Over in the Yanks portion of the board, we were having one of our debates about pro/rel. I made the point, as I always do, that pro/rel has nothing to do with the SPORT, it's a business arrangement. You can have soccer without pro/rel, and you can have basketball with pro/rel. A minor change like saying "even is on" has more impact on the sport than pro/rel vs. a cartel system. I also pointed out that the reason that we don't have it is because our first national sport was baseball, and you play baseball practically every day, and it would obviously not have worked in 1885 for a team to play a game against the San Francisco Seals on Sunday, then play the Minneapolis Millers on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, then the Chicago White Sox on Friday. Then I got a reply that blew me away. Someone asked if I thought soccer would have been as popular in, say, England, if England had initially adopted a cartel system. What do you think? Would the fans have adopted the nearest team as their own? Would other types of soccer (say, college soccer, as with our own football) have taken hold for fans orphaned by a cartel system? Would lower level professional teams have organized local leagues, as with our baseball? My position has always been that pro/rel is 80% about the size of the country, and 20% about a sport being played weekly rather than daily. But this poster was suggesting that pro/rel "spreads" the professional version of the sport in every nook and cranny of a nation, which was vital in the days before even radio. He was suggesting that pro/rel helped to make soccer popular in those nations, and that it was not really incidental. My response was, I didn't know, because I don't have anything like the knowledge of English society ca. 1885 to answer that. But I know who does. If England had adopted a cartel system in the beginning, how might soccer have been organized? And what effect, if any, would it have had on its popularity?
Superdave, you know it's impossible to predict the future, and it's even more difficult to predict the might-have-been past. But I have to disagree with your assumptions. In my opinion, pro/rel is 50% about the NUMBER of prefessional teams playing a particular sport. The other 50% is related to the geographical proximity of the teams. With England, you had hundreds of semi-profesional teams playing the same game in the same general area with excellent transportation. In the US at the same time, you had every town and city with a semi-professional baseball team but the distances were much greater and the transportation was not as good.
The football league was formed as a cartel. It had 12 teams and no promotion or relegation. The difference is perhaps that it was formed as a sporting venture rather than a money-making one, and so when they wanted to expand they added a second divison below the original. Some of the clubs in England, Liverpool and Chelsea to name but two, were instant 'franchises' if you will, being accepted to the league without ever kicking a ball in anger. It wasn't until 1986 that the football league introduced promotion into its lowest division. I'd strongly disagree with the 50/50 reasoning given above as to why it came in. I'd say it was at 100% to do with the number of clubs that existed. While they may have considered something different with a larger country (not that it stopped Russia - those away midweek trips to Vladivostock must be a killer - bagsy not me driving) it wouldn't have actually been part of the thought process. The football league was largely based in the north of England anyway. A rival league, called the Southern League naturally enough, was a rival in the south. The football league countered this threat by electing places to the best southern clubs, who were happy to join the 'senior' league. Had they not done so then you may well have had a situation where an inter-league play-off might have been deemed necessary. There's no suggestion either league would have scrapped pro/rel though. As it was the Southern League was continually weakened by having it's best clubs poached, culminating in its whole top division being taken to form Div 3 in 1920. Cricket exists as a cartel. It is not possible to set up your own cricket club and battle up through the leagues to the pro game.
Promotion and Relegation were a pragmatic way of introducing new members into the closed-shop organisation that was the football league. In the 140 years that have followed, it has become a natural part of the sport. End of story, basically. I don't think it has anything to do with percentage this and percentage that. It is what it is because it is.