NASL commissioner Bill Peterson vows to 'take action' to introduce promotion and relegation in North America The North American Soccer League chief discusses his plans for a pyramid system, West Coast expansion and the league's growing international role http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/fo...romotion-and-relegation-in-North-America.html "One staunch opponent, however, is Don Garber, the MLS commissioner, who, in defending the interest of his own league, believes it makes "absolutely no sense". “The other [American sports] leagues... have been doing pretty well without promotion and relegation,” Garber has said as explanation. Soccer is a global game rather than a predominantly American pastime, however, and this is why Peterson believes the US leagues need to adopt a tiered structure. And if he cannot get any help from MLS in his quest - which seems highly unlikely - he will take matters into his own hands to start building a pyramid system. "
I agree with MLS Don Garber .... Relegation in MLS or in US Soccer is a terrible idea .........Just because something work in another country or around the world - That does not mean it would work in USA ........... Second .... I could you justify going to counties, city, or state asking for local tax payers money to build a soccer stadium and turning around saying to the local municipalities that the team you just build a new stadium for with tax payer money is about to be relegated to the second or third division ....... How does MLS league justify that to local municipalities ? ........ No to relegation & promotion in MLS ......
NASL Mods I am moving this to your general forum. If it already exists please merge or delete. Thanks
From a curiosity standpoint, I would love for NASL to try promotion/relegation with themselves or maybe the NPSL. I would love to see what happens. But from the perspective of sustainability and what's best for the sport, I wouldn't want to be involved with it.
It is like you have a neighbor that has been drinking all day, and now is going to shoot off a truck load of illegal fireworks. You know something bad is going to happen and want nothing to do with it. But every once and a while, you peek through the curtains to see if he blew himself up. Thankfully for the people who don't want the NASL to be a massive failure that implodes, Peterson and his Cosmos overlords have no actual interest in pro/rel. There simply isn't the mechanism to implement it within the next 10 years. The NASL is light-years away from having enough healthy clubs to have pro/rel internally. And even if they could, no one will care about movement between minor league clubs. Bringing up the NPSL is utterly laughable. It is an amateur league where many of the teams play in high and middle school fields. Peterson might as well have spoken gibberish and declared he can fly and shoot lasers from his eyes. That would have made more sense than bringing up the NPSL. He couldn't say the MLS aligned USL since he would get a press release in seconds laughing at how they are the best league under MLS, bringing up the 0-7 mark in the USOC, and reminding him they will be D2 by 2017 with NASL clubs more than welcome to join the USL. So why is Peterson so intent on making himself look like an idiot to every foreigner he can find? I think he legit believes there are a bunch of fans out there who are anti-MLS and want U.S. soccer to behave exactly like the English Football Association. He knows that the NASL cannot offer any level of play or stars to attract these fans, these people want nothing to do with lowly American minor league soccer, so he can only offer promises of being the anti-MLS to draw any audience to his league. None of which he can deliver. It is a con which fits Peterson fine since has proven to be more of a clownish carnival barker than serious and respected league spokesman like David Downs was. I also think he just wants to keep bringing up pro/rel with the desperate hope that enough pressure will come down on MLS/USSF to force it. The NASL is only interested in pro/rel if it means NASL owners will reap all the benefits of getting to the major leagues without paying an expansion fee. A club like the Cosmos wants pro/rel because they are dying on the vine out in Long Island and badly miscalculated the interest in the Cosmos's minor league revival. They need MLS. Peterson also wants to sell these NASL McFranchises, and the hope of turning a relative small investment in the NASL, to a very large one if you can force a seat into MLS. It might attract a few naive fools.
NPSL chairman Joe Barone wants NASL merger to bring about promotion and relegation in North America http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/11...romotion-and-relegation-in-North-America.html
I'll give credit where due. At least Peterson is willing to find out just how difficult setting up such a system between two leagues in a different financial universe is. If this works, I'd be shocked but you have to walk the walk. If they can make this work, then they may have a compelling case for MLS and work through all sorts of gottchas. There is a smart point in that article too. They admit that anyone who spent hundreds of millions on MLS is unlikely to just give that up.
I feel like if what Barone wants to happen happened there would need to be a new league between the NPSL and NASL where teams can go from amatuer/semi-pro to fully pro teams before making the leap to NASL. Even then it might need to be two regional leagues (West and East). At least that is how I would set it up. Have the NASL at the top as the national league, have a west and east league just below that, then have regional leagues like Midwest, Northeast, Southwest, etc., and then finally have state leagues with everything below the west and east leagues being amateur/semi-pro.
This article says "NASL is currently expanding to 20 teams." Did I miss something or did the author mean NPSL?
No, NASL commissioner Peterson claims, "We don't have a hard deadline but within around 18 to 24 months we will be at our 20 teams...".
Wait, so NPSL actually thinks their teams could pro-rel into D2? I didn't realize stupid was so contagious. Someone quarantine Peterson quick!
Well, the CosmosB only went 11-0-1 with a +42 goal difference and won the league championship in the NPSL. How much tougher could the real Cosmos be?
In Mexico there are 2nd and 3rd division teams folding every year, yet they made pro/rel work somehow.
Actually you can argue, and I would argue, that the fact their lower level teams are folding constantly, and that their D1 teams being relegated often buy, relocate, and rename the D2 teams being promoted or lesser D1 teams, to get around relegation), that it is not working at all. In fact I'd hold up Mexico as a prime example of why Pro/Rel is a terrible idea as it's Pro/Rel at its worst in a larger geographic country closer in size to the US than any Euro leagues. And I say this being a fan of one of the Mexican teams (Club Tijuana) that benefited from Pro/Rel in the way it was meant to work without being manhandled by a more established but struggling team.
One of the ways they made it work was by swapping teams around. In the Spring of 2013, Queretaro got relegated from the LigaMX to Ascenso MX. So they bought Chiapas, moved the team to Queretaro and stayed in LigaMX. Liga MX team San Luis then picked up and moved to Chiapas and changed their name. What happened to the relegated Queretaro? They just folded. That same year La Piedad got promoted and they promptly moved to Veracruz to replace the team there that had went bankrupt. What happened to La Piedad and San Luis? La Piedad has a 3rd divison team. San Luis has no team at all. Of course Queretaro had started out this way. The team in La Pieded moved to Queretaro in 2002 and became Queretaro FC. That team got relegated when the Mexican premier division cut back to 18 teams so they bought Zacatapec, moved the team to Queretaro, and made it back into the Premier division. Zacatapec is trying again from the 3rd division. That is just one story. There are many in Mexico. It might not be the best example of how pro/rel can work.