Let's say you're on a city council. You have a proposal before you. The local MLS club is willing to pay for the construction of a new stadium, but the site requires $20 million in infrastructure improvements.

"OK," you say. "So this club will be in the top division of U.S. soccer throughout the life of this stadium?"

"Well," they say. "Maybe not."

This sort of thing plays out elsewhere, too. If the EPL expanded to Reading, the club would expand its stadium.

MLS was built to be stable. Investing in U.S. pro soccer in the 1990s was a risky proposition, and they sought to mitigate that risk as much as possible.

Today, it might be less risky. (Or it might still be risky -- soccer still lags far behind gridiron football, basketball and baseball, and I'm actually worried the hipsters in Cascadia may eventually find something else to do and the bottom will fall out. But I'm a pessimist.) But MLS has still made progress by mitigating risk. I don't think the Philadelphia Union would have started a residency program if it were at risk of being relegated.

All that said, we *might* be at a point where we could start moving toward pro/rel. But this "pro/rel will magically make MLS the best league in the world, give the U.S. men a lock on the World Cup, cure cancer and write a reasonable health-care bill" stuff is simply nonsense. Pro/rel is a *symptom* of a thriving soccer culture. Not the cause.

 

It's as serious as your replies.

I saw the World Cup 94. I think soccer was plenty popular in the United States.

But if I accept your premise that it wasn't, then your conclusion that pro/rel would help makes no sense. MLS has been the prime driver of soccer acceptance, suddenly - hey let's stop doing what they've been doing and do something else that had 80 years to work!

Nice business plan you've got there.

 

If FIFA decides to enforce its league size limits, then MLS will have pro/rel. England, Spain and Brazil all had to pare down the size of their top flights. Pretty much all depends on FIFA's mood and whether any other nations start to grouse about MLS getting way too large. Claims of American exceptionalism are cute now, but they aren't going to sway the internationals who hold the hammer to make the league change.

 

FIFA regulations about league size are there to prevent schedule congestion, since they want players to be available for national teams and pro teams available for domestic cups, federation tournaments, and the Club World Cup. MLS runs an unbalanced schedule for exactly this reason; there's no time to schedule enough games for a balanced one.

And if you believe the conditions for a league here are materially similar to running one in a nation with at most a quarter of the population in at most a tenth the area, then sure, dismiss it as base American exceptionalism.

 

No, no they didn't.

 

Wait, you mean the WNTs aren't required to wear sexy outfits?

 

Should've said suggestions. Gimme a break, it was 4:30!

 

I myself am a Bein subscriber. I'd cancel the damn thing but, well......Kay Murray.

Even if it means you also have to suffer through Thomas Rongan and/or Phil Scheon, she's worth every second of it.

 

Nonsense.

Deloitte was hired to make the pitch. Rich corporations don't hire accountants to make business decisions for them. That's why they get the big bucks.

They bring in the name auditors to help them justify and sell what they already decided to do.

 

Corporations hire firms like Deloitte to do market research and provide the data they need to make business decisions.

It's ludicrous to suggest that there was a conspiracy between MP and Silva and Deloitte to doctor the data. MP and Silva would not have made a 4billion media rights offer without solid data that they believed in.

Corporations don't decide to do anything without market research. They don't decide to do something and then hire a firm to provide bias data. Anyone who suggests that just doesn't know how the business world works.

 

That's so cute.

Nobody said a damn thing about a conspiracy. You spend too much time reading politics blogs.

As for your naivete about how and why businesses hire consultants, Jon Snow, you know nothing.

 

So at what point would you say that we could start moving towards pro/rel?

 

In the abstract, pro/rel is nice. Replace an underachiever or two with an organization which is better run and more ambitious.

But the side effects are bad. It makes working with municipalities to upgrade or build facilities more difficult. It encourages short-term thinking for bad teams, which are pressured to cut costs elsewhere to overspend midseason for temporary help. It encourages a very static hierarchy of teams; at worst a single superclub, but at most only a half-dozen teams which have a real shot each year. Then there's a class of also-ran teams, which compete to be also-ran teams in continental competition. And then the teams which bounce between the first and second division, which hope for scoreless draws against their betters. Yuck.

I have no interest in following an uncompetitive league. I also like geographic coverage; there's a lot to be said for nearly everyone having a nearby team in the league. Even a two-legged series between the last first division team and the top second division team would still require plenty of other qualifications before it would be good in practice.

 

If you're so confident, then maybe should tweet out your own poll about whether or not MLS should move towards promotion relegation or if another pyramid should be created or if everyone needs to accept that we will never have p/r in USA. I mean, you sound 100% sure so do your own poll and let's see.

