Not really. Nobody is saying they categorically are better on or off the field, just (it's felt that) they they deserve a shot to prove their worth. That's not the comparison though. It's about the relative interest in the top division to the rest. While the premier league does get most of the interest, and I'm never going to claim fans around the country are sat in pubs right now discussing the news that Ishmael Miller has moved from Blackpool to Huddersfield, the other division are not "minor league" in the way that they are in the USA. As a result, people do care about the game as a whole, not just the top division. Take the results page from the BBC website, as an example http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/results From there you have links to match reports of every game down to the 5th tier in England, and the 4th tier for Scotland. Many national papers on Sunday and Monday have match reports from every game in the top 4 divisions, and a couple of pages of stats from each game too. Oddly it's the "quality press" that tends to focus almost exclusively on the top division. You could shoot them. You have the guns. Again, that makes a lot of sense when talking about minor leagues, against clubs of limited ambition or ability. It seems less clear cut when the average team in the division below is a Sacremento, and the bigger teams can actually outdraw the worst supported top tier sides. Because Coventry, with their years of support and investment, weren't replaced by a team who had neither. Simply, where do you draw the line? You can look at any US sports league, and it's easy to work out which teams are equipped for the major league and which aren't. There's a huge cliff-like drop-off in support and infrastructure. In England it's a lot smoother. There is no obvious point where you can say "these clubs are viable, but these aren't" Tradition does obviously play a major part. There's no cold logical reason why Walsall should have a league club, but Sutton Coldfield or Dudley doesn't. The fact is though that there is a great deal of love for the game outside the lower divisions. Lower division fans are often portrayed as being somehow more genuine fans that those of top division clubs. There's no need for Walsall to bring in a ban on selfie-sticks at the Bescot Stadium. You don't get too many tourists watching their games. While the "genuine fan" part can be somewhat overplayed, the idea of stitching up smaller clubs for the benefit of the big sides is regarded as appalling, even by fans of the big clubs. I think I said earlier, there was a since discredited rumour a couple of years ago that some foreign owners wanted to do away with relegation, and the condemnation of it was universal, by fans of all clubs.
If given a choice between dreamers and schemers, I will always be on the side of the dreamers. Any discussion of MLS instituting Pro/Rel is pie-in-the-sky. The only marginally realistic scenario IMO that could change that would be a significant modification of the business model of MLS someday from a single entity league that is okay with stadiums that hold under 20k (as long as they're "soccer specific") to a league where several successful "superclubs" play in NFL/MLB stadiums that are built to accommodate MLS attendances in the lower bowl. The reason these larger stadiums get built to accommodate soccer is political; stadium proponents will want a larger share of public support to build them and will also want them to be able to host those well attended international friendlies and a possible future World Cup in the USA. I could see that in Minnesota, NYC, Miami and LA... add a few more, and... If you have an expanded MLS with over 30 clubs, and half those clubs still average between 15k and 20k per game while the other half start to average 30k to 40k, it is conceivable to see the stronger clubs pressure the league into allowing them to sign more superstars in an effort to gain notoriety, compete with other world clubs, and garner higher tv ratings. At this level, we currently don't have a pyramid; just a pyramid scheme. Expansion fees have risen from $10-$15 million ten years ago to well over $50 million now ($50 mil was a figure quoted to a Tulsa politician and another local entrepreneur three years ago). Although I think any MLS2 would likely flop, I think for financial considerations, it wouldn't be unthinkable to see a "Premier MLS" with a sky high expansion fee alongside a standard MLS with a more reasonable fee that would be "Americanized" with limited inter-league play based on whatever makes the most sense in a future effort to peel off some of the large numbers of Euro fans here... I've noticed that the younger generation of fans will either closely follow one MLS team AND one EPL club, or decide to only follow an EPL club and their local club, skipping MLS altogether. I have fans ranging from the guy who brings a Welsh flag and another who brings a half USA/half Ireland flag to another guy who's also a NASCAR fan whose only use for the word "Ultra" involves brewskis made by Michelob. I've never been more than a casual fan of Everton, but have met our local fan group, know we also have groups who support Liverpool, ManU, and Chelsea, and then there's my favorite name for our supporters of Arsenal: The Sooner Gooners. I don't know if my non-MLS market in Tulsa could be seen as a bellweather or an outlier (we had the highest US tv ratings for last year's FA Cup on Fox and were #6 in US tv ratings for last fall's MLS Cup). But it's hard for me to conclude we're alone; I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there are substantial numbers of fans in other smaller markets like Birmingham, AL, Louisville, KY, and Grand Rapids, MI who would be of a similar mindset.
Well, posting relentlessly on a website about the same subject religously, when it's understood that it is pie in the sky, is the definition of dreamer.
Well, posting condescension, ridicule, and social commentary about people you don't know on a thread you claim to have no interest in, is the definition of ____________.
