I agree. I applaud MLS for using a single-entity business format to keep it from being pulled in too many different directions, subject to the whims of individual owners (like what happened when the old NASL was imploding). "We allowed Nelson Skalbania to move a club from Memphis to Calgary and fold it in a year." We allowed an Englishman, Ralph Sweet, to take over Minnesota, one of our best franchises, and destroy it in 18 months. He closed it down on the transatlantic phone. A man called Bruce Anderson took one of our flagship franchises, Seattle, and ran it into the ground in a year. We lost a great owner in Lamar Hunt, one of the fathers of the NASL. All over the country there are scattered carcasses of NASL franchises." -- Noel Lemon As for Kenn, since I've become a big fan of lower division soccer and an advocate in favor of Pro/Rel in particular, I find the Ignore tool to be a useful way to avoid crucifixion. After spending 1985-1995 without anything resembling high level outdoor professional soccer to support, I applauded and still applaud Alan Rothenberg's brainchild of single entity. It certainly started off as a pretty risky scheme. But if you believe the only reason for Promotion/Relegation is if there are too many teams, I'd counter that the only reason to create a single-entity MLS is if there are too few teams and even fewer owners (St Phil, Uncle Lamar, Bob Kraft... ???), which was entirely true at that time. But here's the deal... who are "they?" We've had several versions/generations of MLS owner/investors, most of whom did not run any of the original 10 teams in MLS. It took many years before I started to be even mildly critical of MLS. Don Garber promised to "pause" once the league reached 20 teams and I didn't think MLS would try to become a cheap imitation of the NFL, NBA and MLB by expanding past 24 teams. But here we are. I want MLS to start deconstructing single-entity to allow individual franchises to stand/fall and make decisions individually. I want MLS to be a collection of clubs, in the truest sense. I want lower division soccer to remain largely independent, rather than morph into an MLS version of minor league baseball. And I want lower division soccer to include some sort of element of Promotion/Relegation within its ranks, which appears most likely right now between USL Championship and USL League One. #ProRelForUSA
I don't really know why I am dignifying this with a response, but outside the kitchen, the English use the Imperial system to measure pretty much everything besides area and volume. So a swing and a miss on your insult here.
^^^^^^^ THAT ... here in the US it's about the INDIVIDUAL. It ties to the marriage of local/scholastic entity of sports that begins early on. From 5yrs up to 19yrs old you "play" with either your city (or team within that city), area, or school name/mascot on your sporting gear. Even if you don't do "school" sports you are still tied to the area of where you live to compete (AAU competitions, etc). You only go further out if there's no available program for you and even then it requires some work to get done. "A weekly phone call home with my parents was the key source of football information, or perhaps “The New York Times” or “The Boston Globe” would deign to print half an inch of results buried deep in the Sunday Sports section." https://www.apnews.com/eb5bc2c3827941e583cf89909da09dfb
NASL's biggest years were during the Carter administration and started to dwindle when Reagan entered office. Coincidence? I THINK NOT.
Not really sure what to tell you on this. You've got multiple examples of teams that simply stayed in the league after relegation, so that's three years of post-relegation data. It varies but often the teams will see attendance stagnate slightly if they don't bounce back relatively quickly. If they're solidly in the mix for promotion, they'll likely see a modest bump toward the end of the season. This will also tend to occur if the prior season gave reason for optimism, though the opposite can be true if it ended with the team in poor form. Honestly though, I think I've given you a pretty large sample size. Whatever variations otherwise occur, the relationship between league level and attendance is pretty conclusive from those numbers. From the blog entry: I guess that brings us to the final set of stats: the attendance of clubs relegated in 2013. The theme of lower leagues not being that popular somewhat continues here. In all, 45 clubs were looked at – though finding figures for all, throughout the following seasons wasn’t possible. Luckily, this only impacted a few clubs. All but one team saw attendance drop in the season after relegation. That one was Mersin Idman Yurdu of Turkey, who averaged 5.8k for the season where they were relegated, increasing to a little under 7.5k the following season, as they won the second division and secured an immediate return. Others that fared relatively well in the wake of relegation were QPR who only saw a 7% drop from 17.8k to 16.6k as they also returned immediately, Brazil’s Ponte Preta who lost just a couple of hundred (6.4k to 6.2k) while France’s Nancy dropped from 15.6k to 14.6k. GKS Belchatow of Poland saw their already-small 1.9k attendance drop by less than 100, however their immediate promotion saw an attendance of over 3k back in the top flight, dropping back to 1.6k when they yo-yoed straight down again. Unsurprisingly, attendance tends to do a bit better when a relegated team is in immediate contention to return. Likewise, further relegation typically sees attendance drop even further. Most others saw a drop of at least 15%. All but 7 of the 39 clubs included in this section saw a drop of at least 20%, while 18 saw a drop of more than 30%. Most damning of all is that 8 clubs saw a drop of 50%. So much for supporting your club through thick and thin.