 

Looking around the world ... Half a dozen Is a lot...

 

Typical bigsoccer anti-Pro/Rel mentality.

Yeah, it's not as if we have any reputable firm that did a poll on it... oh wait...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/football...pyramid-deloitte-report-makes-case-for-promo/

And, I mean, there is a new league called NISA, so maybe Peter Wilt might have some words of wisdom here...
https://www.whatahowler.com/httpswhatahowler-com201701the-u-s-promotionrelegation-manifesto-html/

 

I don't think there's anyone on Big Soccer who opposes your little hobby horse. I certainly don't. I'd love to see pro/rel in the USA. I'd also love to see Sasha Grey helicopter over to my house and make me a nice souflé.

 

The future of american soccer is not pro/rel--it will be a farm system such as in baseball or hockey. in fact we've already taken a huge step towards that future in the affiliation agreements with USL. In the future youth players that show potential in developmental academies will be placed in USL after their academy days are over. If they do well they may receive a call up to the MLS senior team. If they dont do well in USL then they will be free to go as free agents and ply their services wherever they can be paid for them. Likewise veterans that are slumping or that are coming out of injury in the future can be placed in a USL team for a while and then be brought back when ready. If you prefer, you can think of it as pro/rel, but pro-rel of players rather than of clubs.

 

The thing about this topic that no one talks about (at least no one I read) is to address why promotion and relegation in soccer was brought into being in the first place.

In England, they started a league system to provide regular matches for the country's strongest clubs so they could count on regular, predictable revenue and afford to pay their players – a concept adopted from the American baseball leagues. At first, this seemed like only twelve clubs were willing and able to take the leap and so the league was twelve in number. Sounds familiar...

After a few years, it was clear there were more equivalently strong clubs of the top division's caliber then there were reasonable places for to teams to play annually across a country Great Britain's size, a number eventually set around 20. So, the clubs decided to incorporate a second division. And so on, and so forth.

The entire principle of promotion and relegation is overflow, that there are already more viable, competitive clubs than places available – and usually by a factor of 2.

"Pro/Rel" isn't a top-down magic wand. It never was. The clubs come first. When MLS is full and there are 24 new Seattles in North America without places (or Cincinnatis in D3 to go to D2, etc), let's talk.

NB: the promotion and relegation system isn't structurally inherent to soccer either. If the initial league boom had occurred in the US rather than the UK, the structure of pro soccer around the world might look like baseball or the NFL.

 

Actually that's brought up frequently and incessantly. I'm one of those constantly bringing up the history and the reasons.

The problem isn't the availability of the information, it's the willingness to listen and understand by those that want to believe in pixie dust.

We can explain that soccer is about as English as a word gets, but that never stops people for mocking "sawker" and other U.S. terminology.

 

That's how about many EPL contenders there are in a good year for the league, but yes, that's really stretching the upper limit. Much more common is a single superclub that clinches with 5 games left. I'm really not interested in seeing that here on an annual basis. An occasional team reaching for best ever is fine, but not every season.

 

And in a geographically compact country having 1 to 4 or 5 usual suspects still give most or all of the population the option of embracing a top team, even as a secondary team.

In a country the size of the United States, having a few "chosen teams" that always win has a huge negative impact. Leaving swathes of population out in the cold. Yes, the "hard core" or "real" or "proper" fans won't care, but those will always be the minority, and large public acceptance by bandwagon and casual fans is important for broadcast revenue and sponsorship dollars.

 

We already are to some extent. Most amateur leagues of any decent size (I'm talking local leagues like the Cosmopolitan Soccer League, Maryland Major Soccer League, etc., not PDL and NPSL) already have pro/rel, and they're starting to form an ad hoc pyramid similar to what England had a few decades ago. Then add in Peter Wilt's NISA, which proposes to be a Division 3 league that will eventually grow large enough to be a pro/rel bridge between the amateurs and semipros (honestly, there aren't that many "semipro" teams, though there are more than there were five years ago) and Division 2.

While this is happening, we're rapidly approaching the point of having about 30 clubs already demonstrating they can operate at a Division 1 level. So if someone can come up with a plan to share revenue between two top tiers (which we've seen floated in England with the "two-tier Premier League") and convince MLS to get on board, then you can get to what I propose here:

https://duresport.com/2017/07/27/how-the-usa-can-do-promotion-and-relegation-better-than-england/

But it's easy for me to play around with maps. It's another thing entirely to come up with a business plan that reasonable investors will buy into.