On the pro/rel discussion. I do think we will eventually get there with MLS, but I also think the narrative I've seen some show where it immediately will increase the quality of MLS and will immediately help with development. I think the best way to do that is to continue to sign players that will raise the floor so to speak of MLS so that you see more depth across the league which will in turn continue to make the product better. Now where I do think pro/rel would be helpful is it would encourage teams to actually invest in football operations and not focus strictly on the bare minimum (Looking at you Stan Kroenke)
Dang, I accidently opened the thread w/o logging in. I asked how many bottom 2/3 teams are running out 2-3 young Americans (per game) to develop them, bring them up. I read this and I'm thinking, "ok, here's a defend MLS at all costs post" Like, on the MLS payroll. But, hey, it's thorough. Orlando - I watched them in CL and only Halliday played. How often do he and Freeman play together. How often do the 4 at NYRB play? DC - Paredes is gone. I don't know who 3 of the other 4 are, but do they play? Chi-Town - Gaga is gonegone, and how many matches did he play last season? Do Guti and Pineda play? St. Louis - Nico and Indy are imports, right? Not really what I was thinking of, but I love that MLS provides a landing spot for guys that don't clear the hurdle in foreign leagues. I wish Seb L. came back earlier. But ... that was a very informative post. I will save it for my MLS watching. Thanks!
They play the same position, so they don't. Ngoma is coming back from injury but started at the end of the season last year before getting hurt. Edelman started most of last year; Amaya might have taken his spot. Tolkin is an every game starter. I was highlighting a couple of guys who had been sold. I'm not going to punish teams for selling. TKDP starts; Akinmobi is like a 15 year old CB, so his time is less frequent. Gaga was Chicago's starter last year. Gutierrez starts quite a bit and is very underrated. Pineda is less talented and is in and out of the lineup. Yes, but St. Louis is ... 4 games old. And Miguel Perez is getting sub minutes out of nowhere. You're welcome.
Pro/rel isn't someplace that MLS has to get to. It's not an achievement. It's an archaic tradition that's rooted in small countries and leagues that are (or will soon be) basket cases.
Since we're at this place, a big frustration I have with MLS is that when the season is lost or barely holding on not enough managers are willing to bench players to give the depth/youngsters a chance. It's not like it is an "MLS mindset" or something. At FCC we had a complete outsider for GM and manager. We sucked. Stam pretty much selected the same XI every game injury or suspension didn't force him to change. Same formation, same players, same results every game for 2 seasons. Whole time Vazquez is on the bench barely getting minutes while we struggle to score goals. Interim manager gives him start and the whole team plays better. I'm sure other teams are the same. Like can we please stop starting the same guys every week when you are losing?
Its as simple as this. St. Louis just paid a 200 million dollar expansion fee. Would you pay 200 million if there was a threat of relegation to the netherworld playing against Tulsa and Birmingham? A chance to greatly devalue your business and product? If the Premier League started today, those owners wouldn't be in favor of pro/rel either. Luca de la Torre has never had anything to do with MLS. He didn't even play in an MLS academy, but for Nomads and San Diego Surf. So what does he know about Europe versus MLS? What I do know is that clubs bearing Luca de la Torre have a history of being relegated. It looks like Celta Vigo has dragged themselves out of relegation trouble (which DLT has contributed to for sure). Yedlin. I have time for his opinion as he's played for both. But it's not his 200 million to throw down the drain after relegation.
That's the biggest thing. No one is going to willingly light their 200 million on fire. And the fee is about $300 million now, along with the cost of the stadium in most markets. Hard to get people to buy in if you're going to devalue that investment. Promotion/relegation is more fun for us as fans, but it doesn't help investment in the sport in a country where soccer is still a growing sport and not at the level of the NBA or NFL.
I'd imagine that pro/rel might happen in MLS one day, and any team relegated would receive a giant parachute payment.
So let's figure it out and make it easy! Team coming up pays expansion fee to team going down! If you can't afford it both teams stay where they are.
I just don’t see why owners or MLS would go for it. The system made sense in countries with 100 teams that started playing 100 years ago, when financial concerns were not so important and every club wanted a chance. But while adding pro/rel would improve the quality of play, I don’t think that improvement would lead to increased revenue that would offset the destabilization that it would cause.
Where's that coming from exactly? MLS' current TV deal pays each team about $8M/yR, and that's before the league office takes out any costs for producing the broadcasts, so that number will likely be closer to $4M-$5M annually. Teams relegated from the EPL getting $40M+ parachute payments is the exception and not the norm.....the other leagues across the world don't have parachute payments even close to those sums.
It's just coaches. I saw it with my terrible college basketball team. We were 2-38 in conference over the last few years, and it was the same starters, same short rotation. When they start losing, they often double down. Some of them might be right -- the other guys might be worse. But I like what Lattanzio did in Charlotte -- he benched two of his DPs because they had their chance and didn't deliver. The backups did. And he did it early.
The theoretical world where it happens is this: USL gets really good and threatens MLS to some extent. Instead of Soccer Warz, there's a buyout/merger, where the USL pays for 2-4 expansion slots with cash, equity or increased media contract from an Apple or whomever. There's a runway of unequal shared revenues for a while, slowly making everyone equal. But the time value of money/increased revenue makes it okay for the owners. USL grabs four slots but perhaps there's only two relegation slots, and it's not a one year thing but a points system that makes it hard for old MLS teams to go down for 2-3 years. Eventually everyone is equal, but MLS owners grow their value through the payments and increased media (remember USLC has teams in Phoenix, Oakland, Detroit, Tampa -- a ton of the current missing markets) and the risk exists but is pushed out into the future so owners can prepare, sell, or simply discount potential losses. You can also toss in a developmental level right below D1 in a functional D2 that they can work with. A good number of USLC teams wouldn't even be a threat to compete with current ownership anyway -- you could also have a tax on the sale on the USLC teams to compensate and people would pay it.