I'd argue that one doesn't really counter the other. I'd also like to layout the reasons behind "too many teams" being the reason for pro/rel. In the grand scheme of things, in its purest form, an open soccer pyramid is essentially one gargantuan league. You simply can't play hundreds (or thousands) of teams in a single season. As we've already discussed, the size of a domestic league is based on a) the number of teams available and b) the number of dates available to run a seasonal schedule of games. Remember that England's top flight grew to 22 teams when they could accommodate it, then scaled back to 20 only when logistically beneficial. If MLS were single table, we'd already be at the point where pro/rel was a strong consideration. However, the regional conference/playoff model means that we're not at that point: and I maintain that accommodating more teams in D1 is a good thing. We've seen that playing at the D1 level maximises attendances and generates the most revenue, enabling teams with the means to function at that level to fulfill their potential. When South Korea first attempted to adopt pro/rel in 2005, they hit an issue because the teams in the second tier determined that they were unready to make the step up. The FA first tried to punish teams that refused with heavy points deductions and then told teams to indicate whether they would accept promotion if they won their division. Even the latter failed when a team that had affirmed their intention to promote, ended up reneging when they finished top. As a result, this attempt was abandoned. This time around, they artificially created the issue that pro/rel is designed to fix by reducing the 16-team top flight to 12 clubs. The result? 4 teams are now yo-yo'ing between levels, drawing less fans and making less money as a result. To date, only one team that wasn't part of the orginal K-League has achieved promotion (via the playoffs) and they finished bottom their only season. The only other "upstart" has been the official police team, which consists entirely of players who are in their final season of national service (and therefore, the best South Koreans in their age group) who due to the nature of the entity, have not been promoted despite winning the K-League 2. While South Korean football has plenty of other issues that are putting it in crisis, pro/rel has so far not helped. I'd argue that by consigning D1-capable clubs to D2 artificially for the sake of implementation, it's hurting. One final segue on this: the reason why PLS standards are important. USSF offers the unique opportunity for independent leagues to coexist at the same level as one another. The problem is, when a league sets it stall out as being "in competition" with the incumbent "major league", despite not having all the tools at its disposal to do so, it inevitably flames out and collapses. This IMO is where NASL 2.0 went wrong. They needed to do as USL has done: concentrate on consolidating at the appropriate level and progress from there. By painting themselves as a D1 alternative, despite not truly being one, they put themselves under enormous pressure to get to D1 status, when in fact, they were barely functioning in line with the D2 reqs. They have therefore gone the way of WHA in hockey and the ABA. Worse in fact because while those two leagues were forced into unfavourable mergers, simply to keep their remaining scraps of existence alive, they were at least able to do so at the top level. However, should we ever get a rival D1, it will be sanctioned as such because it has demonstrated its capacity to function at such a level. This facilitates coexistence and allows a league to try a different model to MLS, if that's what they want to do.
I have a confession to make: I did not read your blog post before replying. That has been rectified. So I want to clarify something here: I'm on board with the correlation between relegation/promotion and attendance. I also acknowledge that division has an affect on total numbers. What I'm interested in is why this seems to affect some clubs more than others and others not at all. Certainly how well the team is playing has some effect, but that doesn't explain some of the teams that seem to be feast or famine or those that are consistently consistent.
It was a long blog. I don't blame you! The consistent teams tend to be based on a couple of things: established profile or yo-yo'ing becoming the norm (Norwich City, QPR). A big team is a big team. They can still take a hit when they go down (see Man City when they dropped to the third tier) and extended spells lower down the leagues can take their toll. But as we've seen with Newcastle and Aston Villa, they can sustain their attendance after a relegation. Indeed, if they've been woeful in relegation, only to bounce back to dominate the following and go straight back up (again, Newcastle), they might even see a slight increase. That's relatively unusual though. Burnley are an example of a team whose past success has allowed them to retain a level of support that's higher than average for a team of their size and location, though it still fluctuates significantly with level. Of course, I'm committing the cardinal sin of using England as the example. This is because I'm more familiar and honestly, the EFS website lists each team in detail. Now after Calciopoli, Juve didn't fare too well, with their attendance decreasing by 12k during their season in Serie B. Atletico Madrid conversely saw a massive upturn in attendance when they were relegated in 2000 (30k to 42k). This makes some sense because Jesus Gil had put the team in turmoil and they'd fought relegation for two seasons. Gil was being investigated for misuse of team funds and the upturn was likely the fan base rallying behind the club after years of mismanagement. Of course, when they were promoted after the second time of asking, the attendance increased to 46k.
