I come in peace. I'm a regular participant in the debate about pro/rel in the USA. My position on it, is here: https://barroldinhosoccer.wordpress.com/my-position-on-promotion-and-relegation-in-the-usa/ I notice that the K-League implemented the system recently. To date it looks like there's generally been a yo-yo'ing of K-League Classic teams between divisions and I notice that in 2017, there will be no teams that weren't there before pro/rel was implemented. Of course, it is early days. I'm interested in the opinions of posters here on how its going and what impact it might have. I also notice that attendance seems to have dipped since its introduction. Was it a direct result of pro/rel, the split system or are there other factors? Thanks in advance.
There was a significant boost in attendance in the 2015 K-League Challenge (2nd div). Personally, I'm all for it. Two teams, Bucheon SK and Anyang LG Cheetahs, were suddenly franchised out to teams that are now known as Jeju United and FC Seoul. Unhappy fans decided to create their own club and came the birth of Bucheon FC 1995 and FC Anyang who both compete in K-League Challenge. These two clubs made proper strides since their foundation and are two of the better supported teams in our 2nd div. I, as well as the fans of those two clubs, really want them to get promoted so they can play regular matches against their foes. The biggest rivalry in Korea is Suwon Bluewings & FC Seoul but I feel like once FC Anyang get promoted, the "El Clasico" derbies will be one of the better attended matches. FA Cup - FC Anyang fans & Suwon Bluewings fans
Also as a side question, what's your take on NCAA Div. 1 teams competing in the Lamar Hunt Cup? Always thought that the winners of each major conference (Big 10, ACC, Big 12. Pac-12, SEC) should at least be given a shot.
There's a couple of tricky factors regarding that. First off, I'm not sure that NCAA rules would allow it (though I'm not sure). More importantly though, due to the relatively short schedule (August - November regular season, November - December playoffs) many NCAA soccer players also play for NPSL and PDL teams, which do compete in the Cup already. Thanks for the response. Do you know what caused the D1 dip?
The attendance for D1 dip because they changed the way the counted the attendance. For example, before they counted the people that had "bought" the ticket. Now it's how many people actually showed up to the stadium. The realistic numbers had always been low.
People complain about MLS doing that but I did some research a while back and it turns out that even Man United and Arsenal count the tickets distributed. My understanding is that rather than attempting to be misleading, there was simply more interest in counting tickets sold from a business standpoint. It's nice to see the K-League taking actual attendance though. That answers my question anyway. Thanks.
It wasn't really "sold" because a lot of time the clubs would give out free tickets by bulk. People didn't show up and the attendance was obviously greatly exaggerated. Even now people don't pay to see games, they can go in with free tickets.
MLS does giveaways too, though my understanding is that they don't do it in serious numbers. Not enough to make a serious uplift in attendance anyway. The biggest discrepancy I've seen (and this goes for English clubs to) is that season tickets are counted. For the most part, season ticket holders will of course go to most games. What I've noticed at the LA Galaxy though, is that the more expensive sections which are often sold as part of corporate packages, often have many empty seats. That's to be expected to a point, because corporate tickets don't always get used and even if they do, there are often more available to an organization than are actually used. Though I do know that when the Rochester Rhinos were pushing to join MLS many moons ago, they pulling in 10k+ a game but it turned out that they were tickets away in huge quantities and when they stopped, attendances crashed.
TBH, I think the K-league should just scrap and restart all together. The whole thing is a mess, and I think the K-league still didn't elect their president... When it revamp, they should cut the numbers of pro teams to 8 without the promotion or relegation. There will be no salary cap or draft or anything like that. They should concentrate on generating profit and marketing. Once they get the ball rolling, they need to start adding more teams and hopefully we can have a solid 2 tier pro leagues with promotion and relegation in 20 years time. But what's important is quality over quantity and generating profit. Right now, we have too many teams with shitty products that's no one is interested in. The 8 teams should be: 2 teams in Seoul, 1 team in Ulsan, Suwon, Changwon, Seongnam, Goyang, and Jeongju. So basically all the big cities that don't have a pro baseball team other than Seoul because they're a big ass city. Jeongju gets a nod because they have the best team and the best supported team in the country (Jeonbuk). Also, all the teams need a football specific stadium so Seongnam and Goyang need to create one. But, we can also argue that the stadiums used for other teams are way too big so all of them need to build a smaller football specific stadium?
