A pro/rel discussion

Works the other way around, too.

If you live in a city and your local politicans are trying to build a pro stadium that they say will create revenue and bring in tax money (lets say MLB) and at the end slip in that if the team(in D2) does well they will go to major and revenue/tax base goes up. Would you support more of the new stadium with that chance?

 

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I think it's different in a subtle way from the rest of the world, because of the parity in D1. Saying that the better Championship teams are playing at about the same level as the worse Premiership teams is every bit as true. But it doesn't mean those Championship teams are even particularly close to matching the big four.

On the other hand, there's parity in MLS on a level that's unheard of in most of world football. Once you grant that Montreal (last year's USL-1 champion) is playing on a level where they might not be very good in MLS but they at least wouldn't embarrass themselves there (even with their current squad - obviously they'll have a somewhat stronger one when they join MLS), you're also granting that they can put up a respectable fight (and have a chance, albeit not a great one, of winning) against any team in the league.

I happen to think that's pretty clearly true, with the caveat that D2 does not have the level of parity that MLS does and we're talking about the better teams. Some of the D2 teams really would be guaranteed a perpetual slot at the bottom of the MLS table - I don't expect to see Miami or Austin win many games even against a lot of the league they're in, let alone against anybody in MLS. But I think if you took Montreal or Vancouver, and arguably also Rochester, Carolina, Puerto Rico, or Portland (those four aren't so clear) and put them up against any MLS team in a game both sides cared about enough to play their starting eleven you would see a very interesting game. Obviously I know who I'd be inclined to bet money on (and it's not the D2 team unless you give me some really lopsided odds), but the results would not be a foregone conclusion and I'd be shocked if the game were a blowout.

Do I expect a D2 team to win the USOC this year? No, WhiteStarWarriors is full of it on that one. It's only happened once in the history of MLS, and it's relatively unlikely to happen again any given year. But low-probability events do happen, and a D2 team winning the USOC is unlikely, not implausible.

Also, note that I'd put the number of D2 teams that could pull it off at six and that's a tiny bit generous; even if those six and every MLS team had equal chances of winning the cup, it would only go to somebody in D2 27% of the time. And no, I don't think there's only a three in four chance of the USOC going to somebody from MLS; I'd say a decent ballpark estimate for the real likelihood of a D2 team winning is the fraction of the time when it's happened since MLS began - one time in fourteen.

Back-of-the-envelope calculation time! If we take that 1/14 as being a more robust estimate of the chances of a D2 team winning the USOC this year than it really is (which I'm up for, because I think it's decently close to the truth), and we make the simplifying assumptions that those six teams have equal probabilities of winning and that the 16 MLS teams have equal probabilities of winning, then that implies that any of the top six D2 teams has about one fifth as good a chance of winning the cup as any given MLS team does. Honestly, yeah, I think that's a fair assessment - it's approximately like (but not equivalent to) saying that if you paired up an MLS side (any of them - there's enough parity that even picking one of the weaker ones isn't really stacking it against them) and a D2 side (from the top half of that division, whether or not you agree with my assessment of which six teams that means) and had them play six games, the MLS side is enough stronger than the D2 side that it would earn more points in those games five times out of six. (That, in turn, means that the MLS side will win such a matchup about twice as often as they will lose it.)

Concluding that in a matchup between an MLS team and one of the top six D2 teams you'll see that the MLS team is unambiguously better, but not by such a wide margin that the D2 team doesn't have a serious fighting chance every time they play, sounds like a good description of reality to me.

 

Funnily enough, in Ipswich's first season in the top flight they did win the league. Nottingham Forest did that too, and won the european cup the following two years for good measure.


Clearly the world was different back then ('62 for Ipswich and '77 for Forest) but Kaiserslautern achieved it in Germany in 1998. They key point really is the massive gap in tv money between divisions at the top. It makes it very hard for promoted clubs. People might look at someone like WBA and think them a club too small for the premiership, but in reality they are about normal for a premiership club. They just have a lot of catching up to do.

There's no reason just yet to assume that the premiership world, in terms of financial gaps between divisions, would be a closer approximation to any potential MLS1/MLS2 than the old style gap in the 1970s. If you look at divisions lower down, you'll see that promoted clubs can and do win their divisions after going up.


It certainly is true though that an unregulated league could get lopsided, and applying a cap just doesn't work with pro/rel, as you would get big clubs going down. About all you could do would be to set the cap at a level which would allow enough teams to compete to make things interesting, while still allowing them to have an advantage over the smaller clubs, but not so much of an advantage that they'd be out of sight.

