I've got no problem if the Revs became Leeds United. Leeds has been mired in the Championship since 2010 because it hasn't been good enough. It's not the first time they've been down for a long spell: 1982-1990, 1960-64, 1947-56. It's been a boom-bust club throughout its history. Other Boston teams are among the elite franchises in their respective leagues, so I figure the Revs have a pathway to do the same. Yet if they became a club that yo-yoed between leagues or couldn't get out of a lower division, then I'd be fine with that. At least there would be the promise of something better out there for the team if it earned it. Beats testing the limits of consequence-free complacency.
I agree that the owners aren't going to hop on that bandwagon willingly. Ultimately it would require pressure from FIFA and/or CONCACAF, both of which are easily bought.
Really? Being mired in the 2nd division beats being mired in the middle of the first division? We'll have to agree to disagree on that one.
They're already mired in the 2nd division. It's just that there isn't an official second division. The main difference is that it would be clear this isn't good enough and we'd know the way forward.
Yes, there is an official 2nd division, called the USL. The Revs drawing 5K fans to Gillette to face Bethlehem Steel is not the way forward.
Nor is the current situation - it just gives us the appearance of being in the first division. If you can't compete, what's the point? I'm really hoping Friedel can turn it around.
Imagine if they had this in baseball, a system with a long history of a fairly solid "Second Division" structure all over the country... A few years ago when the Red Sox finished in last place (a year after winning the World Series), their big opponents would not be the Yankees, Orioles, Indians, etc. but the Scranton-Wiles-Barre Red Robins, the Tidewater Tides and the Richmond Braves. Oh, and none of the Classic Era ballparks like Fenway would have ever been built. Why would they spend [Dr. Evil]One million dollars[/Dr. Evil] on a new concrete and steel stadium if you could be relegated the next year? That rickety wooden grandstand over on Huntington Avenue will do fine, even if it might catch fire when someone drops a cigarette... And it's not like some University is going to come along and buy the land or anything. Please, people, there are a lot of worthy things to debate, like why the Revs have a blue stripe on their kit instead of a red one, but the merits of promotion and relegation isn't one of them.
It's not a 2nd division where they can't be sent. It's just what the USSF is calling a 2nd division these days. How popular a 2nd division would be if there was pro/rel we have no idea. I suspect less popular than MLS and more popular than the USL (6,414 per game for non B teams). Yet the way forward would be clear if the Revs got relegated down there: get promoted and then make sure you stay up. What's the direction now? Try to squeak into the playoffs and, if not, oh well. That's not particularly forward.
Imagine we're talking about soccer and not baseball. Different sports, different origins. All of the teams in AAA are affiliates for MLB teams. It's not like they operate as separate entities. Soccer's a different animal. I suspect we're all fans of various pro/rel leagues. It's not like some super scary thing. There's teams all over the world. They play in stadiums and everything. MLS isn't going to do pro/rel of its own volition. It's nothing imminent. It may never happen in the U.S. But I think it's kind of weird for soccer fans to have a fear and loathing of it.
So what makes you think that will happen if they get relegated? I bet lots of clubs in England are hoping for that exact scenario, but it's a hell of a lot harder to go right back up from the (defacto) second when you get dropped down. There are other clubs just as good (if not better) who just missed out on promotion the previous year and are hell-bent to make sure they, not you, will go up this year. I used the baseball example because the sport was becoming established around the same time many of the long-standing leagues with promotion/relegation were. In those countries, there were many more teams than places in the league, and a system like that made sense. But you can pretty much guarantee that if these leagues were forming now (when the financial gap between clubs is so much greater) there would not be any discussion of pro/rel. Mexico is lokking to get rid of it, and the whole Premiership was created 25 years ago so the big clubs could take a larger slice of the TV pie. The only thing pro/rel will do if implemented in the US is bankrupt lots of clubs who have ambition and think they are one of the few who are going to make it. Those of us who have seen too many soccer teams and leagues die in our lifetimes don't want to go back to the dark ages of the late '80s, especially now, when we have stability at the top level, and even the lower levels are becoming increasingly more stable. Soccer has never, ever been better in this country, We don't want to mess it up because someone thinks it's cool and wants to be just like Yuuurup! Pro/rel is not going to make the Krafs better owners. Only a lightning bolt or God himself can do that!
They'd know what they have to do. Whether they'd do it I can't say. We're deep into the hypothetical here. Yet right now they don't have to do anything, so they do the minimum. And there's some serious concern they're strangling off the grassroots of the game in that country by doing so. Why the hyperbole? The rest of the world seems to get by pretty well in this sport. And one percenters do just fine looking out for themselves. I remember those days too. The difference now is the sport is popular. Tens of millions of people have played it growing up and top Euro leagues are easy to find on your TV dial. I get why Bob Kraft wants to be handed an open-ended license to print money, but I don't see why we should lionize him for getting in on the ground floor of a sports boom. Good for him, but we're not going back to the late '80s because the world has changed. It's not like they'll take soccer away from us if we're naughty. So the paternalism argument doesn't track for me. Again, I don't see the reason for vitriol over a soccer league behaving like a traditional soccer league. It's fun to watch. I suspect everyone here does watch some of those leagues. Pro/rel gives you more things to follow. I'm cool with that. Soccer's going to continue getting better in this country because that's the arc it's on. Don't know how he'd react if there were consequences for his actions. I'm for it because it makes the league more interesting.
