lack of parity uninteresting.

7. A lot of people enjoy the traditions and continuity of sports. Pro/rel might add a layer of excitement but I don’t see the response being favorable to a big change like that to established sports.

8. Yeah I think it would be fun. Teams should be punished for tanking.

9. No. Our leagues aren’t structured for that, anyway.

10. The main pro to me wouldn’t be better competition, but rather more teams/cheaper tickets.

    By that, I mean cities like Cleveland, Providence, Atlanta, and Quebec City would surely have “NHL-potential” franchises if there were 50-80 teams competing for advancement/top league spots each year. Similar for NFL, NBA, MLB but different cities. And then they’d have to compete less monopolistically (ie cheaper) for fans.

    But I don’t think our system breeds poor competition the way Europeans seem to assume.

    Like 2 or 3 out of 30 teams are tanking for picks any given year. And the players and coaches generally aren’t complicit because trying and winning still benefits them personally.

    The other 25+ teams are competing hard, and we see a greater variety of champions as a result.

    While the same 5 (mostly London based) teams are the only ones competing for Premier League titles since it’s inception (and even fewer in other leagues), small market teams in the US compete and win titles.

    Net: As someone who grew up not in NYC or LA, my teams still competed for championships and that was more fun than watching them “compete” for the 5th worst record to avoid relegation – that just seems miserable to have as your ceiling for the entirety of your life.

11. No. The way we do it is better. If you’re a good owner and investing smartly as you say, none of that really matters. Basically every European soccer league has the same winners year after year. Your small town in England will never win a trophy unless some billionaire decides to use your team to launder money.

12. Not really, it’s designed differently, Europe has a (theoretical, doesn’t happen often or usually at all) chance to go from park to the majors, American sports fans know that with good management their team will always have a chance to win a championship.

    There are exactly 2 teams that have a chance to win the Prem this year.

    Juve won like 9 straight.

    Bayern has a current streak of like 12.

    American sports are designed for parity, between the 2010 and 2021 season, 8 different MLS teams won, 7 NHL teams, 7 NBA teams, 9 NFL teams.

    I would rather have management matter than just money, like it does in soccer.

13. While you have relegation, we have a salary cap. At least most of our sports do, I believe baseball doesn’t I don’t follow it enough to know if they added one. But it keeps the playing field a bit more even. All teams are given the same budget, so we don’t have PSG or Man City spending any amount on players. Our league’s also aren’t set up for that, not in the slightest.

14. Not for pro, yes for university-level, especially American Football.

15. No, I’m fine. Favoring the losers in drafts seems to do better at retaining parity which makes for more good games and fewer blowouts.

    Y’all seem to have a lot more dynastic streaks than our major leagues do and Americans want to feel their team has a chance, if not now then in just a couple seasons, whichever team that may be.

16. The fans of bad teams are already punished enough. On the other hand, if the Washington DC NFL franchise were relegated to a minor league, they might actually win more games.

17. > I’m no expert on your system but I believe the worst team in the league gets rewarded in the draft system.

    In some sports (NFL, MLB) the draft picks are directly tied to regular season record. The [NBA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBA_draft_lottery) and [NHL](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHL_Entry_Draft#Draft_lottery) put the non-playoff teams in a lottery to discourage the bottom teams from losing on purpose, “tanking”, to ensure draft position. The draft’s intention is to level the playing field, we want the bad teams to have a chance to get better, not be punished for being bad.

    The club system is not the same as our franchise system. The leagues wield less power than the collective of the owners, the leagues could not force this upon the franchises. The owners of the franchises would never in a million years agree to be relegated. The Pittsburgh Pirates make millions of dollars annually despite being a floundering franchise, they would never agree to being sent to the minor leagues.

18. No.

19. Not in an existing sport. If some as-yet undefined sport did, sure.

20. I don’t. I also want to point out that it would require blowing up everything and starting over. The leagues here are business partnerships between their teams, meaning that the teams own the league. They are not independent entities. We also don’t have lower tiers to delegate to/promote from. Minor leagues exist in 3 of our 4 major sports but those teams are owned by (or at least in partnership with) their parent teams. For example baseball players under contract to the Boston Red Sox but not yet ready to play on the major league team may play on the Worcester Red Sox (a minor league team one level down from major league baseball). It doesn’t work or make sense to promote that team to the majors.

    When bad teams tank it sucks, no doubt, but it gives those teams a way to get relevant again. This is in the interest of the league.