Interesting idea. I like that you are thinking outside the box a little bit. What happens to the team going down if they have aspirations of returning? they gain cash in the immediate short term. They may reduce operating costs, they reduce income (lost tv revenues, reduced attendance) and IF they return the next year, have to pay a new expansion fee. Off the top of my head (so it may or may not be accurate) I see a couple of problems: 1. Teams in Europe have loyal fanbases that have history that spans generations and the team is embedded into the local history. MLS has nowhere near the history and I would guess that they would lose far more attendance than a European team. That leads to a greater loss of revenue than would be likely compared to Europe. 2. Operating costs may decrease while down but possibly not enough to counteract the loss of revenue. The can't eliminate all of the player salaries and the cost of administration, stadium maintenance etc doesn't go away. 3. IF they do make it back, they now have an expansion fee to pay (which could conceivably be higher than the one they received going down) AND they now have less money to pay it back. I see it as a cycle where relegated teams go down and (possibly) return, only to be in worse shape financially....which isn't good for the product on the field either and could (if it got bad enough) lead closer to financial instability within the league. (If there is a core of 5-10ish teams which form the majority of teams relegated....you get a significant portion of teams that is becoming more and more unreliable finanially.)
Share the tv/media revenue evenly between the teams, regardless of what division they are in. You're in D1, or D2, you get the same amount of money from the league. Also, the pro/rel, D1/D2 format doesn't preclude interdivisional games. The rivalries can be maintained regardless of what division you're in. This part probably wouldn't work - I shouldn't post it, but what the heck. At the end of the season, you have MLS playoffs. You also have relegation playoffs. The teams that don't make the playoffs have a playoff where the loser advances. It's seeded. So, in the first round, the best teams (that didn't make the playoffs) play the worst teams. The losers advance, the winners are safe. Do that until you're left with 2-3 teams that get dropped. That would be good TV.
It's single entity. Just share the league money evenly between teams, regardless of the division. Teams can keep their locally generated money (ticket sales/jerseys, selling players), but the league money gets shared. No parachute payment required, because all the payments are the same. Then let the tired old geezers teams with lousy fan bases - aka the "legacy" clubs, knock the ball around in the second division, where they belong.
But if the pay is the same in the second division, then doesn’t that defeat the point of implementing pro/rel in the first place?
Money is only part of it. Owners, players, coaches, fans, really won't want to be relegated and that will bring plenty of motivation to not just play out the string, which is what happens now.
That’s not a convincing argument to me. I’m sure professional pride comes in for players, but the same is true to an extent with simply having a bad year in MLS. owners care so much about relegation because it means a huge hit to their business. For players, it usually means a big pay cut as well. There are other things like losing one’s place in a national team, playing in a less prestigious league, etc, but I don’t think essentially playing in MLS B would really scare players or owners. If some crappy owner doesn’t care about finishing in the bottom of the league because their financial situation is unaffected, why would they care about playing in a b league if their financial situation was still unaffected? Where’s the motivation? As for players, if you’re getting the same pay, and playing against a similar group of teams, then there’s no way you’d be as scared of relegation. relegation in Europe means playinb in smaller stadiums against smaller clubs, against substantially weaker competition. If the pay in MLS B is the same, then the talent won’t be much different either.
NNNope. The point (my point) of implementing pro/rel is that it would allow the league to add a ton of teams that presumably would have academies, that would presumably produce talent for the NT. So, no, it wouldn't. As for a more conventional view of the point of pro/rel, most of these owners will feel very strongly about not wanting to own a AAA team. And the players will not be stoked about being relegated. And, the pay wouldn't be the same. It would probably affect ticket sales and merch. I will say that getting out of the 2nd division would be the dogfight of all dogfights with the teams so evenly funded.
And if financials are affected, then it’s pretty much a guaranteed no-go for owners. Why would any owner agree to that? What’s the upside?
I think the issue is you probably don't have alot of USL teams whose owners are able to pay such a fee. Typically, especially for teams at the risk of relegation, players will have clauses in their contracts that mean reduced pay if you go down. Teams that don't expect them don't really have them and this would reportedly be a problem for Everton if they go down.[ Yup. MLS just doesn't have the TV deal for that sort of parachute payment. And that payment also doesn't have anything to help the fact that the franchise value overall plummets.
I actually think the place you are most likely to see promotion/relegation is within USL itself. They're definitely moving in that direction, and they don't have the same level of franchise values or financial investment to be discouraged from doing so.
Positives for pro-rel: added excitement/tension, speed up play, incentivize academies w/ potential ROI Negatives: disincentivize playing much of the youth you have, not giving communities and owners return on past investment Once that past return on investment from the league buy-ins and stadium $ is realized (15 years?), then the positives for pro-rel will clearly out-weigh the negatives. At that point, it should be instituted. But I'm still skeptical on account owners ideally want the public $ to subsidize their investment. It's part of our culture where management gets their way.
I'm not as fatalistic as you, but I do see a situation where some teams are comfortable in that second tier, and that's okay, too. They probably belong there. I really believe the best teams want to play the best teams and be in the best competitions. I put a lot of faith in athlete's competitive nature, I've seen it and lived it in situations where not a dime is on the line. Many, many times over. Bottom line, I can't be as cynical as you. Your counter is well thought out, and has merit, but sports are more heart than money in many ways, because the ultimate measure is winning or losing, not bank accounts.