 

I would want my politicians to vote on infrastructure and stadium projects that will bring in constant tax revenue not fluctuating tax revenue. So no. If it becomes a gamble than private sector picks up the tab. The reason cities get behind big sports franchises is because they are safe bets. MLS has leveraged cities to get behind their clubs, people don't understand how important that is. Soccer is still regarded as not a safe bet in America by the general public and minor league soccer, no way. It would never get traction. Cities like Portland would not give money to renovate the stadium, and once it has to be all private money the overall investment in soccer in the US goes down and we see a lot less SSS. The Rhino's stadium is a big black eye on the face of US club soccer reminding smaller ambitious cities who are promised a shot at MLS one day, that their investment might end up being a big mistake. Buying a permanent franchise allow for there to be more stability to the project and allows politicans who are neutral (or anti) soccer to get on board. Relegation ensures the constant possibility of tax revenues drastically dropping, thus would become much harder to get approved.

 

Umm...

Starters
Fredy Montero - Not USL1
Nate Jaqua - Not USL1
Freddie Ljungberg - Not USL1
Steve Zakuani - Not USL1
Brad Evans - Not USL1
Osvaldo Alonso - Charleston Battery
Leonardo Gonzalez - Not USL1
Jhon Kennedy Hurtado - Not USL1
Tyrone Marshall - Not USL1
James Riley - Not USL1
Kasey Keller - Not USL1

Number of USL1 players - 1

Subs and benchwarmers
Sebastien Le Toux - USL Sounders
Sanna Nyassi - was loaned to USL Sounders by MLS Sounders
Roger Levesque - USL Sounders
Peter Vagenas - Not USL1
Tyson Wahl - Not USL1
Nathan Sturgis - Not USL1
Patrick Ianni - Not USL1
Stephen King - Not USL1
Zach Scott - USL Sounders
Evan Brown - Not USL1
Taylor Graham - USL Sounders
Michael Fucito - Not USL1
Lamar Neagle - Not USL1
Kevin Forrest - Not USL1
Chris Eylander - USL Sounders
Terry Boss - Not USL1
Jarrod Smith - Not USL1

Number of USL1 players - 6

Total number of USL1 players - 7

Care to revise your numbers some? Unless, of course, you're counting people that have been in MLS for multiple years and once played in USL1, which is just silly, IMHO.

 

for all of the talk of parity I would just like to point out the following:

14 MLS cups - 8 different winners - however 4 teams have repeated as champions and account for 10 of the 14 cups.

Out of 28 possible slots in the MLS Cup Final, there have been 11 different teams but 15 of those slots are taken by 3 teams (DC/LA/NE). Only 3 teams that have made the finals have only 1 appearence in the finals and all three teams featured in the last two years.

So even with all of this parity .... there is clearly an "upper echelon" in the MLS.

 

Easier stat:

Until last season Chicago, DC, or LA had won one of the major three trophies every season.

 

Parity in salary just means you need to have better off-field talent. Certain teams have been better at getting that talent than others. The problem being, even the teams that have been better at getting off-field talent have made stupid decisions in the past (Yeah, I'm looking at you Lalas).

 

aaaaaaaahhhhhh man, I was going to destroy his reply with that stat !

 

MLS should follow the j-league as a example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._League_Promotion/Relegation_Series

 

There's a lot of good discussion in this thread.

But I'll just never be able to take US professional soccer seriously without promotion/relegation.

 

Why? Because "that's how Europe does it"?

 

Yea look at the state of MLS? J-league is not in Europe

 

Other than labor troubles which have nothing to do with pro/rel, MLS is doing pretty well for a 15-year-old.

I wasn't responding to your post about the J-League. The J-League is doing it for their own reasons. That's not really the nature of the question I asked anyway, and I'd like the guy to respond in his own words, thanks.

 

or Mexico or Argentina or Brasil or etc...

there's more in the world other than US and Europe.

that's how any decent or above football league around the world does.

 

So simply because other leagues do it mean it's appropriate for the US? Are you confusing causation with correlation?

 

You said Europe, so I was pointing out it's more than Europe.

 

That's like an American saying they'll never be able to take any foreign sport seriously without playoffs.

Absurd.

 

Playoffs is how to determine champion comparable to how they determine champion with single table balanced schedule.

Pro/rel is FIFA's strong demand.

 

How is this a refutation of the post you quoted?

 

what do you mean?

Pro/rel is not just different ways of different leagues like plaoffs or single table balanced schedule.

It's actually FIFA's strong demand to all the football leagues in the world.

 

This sentence is unintelligible.

Citation needed

 

FIFA doesn't demand every league to have playoffs or balacend single table.

However it demands every league to have pro/rel.

http://au.fourfourtwo.com/news/77229,aleague-need-for-speed.aspx
"FIFA has demanded the promotion-relegation system be used in all leagues around the world."

 

That is an article using Sepp's quote out of context, DCU1996. Blatter never said that FIFA demanded pro/rel to be used in all leagues. He was talking about situations where teams were moving up to higher divisions for reasons other than their on-field performance.

http://www.fifa.com/aboutfifa/federation/bodies/news/newsid=783630.html