I agree that the K-League needs a huge re-vamp but 8 teams? Your potential list throws out Pohang which has a decent following and have been largely successful domestically and in Asia. Also, Goyang is a very strange inclusion. Korean officials have been following the J-League as a way to study their success but I think it wouldn't be a bad idea to check out MLS' success as well. Atlanta United had an amazing home opener attendance-wise.
Yeah I think 8 teams is the right number, quality over quantity. I threw out Pohang because it's a really small city...Goyang is apparently a big city so I included them. Pohang is debatable I guess, the teams that I presented are not set in stone, it's just an idea. I just realized that Suwon and Changwon has a baseball team, but Suwon has been more of a football city than baseball so I included them. Changwon idk now. I don't mind MLS if there's something to study about but I feel both countries have different problems to tackle. US is already a big country unlike Korea etc.
There's been a general fall in interest in the sport, with players in Europe not doing particularly well and the NT not doing great either. I'm not sure much, if any, of it can be attributed to the introduction of promotion and relegation. If anything, it's probably saved a little bit of interest, given that there are less teams in the division and that bottom dwellers and second division clubs now have something to play for.
We must keep promotion/relegation system alive. That is AFC requirement. I agree with your point that we need to reduce # of clubs competing in the top-tier championship from 12 to 8. 10 could work as well.
I don't much care for that policy. Pro/rel has its pitfalls as well as merits. It's very good for handling a large solid base of teams, especially when they're mostly competitive with one another, or there's a steady gradation of quality from top to bottom, without major gaps between levels. At the same time, it can be messy if just implemented for the sake of it. Qatar for example, have supposedly implemented it just to meet the AFC requirement, when they actually had a decent number of clubs for a country of their population. I've done some research on this and there's little value to just arbitrarily chopping an 18 team league in half to create tiers. Now of course, if 6-12 of those clubs are stronger than the rest and you've got perpetual bottom-dwellers that do nothing year after year, then pro/rel has a firm application. Dividing MLS in two for example wouldn't make sense, because it's a very competitive league, with no team that doesn't have at least an outside chance of winning the title.
To me it's about priority. Doing well in the Champions League should not be the top priority, it's the cherry on top. What is needed however is making sure that the league is profitable through broadcast rights, attendances, and commercial and even selling players to richer leagues. As well making sure the teams are responsible for their own operations instead of relying on corporations and government hand outs.
i would like to see mls implement a successful promotion/relegation program into their system for a selfish reason. it being i want to see the idea spread onto other sports in the us. seeing promotion/relegation in the nfl would incredible. even better if they completely adopt the english soccer system of having the pyramid fall all the way down to regional pub leagues. there are enough demands for local football around america and as well as the supply of players
It does in Korean football. In K-League Classic about 30% of the attendances come from give away tickets, and more than 50% of the attendances in the K-League Challenge are from free tickets. I completely agree with this. K-League was the first professional football league in Asia, as well as being the most successful league at the continental level for decades. What has that brought us? Virtually every single club in Korea (barring Seoul, and maybe Jeonbuk) will go bankrupt without companies/city government bailing them out every season, no company wants to sponsor K-League, even the Thai league is more commercially successful, nevermind J-League or CSL. There needs to be a shakeup. They need to introduce rules to ensure that they can't live beyond their means like J-League, or something in the lines of that. Chuck out teams that can't cut it.
I think most teams should close shops and start new clubs with different brand in an area that can secure good attendances. These new clubs wouldn't have any of Samsung, Hyundai, or E-land and stuff like that.
