Mar 12 2007
The Joy of Relegation
Last week, I referred to West Ham United as “soon-to-be-relegated West Ham United.” If you’ve never followed Association football in England, you probably thought to yourself, “Relegated? What the hell does that mean?”
Well, it’s like this. The English football league system consists of multiple tiers of leagues. The Premier League is the top tier of football in England and contains the most elite clubs in the land. Just below that is the Football League Championship (2nd tier), Football League One (3rd tier), and Football League Two (4th tier). Below that is the National League System, which starts at the top with Conference National (5th tier), then breaks down into regional and local leagues below that.
It’s somewhat similar to multiple levels of baseball and hockey, but with one important exception — football clubs move can move up or down the league system, depending on their success or failure. Clubs that finish at the top of a mid-tier league are promoted to the league above them, while teams that finish at the bottom of a league get relegated to the league below. For example, Reading won the Championship last season and is now in the Premier League, while West Ham is expected to finish in the bottom three of the Premiership, and as a result, they would play in the Championship next season.
You don’t see this anywhere in American sports. There is zero chance that the Durham Bulls or the Indianapolis Indians, both AAA minor league teams, will be promoted to the major leagues. That’s because baseball owners set up a system right from the start in which leagues are practically closed corporations, and the teams within them aren’t clubs, but “franchises.” That allowed each team owner to have a geographical monopoly on the team’s home city.
Unfortunately, as time went on and TV and merchandising money came into play, the franchise system gave bad teams no real incentive to get better. The franchise system breeds team owners like William Clay Ford of the Detroit Lions, who doesn’t care a lick about winning so long as the franchise is making a profit.
You’ll never get me fired, bitches! I am untouchable!!!
Not so in English football. If a club finishes at the bottom of the league and gets relegated, the financial impact alone can be devastating. For starters, Premiership clubs get roughly £28 million each in TV rights money, while Championship clubs get only £1 million each. This forces relegated clubs to sell off some of their best players’ contracts to make up the difference, thus making it harder for them get back to the Premiership — even with the £6 million “parachute payment” that a relegated club gets. Some clubs bounce back and forth between the Premiership and the Championship so often that the word “bouncebackability” has become common parlance in the league system.
The end result, though, is that teams at the bottom of their league standings have to scrape and fight to stay in the top flight. NFL teams don’t have to worry about that. The Oakland Raiders and Detroit Lions had the worst records in the NFL this past season, but they’ll still be NFL teams in 2007. Birmingham City, Sunderland, and West Bromwich Albion, on the other hand, were the worst teams the Premiership last season, and they are not Premiership teams today.
This makes games involving teams at the bottom of the standings a hell of a lot more interesting — and goal celebrations like the one between Carlos Tevez and West Ham fans much more common. Compare that reaction to the reaction of Lions fans after their team beat Dallas on New Year’s Eve, which was something along the lines of, “Well, shit, now we won’t get the first pick in the draft.” As Soccernista puts it:
(Relegation is) the single greatest invention in sports history. While other leagues hang there heads in shame as the Cleveland Browns take on the Arizona Cardinals, or the Boston Celtics lock horns with the Atlanta Hawks, Wigan vs. Sheffield United (on the final day of the season) will be one of the most anticipated games of the season. Relegation turns crap into gold.
Thus, in a multi-tiered league system with promotion and relegation, there is always incentive to win. You either want to stay in the league you’re in or move up to a league above you. Even if a club doesn’t win the Premiership outright, its achieves victory just by staying in the top flight for another year. Nobody wants to get sent down to a lower league.
American football leagues, on the other hand, are plainly scared of promotion and relegation. The NFL? Arena Football? Major League Soccer? They’re all “closed-corporation” leagues. The NFL in particular will remain this way until the heat death of the universe. The Australian Football League is a closed ecosystem, too.
One could argue that the lack of a promotion-and-relegation system is the reason nobody takes MLS seriously. Bad MLS teams, like bad NFL teams, don’t have to fight for survival. They should. It would make Association football in America a hell of a lot more interesting.
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Great article. I tackled the same thing in my column . It seems like one of the biggest complaints American sports fans have is that their athletes are getting paid lots of dosh without having any real incentive to put forth their best effort. Relegation introduces a much more practical motivation.
[...] blog does a decent job explaining relegation and is also a worthwhile read if you want to learn about [...]
[...] I can’t be arsed to care about MLS The joy of relegation Covers all football, foreign and domestic. Some great blogs on how the MLS can be more appealing [...]
I 100% agree–as someone who watches NFL I really think relegation would add some incentive for crappy clubs to play better.
NFL should buy the CFL and add a team or two in Mexico–retool that into 8-10 teams and move the schedule a small bit. Call it NFL-B or whatever.
I think 1 team relegation would be the way to start. Gray cup champ gets to move up and Det. Lions (this year) would go down.
The league formerly known as the CFL would make more money and our Mexican friends would finally get a team or too. L
[...] I can’t be arsed to care about MLS The joy of relegation Covers all football, foreign and domestic. Some great blogs on how the MLS can be more appealing [...]