I don't think the problem is the idea of having standards (and more onerous the higher on the pyramid): I think it's around the fact that they're designed pretty specifically for franchise-style leagues. The stadium requirements are a little extreme (e.g. Bournemouth wouldn't qualify if these were the standards in England: despite the PL being a much more major league than MLS), but I'm not really against them. The time zones and population sizes, as written, pretty much preclude pro/rel, but we've discussed that before. The financial requirements also seem to be written for expansion franchises, as well. It makes sense to require three years of operating expenses when there is no guarantee that anybody is going to show up for a new team plopped down in a new city. That's far less necessary for an established club: you have a track record to judge. But, honestly, the major issue in my mind is that it's the leagues that have to meet some sort of standards, not the teams directly.
Sure, this is exactly the sort of thing I'm trying to suss out, though. Interestingly, I would have placed QPR is more of a the pendulum camp, at least since 2009 or so. It's possible that they have become too much of a basket case club to successfully hang on to their fanbase unless they're actively doing well. It's also a very real fact that the teams getting relegated, by and large, suck. I also wondered about a few things you mentioned in your blog post: namely the fact that countries like Portugal have such poor lower level attendance. Maybe 18 teams is more than enough for a country of Portugal's size.
Yes and they do. This is a function of the USSF being reactive to what exists than proactive about what might emerge. Indeed, i think so much of soccer's ills could be fixed by the USSF not largely sucking at what they do. In a league-to-league system, you need the PLS to be in the ballpark of what's already out there. If we decide that Eibar's stadium of less than 10k is a reasonable size, then you could theoretically have a league with a dozen 7k seater stadia, that can't actually compete with MLS and ultimately goes under trying to do so. I agree with @USRufnex that it would be interesting to see it implemented in the lower leagues, where the is a much broader base of similar teams. It would be interesting to see how USSF PLS would apply in such a case and what changes would be made to accommodate.
Someone familiar with Portugal did give me a response to that. IIRC, most support one of the "big three", plus a more local team where applicable, so long as it's doing relatively well. But yes, population is a big factor. Almost half the country lives in either Lisborn or Porto, so for many, one of the big three is the local team. Something that really surprised me was that the nations with high populations (100m+) didn't get especially high crowds by comparison. I'd always assumed that this was why gridiron got such good crowds.
I believe that a system of Pro/Rel with MLS involvement could help revolutionize American soccer in a similar way to how PepsiCo introducing 2 liters revolutionized how we buy soda. Why Is Soda Measured in Liters? "Until 1970, all soft drinks in the U.S. were sold in fluid ounces and gallons, mostly in glass bottles. Then the plastic polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle came along, and soft drink makers decided it was time for a product redesign." "The redesign process coincided with two key factors: a short-lived wave of government interest in going metric, and the burgeoning environmental movement." "The folks at PepsiCo decided to meld all three into its exciting new vessel: a lightweight, cheap, recyclable, metric bottle, with built-in fins so it could stand up on supermarket shelves. Two liters: the soda size of the future."
I would bet that you would see a similar pattern here: relegation would affect the Fire much more adversely than the Timbers. Columbus might throw this theory out the window, though.
I can relate to most everything they use day to day (except stone) but using mass to measure ingredients is where I lose them.
It didn't affect QPR, for instance, because they play in a tiny stadium. Their attendance dropped from 17.8k to 16.6k. If they played in a 25k stadium they probably would have filled it regularly in the EPL, not least due to the proximity to other Premier League teams.
Most states have soccer associations, some have more than one depending on the size of the state. Each state association feeds into one of four regional associations. There are also elite amateur leagues below UPSL/ASL level. Almost everything you say you need to develop grass roots soccer is in place and has been in place for decades, or in some cases over a century. But the bottom up approach doesn't work in the US partly, nay chiefly, because before USSDA, anyone with talent under the age of 23 was in college or trying to get into college.
My Dutch nieces donot look that impressive when you mention their height in foot/inches. They however turn intimidating in centimeters
Wow, according to comments a Yank did this, using a knuckle-duster: Gary McAllister's recovering after being attacked in Leeds hours after he was at the #Liverpool legends game at Anfield on Saturday. The ex Reds captain was with his wife when a man punched him in the face outside a bar & was taken to hospital where he reportedly needed stitches.