21. I think it could be fun for college sports.

    But mostly because I would like to see bad things happen to my teams rivals.

22. No, and I don’t think it would work here even if it was.

    1. There is no Tier-2 football league, unless you count college teams but that would never work. The NBA is building a proper Tier-2 league, but it couldn’t survive without the NBA. Only hockey and baseball have well developed Tier-2 and lower leagues, and those all seem to struggle financially at times.
    1. American cities are _very_ spread out and between them is largely empty space. As a result, Tier-2 leagues in hockey and baseball can struggle to pay for travel costs and even in Tier-1 games, you’ll only find a handful of away fans (and those mostly live in the home city, rather than traveled to the game)
    1. The cities that can support pro teams largely already have them.
    1. Americans in general are not very supportive of Tier-2 teams. Even popular ones will often fold or move after 5-10 years because they’re not making money.
    1. Teams aren’t as involved in the local communities as they seem to be in Europe, meaning people just don’t really care if the team isn’t the best, minus the die-hards
    1. A Tier-2 team could never sell out a 20k+ stadium here regularly. And a Tier-1 team would be leaving a lot of money on the table with a 5k stadium. So if a Tier-1 team is relegated, they likely can’t pay their bills and fold. If a Tier-2 is promoted, the league leaves a lot of money on the table.
    1. And lastly, our leagues force parity:
    1. We have drafts instead of academies so bad teams have the opportunity to draft young stars.
    1. We have revenue sharing. Rich teams share with the poorer teams to help keep them competitive. The better those teams are, the more money they make. The more money they make, the more money the league makes.
    1. Salary caps prevent teams from “buying” championships (for the most part). As a result, the difference between the best and worst teams are much less than they seem to be in Europe and we have greater champion turnover (I looked last week and the NHL has had 12 champions in 20 years, as an example. Meanwhile, the Premier League has had 8 champions in 30 years, with Man U winning nearly every other year)

    The logistical and cultural differences would make promotion/relegation very difficult to implement.

23. Absolutely not.

    For starters, we’d have to restructure every single league with the possible exception of baseball. This would involve creating brand new bush leagues to relegate teams to, and brand new bush league teams for them to play against. Teams that nobody would watch, and therefore teams that wouldn’t be able to justify their existence financially.

    Additionally, even in the one league where adopting the promotion/relegation system *wouldn’t* be a massive league-killing financial clusterfuck, baseball, the gulf in terms of skill between an MLB team and AAA team is enormous. Bumping the worst pro-team down to the minors for a season and sending the best minor league team up to the majors would mean both of them would be almost guaranteed to last just one season in their new spot. The AAA team would get annihilated in the MLB and get relegated again, the MLB guys would mop the floor with the AAA teams and get promoted back to the MLB.

    Nothing has effectively changed beyond the fact that you just made 52 men waste a season of their careers. You’ve also just all but guaranteed that no AAA team will ever win the AAA Championship again, so in a way you’re wasting *an entire league’s worth of players* time too.

    But most importantly, relegation kills competition. Losing teams are already punished by virtue of being losing teams. Kneecapping them further accomplishes nothing beyond ensuring that they’ll remain losing teams. It’s bad for the league, bad for the fans, and bad for the sport. The only people who benefit are teams that are already powerhouses.

    Those teams need to buoyed and made more competitive to give them a chance to upset the league hierarchy. Not simply swapped out with amateurs who’ll get crushed even harder they did.

24. I don’t know why on earth you would want this.

25. No.

26. Nope. It wouldnt work with our sports and any proposal for it has major flaws

27. For the non-soccer sports? Hell no, that’s a horrible idea. I think it’s be cool for our soccer system though.

28. I think it’s cool but i see no way to get to it. The owners aren’t going to be like ‘sure, let me risk having my team worth billions reduced to a minor league team worth hundreds of thousands’

29. Maybe in soccer one day. I don’t think they’re ready yet tho

30. We do have relegation. It’s called getting fired.

31. No.

    College sports fills the role that the lower professional leagues do in Europe. As such there is no need to create such leagues here in our professional sports teams.

32. We already have that. It’s called “college sports and minor leagues”.

    No professional player would ever go back to playing college sports, just to clarify, but college sports is the most common launching point for most professional sports in the US. As for relegation, this is most common in baseball, where MLB players are downgraded sometimes to AAA ball if their skills need practice and AAA players get promoted to MLB teams if they get really good. However, most college athletes in the US go straight to playing for major teams for whatever reason.