OK, this is my last comment on promotion/relegation. It would be absolute idiocy for a league like MLS to implement it. This is not an opinion, it is a fact. It would mean financial ruin for clubs who have bad seasons on the field. Instead of having the chance to use resources at their disposal (allocation pecking order, TAM/GAM, etc.) to rebuild themselves, they would have a much deeper hole to dig themselves out of. Many teams have made the one-year transition from terrible to mediocre or even good. If they were relegated, they would all of a sudden have a lot less resources to do that. A guy like Bastian Scweinsteiger signed with Chicago and made them instantly better. Is he really going to sign with them if they are in the second division? OK, so the "bare minimum" would have a new definition. In this scenario, it wouldn't be to be in the running for a playoff spot (don't actually have to make the playoffs, just contend). All they would have to do is avoid being the worst team. Which is pretty much the same thing. If you are the 8th best team out of 11 or 12, you aren't getting relegated, the team that has been out of the playoff race since Labor Day is. And how much marketing/promotion are the Revs going to do when instead of hyping how David Villa is coming to town, the big game is against the Central Jersey Riptide? Oh, and do you really want to do pro/rel Mexican style? So a team in a big market (LA Galaxy) finishes last, so they get relegated. But you can't have that! So just move a smaller market team with a better record, like Portland or RSL or Columbus, to LA and re-name them the Galaxy, so the big market team avoids relegation. But that really sucks if you're a fan of a decent team in a small market.... Yeah, that's what we want to do....
If it was a fact, you'd be able to show how it's a fact rather than just make assertions in bold type. Clubs all around the world get relegated and it rarely means financial ruin (especially in a country with a first world economy). You're making a boogeyman argument, but I'm looking under the bed and in the closet and there's nothing scary there. It would be a change and even though I'm getting to an age where change is supposed to make me angry, I just can't get worked up about MLS operating like other soccer leagues I enjoy. The league would be fine. Soccer's not going to disappear on us. I fully recognize it would take some extraordinary circumstances for it to occur, but spare me the end-of-the-world predictions.
I was extrapolating the current situation, not making a long term observation. Hard to argue they were truly competitive for the past two years, or were a real factor in MLS during that time, despite many of the superficial trappings that come with being in a D1 league. I'm no proponent of pro-rel, just stating that I don't think I've had a "D1 fan experience" these past two years.
Maybe, but a couple of years out of the playoffs doesn't even suggest that it's never likely to happen again.
The "conference semifinals," in the days before the wild card play in, was just a fancy name for "making the playoffs." Even now, if you win one game you are in the "conference semifinals."
Since 2010, the Revs have missed the playoffs 5 of 8 seasons and went out before the conference semis in 2015. Unquestionably, as the league has expanded, the Revs have been below average in terms of their performance. That's the cycle they're in. Not to get all Jose Mourinho "football heritage" about it, but the degree of difficulty has risen sharply and the Revs haven't risen to meet that challenge.
I'd agree with you if MLS itself was divided into two divisions with teams moving pro/rel between them. But once you bring in high school fields and leagues that cancel the entire season, there's far too much financial risk for a MLS owner (or any sane business owner IMO) to take on. Either USSF tightens it's grip on the NASL/USL and standardizes minimum requirements etc or the MLS becomes two divisions. I don't think movement between MLS and this current wild west lower division style would work in our structured sports culture.
They'd need to sort that out, though we don't have a strong second tier by design. One thing that would need to change is the notion that you enter at tier two. That's preposterous. Enter down at tier four and build from there.
Why is that? To me it makes a lot more sense to be strong top to bottom, or at least not a trainwreck further down the pyramid. I understand other American sports have top level teams owning clubs in smaller cities. If it's an unsustainable business model to have 4 standalone tiers due to the wide variability of management and ownership qualifications, maybe MLS should consider team owned clubs in lower divisions. Personally, I think it would be great if there was a regional league supporting the MLS first division club that would offer loan opportunities for young players. Perhaps the revs build relationships with the WMass Pioneers, Boston Rams, RI Reds etc then loans a player out to each team. Then here's the kicker, the MLS Club's ownership pays to support its regional league. That's commitment right there. Set these up all over the country and instead of just one feeder team, there are several. Young guys can get competitive minutes, American soccer has a larger pool of talent to choose from, limits travel and it improves the top division product.
Those are all solid ideas. They could follow the baseball model or the hockey model or the basketball model. Yet they started with the football model, which doesn't give a crap about maintaining the sport's larger ecosystem. So we've got a bunch of disconnected leagues forming a nonsensical Rorschach splotch instead of a pyramid. Regardless of how they want to organize things, the key element that's been missing is the resolve to create strong, well-defined lower tiers. I'm far from sold that attitude has changed among the game's key stakeholders in this country.