I'm not here to convince you. If you don't want pro/rel, that's a choice you can make. My opinion is based on my own experience as a semi-professional coach in Australia. The CCM are a poorly run club who deserve to get relegated and the club I'm taking about Blacktown City are a well run club who deserve an opportunity to get promoted and have a chance in the top tier. I'm not sure how you can argue that. In Australia, our second tier is decided into 8-9 states/territories and the FFA won't allow clubs to form a single second tier below the A-league to improve the standard of second tier football and improve the income potential for these clubs to hopefully become professional.
"Columbus owner Anthony Precourt is set to announce in a press conference on Tuesday that he will move his team to Austin in 2019 if a downtown soccer stadium for the Crew cannot be finalized in the next year." Whilst pro/rel doesn't prevent this kind of stunt, it sure as heck seems more common in closed leagues: https://www.si.com/soccer/2017/10/16/columbus-crew-austin-texas-anthony-precourt-stadium
I assume you are familiar with your own country's history of clubs getting promoted and folding in the NSL era? Pro/rel is a result of a well-developed football culture that gave rise to too many clubs to fit into a league, not the cause.
It will the second time in MLS’s existence that a team has been relocated.. Mexico had three teams relocate in a single off season..
A-League hasn’t had any relocations since they were founded and they are a closed league. China has had a number of relocations and they are a pro/rel league. Spain has had a handful of relocations. Relocations and the lack thereof has more to do with cultural impacts than the league structure system.
Ok, I'll give you another chance to respond to the specific questions you were asked: And the other US closed major leagues? And other pro/rel leagues across the world? Didn't see any mention of US major leagues in your reply, and China/Spain != world. Ergo, your reply was "non responsive". Bottom line: these kind of relocations are much more likely in closed major leagues, especially established ones where the largest possibility of getting a "major league" team is to get one to relocate to your locale. Compare and contrast to pro/rel pyramids where performances on the field of play allow teams to control their own destiny to move up to major league status, without having to convince a team to move from eleswhere.
Again.. Relocations are a cultural thing and not a factor of the league system.. Clubs move in the US because US fans don’t necessarily oppose it happening, just like clubs move in pro/rel countries because the fans in those countries don't oppose it. Sure it sucks for fans in the city that is losing a team, but fans in other cities generally don't care. All of Australia's leagues are closed and they've had little to no relocations in their existence. The AFL has had 1 relocation in over 100 years of existence, the NRL hasn't had a relocation since it was founded in 1997, the A-League hasn't had a single relocation since it was founded in 2004. There is absolutely no reason to believe that just because pro/rel was implemented in the US that the relocation of teams would stop.
I agree with the first part of that sentence, but given that closed major leagues are part of the "culture" of US professional sports, the second makes no sense to me. So how many US closed major leagues relocations since MLS started?
And the fans losing the team wouldn't give a toss if somebody relocated to their city, so you can only sympathize to a point. I for one, would happily participate in a boycott of a relocated Crew. Now if the Crew's current location was untenable and they had no choice but to move cities, that might be a little different. As much as I've taken the piss, that was the case with the Tulsa Roughnecks when they moved from Hawaii. The team just hadn't caught on there and the future would have been bleak had they stayed. Threatening relocation in a bid to get public funding OTOH, is a dick move. However, blame needs to be shared with the people in power locally that allow that to happen. Basically, fans and cities do have the power to end this practice, but they don't use it because as long as they're the ones getting the team, they don't care. While that culture exists, team owners are going to take advantage of it.
How many relocations have there been in Australia's closed major leagues since the A-League started? How many relocations have there been in Japan's closed major leagues since the J-League was founded? We can go round and round all day on this, but just like Mexico, Spain, China, and various other countries that have pro/rel and still have relocations, the US has relocations because the fans don't fight it. If English fans hadn't fought the relocation of Wimbeldon to Milton Keyes, we may have seen more relocations in England. However, since fans across the sport rose up against it, the FA said it wouldn't approve any more relocations ...
Still no answer on the number of US closed major league relocations... oh well, "non-responsive" it shall remain. Fans - and local governments - don't fight it because they know it's the only way they will see a "major league" team in their locale. That's simply not the case in a pro/rel pyramid. Wimbledon was the first relocation in about... a century. So I'm sceptical we would have seen more relocations absent fans' protests.
Well if the fans refused to support a relocated team, accepting only expansion teams, it might actually cause these US leagues to grow beyond the de facto 32 team "limit" and perhaps even create a scenario where something like a pro/rel model becomes a serious consideration.
It might... let's just say I'm not exactly holding my breath that will happen. In the mean time, the US is sadly doomed to this kind of scenario repeating itself at regular intervals.
I'm not answering your question because you know the answer.. There has been more than a handful, particularly in the NFL. If you want to die upon that hill, while ignoring the examples of closed leagues where there are no relocations and pro/rel leagues where there are relocations, go crazy. But let's not pretend that if USSF implemented pro/rel there wouldn't be relocations in the US. There is absolutely no reason to believe that would be the case. How many relocations have there been in Australia despite all of their leagues being closed?
Of course, Milton Keynes is a very new city and was in the rare position in the UK for a town of its size, of not having a well-established professional football club.
The average number of relocations is way lower across pro/rel leagues than it is across closed leagues. Never claimed there would be zero relocations. My point is that when there is a mechanism by which clubs can attain major league status based on their performances on the field of play, the likelihood of relocations is much diminished over a system where that is pretty much the only way to attain major league status.
Quite a few towns around London could theoretically have seen relocations. For example, High Wycombe, Ebbsfleet and Crawley, all of which have seen a large growth in population in the last quarter of century. Wycombe had only an amateur team until the 70's. Ebbsfleet has a team that has rarely been at the top level of non-league football. And Crawley until this century were a nobody in non-league. And yet two of those teams have managed to get promoted into the league. That is the advantage of pro/rel in action and what makes relocations superfluous and unlikely to happen.
I'm well aware of "pro/rel" in Australia. The process was very different to what I would call pro/rel and it was decades ago. Australia and our football landscape has changed a lot since then.
China. More club moves than the rest of the world combined over the last 15 years or so. You've argued it's because China is still a developing league system... while conveniently ignoring the fact that the US is too.
And you seem to be conveniently ignoring that MLS "relocated" three teams to the garbage bin... and that, unlike with pro/rel, the pattern for closed leagues is that, because the only way for a locale to get a "major league" team is largely through relocation, they typically end up having more relocations once they mature.