Very, very interesting topic. I read your blog and re-read it, but I respectfully disagree or at the very least, don't understand your argument. You argue that the popularity of the sport is due to promotion and relegation but I don't see any empirical evidence. There is nothing to suggest that pro/rel has a higher correlation to average attendance (or more meaningfully, the financial value of the league) than say, the average skill level of the league. You also argue that pro/rel is not a requirement for youth development, which I also disagree with. Pro/Rel is a requisite for quality control, more than anything else. However, for MLS, I'm not sure if there is even any value in quality control. Acquisition cost for an American youth player is virtually free and the Americans have a deep pool of players. There's a lot of supply, at zero cost, and plenty of demand. Given, why spend resources to implement a system?
It's either a misunderstanding or I didn't explain it vey well. I actually don't believe that pro/rel is the reason for football's popularity. In fact, if anything, I believe pro/rel was simply a byproduct of soccer's growing popularity. I'm of the strong belief that pro/rel is incidental and that soccer would be just as popular today if it had never been invented. My point on the divisions is that being perceived as a team in the nation's "top" league (and that could be the top division in a pro/rel structure, such as the Premier League, or a closed "Major League" such as the NFL or MLB) tends to maximize your attendance, TV ratings etc. Just click through the different nations on this site and see how the average attendance consistently drops significantly as you go down the divisions. So if you can happily accommodate (for example) 20 teams in a division, it makes little sense to instead have two divisions of 10. All you're doing is needlessly handicapping the teams outside the top division. Actually, there's evidence to suggest that pro/rel isn't required. If you look at leagues in other sports, where promotion and relegation aren't universally used, there's little correlation between the system and standard of youth development. Cricket for example, is the second most popular sport in the world. Its two highest profile leagues (Indian Premier League and Australian Big Bash league) don't use pro/rel, while others do. Despite this, both nations have produced some of the best players of their respective generations. Similarly, New Zealand All Blacks dominate Rugby Union, yet their top teams participate in the "Super Rugby" league, which is closed. If pro/rel truly fostered youth development, you'd expect the English Rugby Union team to be much stronger than NZ. Sticking with Rugby, Australia dominates Rugby League internationally and their clubs are as strong as they come. This is despite them also using a closed league while many rivals have pro/rel. Furthermore, if you look at relatively recent revamps of youth development in soccer (Germany, Uruguay and Belgium are strong examples) the trend has been away from relying on club football to independently develop youth. Instead, a centrally managed curriculum and more "hands on" approach by national federations has been the key. We'll soon have solid evidence if I'm right, as England's EPPP revamp went opposite to this trend, focusing on funneling top prospects to the clubs with the strongest academies. I predict that this will wind up hurting English football, because it relies purely on the clubs to figure out youth development and by giving the clubs with "stronger" academies a virtual carte blanche to snap up the top prospects, smaller clubs are already abandoning their youth programs. As an aside, this also points to the different, but not unrelated issue of modern football structures perpetuating an elite of wealthy, successful clubs. Because the EPL is so rich and is relied upon to aid lower leagues with a level of financial assistance (voluntarily), they held the leverage when lower league clubs objected to some of these reforms. Their reaction was simply "We don't have to give you anything, so take it or leave it".
If I'm informed correctly, the Asian Football Confederation mandates each of its member associations to implement some form of pro/rel within their respective domestic systems. I don't think Australia has pro/rel yet. I wonder if AFC requiring pro/rel prevents Korea from developing a better-fitted solution for revamp.
Australia doesn't. My understanding is that AFC has some kind of rating system to determine which continental competition the clubs from each league participate in. I don't know the full details, but I believe having pro/rel has a significant impact on that rating. This is why you've got nations like Qatar, that only has 18 pro teams, running a pro/rel structure with 14 teams in the top division, and a second tier with just 4 independent clubs, with the top league's reserve teams making up the number. Of course, only the 4 independent clubs are eligible for promotion. It's a complete farce. A single league with 18 teams would be healthier.
It seems short-sighted of the AFC to implement pro/rel system as part of rating for continental competitions.