Given that, as I said, it's nearly always raised in the context of "earning it on the field is better than buying another club's place", I'm not sure what else you are asking. Does one team winning the title prove they are better than the team that finished last in the division above? No, of course not. No more than winning one world cup qualifying group means that team has proven they are better than a team that came 2nd in another. Few would quibble too much about them going to the world cup though. That's what the rules of the competition are. And far fewer would think a system where the richest and most tv-friendly countries were given a bye to the finals would be fair, as that's not how your earn the chance to play. It's what necessity dictated in the USA. It's not as if it was a difficult choice to make. We could do either, but we don't think the gain of a more competitive top division is worth the trade-off of destroying the rest of the game. I mean, you could, if you wished, make the FA Cup only open to the 16 top finishers in the premier league. Some of the tv people would love the prospect of guaranteed "all premier league" ties in every game. You could even have a seeded group stage, to make the bigger clubs more likely to make the latter stages. Some might just say it would ruin it somewhat though. They could certainly come back. Bradford are more likely, but I'd certainly not rule of Swindon or Oldham. You have to realise just how extraordinary getting there was for both though. For clubs that are probably 50th-60th in size in the country, to get to the top division is quite some achievement. You really wouldn't expect it to happen very often - for Swindon it's been one season ever, and for Oldham, one spell in 90 years - but that's still four more years than they'd have got in a closed league. You could in theory have the play-off spots and one from the division above. In the early days that's actually how the play-offs worked. It got rejected in favour of four spots though. People where just don't have any sense of injustice about the three going up not having played the three coming down. It's not as if the three relegated clubs all come back up too often either. Yes, it does and which is why I use it (and other top flight leagues) the most for examples because: And as I've said numerous times, if MLB were stupid enough to offer wildly different tv deals to teams who made the play-offs and those who didn't, you'd see a rift in MLB too. You couldn't, with any degree of credibility, claim that "play-offs caused the rift" ...which is why I said typically, and with Middlesbrough (35k), Derby (35k) and Ipswich (30k) making up the other three places. You typically are replacing like for like. Pretty much every single club in the league has either moved ground or extensively redeveloped in the last 20 years. By my count, 55 have either moved or rebuilt all four sides in more or less that time frame.
This is stretching a tad here as the variables that go into each are drastically different. One is a singular rank and file from the same domestic make up and the other is literally from every single corner of the world that plays soccer. At the time they clubs get to the world cup they've already "qualified" through their region and each region is awarded certain berths based on regional strength ... the field is already handicapped as best as it can by the time the tournament rolls out. Even then the pots are drawn according to strength. That's not at all the case in single table pro/rel leagues. We've had some back and forth on this but I'd actually like to prod a little .... destroy ? the rest of the game ? You honestly feel that'd be the case ? With the history et al I'd be very surprised if it truly destroyed the divisions below the top tier. Many of the clubs have never been more than what they are now and even more have only ever been within a level or so. It's not like there's the great transcendence of clubs and this constantly revolving up and down of who is play where. There are plenty of clubs that are on their 3rd generation of fan or more that have never seen anything but a League 2 or League 1 club - Championship/League 1 etc etc I like that there's several cups including one that the big boys don't play for ... I think the EPL clubs would opt for an EPL only cup and not bother with the League Cup. As you state, just how extraordinary it was at all. Seems to me that (especially with the changes in the game today) that it'd be even more extraordinary for Oldham especially. I know Bradford actually has a decent sized stadium and following but looking at them compared to the likes of a Sheffield or Nottingham or Leeds or Leicester or any number of 10 or more so clubs and I don't see them being able to overcome that fight in my lifetime. Can it happen ? Sure, but I'm certainly not really ever expecting to see it happen or thinking that it is likely. Hell, I've been told since I was first able to truly watch the EPL regularly that Forest would be back ... and in that 14 years they've dropped further, been promoted back to the championship and only come truly close once ... ditto Leeds. Shame, I honestly feel that would be perfect, just, and the right way to do it. "Best" of the relegation zone finishers plays "worst" of the promotion candidates etc on. Have it seeded and actually have whomever is in the EPL the next season "earn" it. Again, not at all the same thing ... and actually you do have this effect in the EPL (and other top tiers) with CL monies and merit monies based on table position and TV appearances.
Oh, no, I'm not saying that promotion is a bad thing, at all, if that's your thing. It's just that one of the most frequent arguments I've seen made in favor of pro/rel(probably by American enthusiasts) has been that the composition of the league/division is decided 'on the field of play' which I find to be a bit disingenuous considering that the teams that swap places never play each other to determine who is truly better and more deserving of earning/retaining a place in the division. The solution seems pretty simple to me: have the teams involved play-off against each other. But if it's all about just the chance to prove that you're better, as M has suggested, well, I think that's too great a reward for the promoted teams and too great a punishment for the demoted teams. But that's just an opinion from an ignorant American who has no cultural experience of pro/rel. For the record, I'm not ever suggesting England change it's system, or Belgium, or Switzerland. This is Soccer in the USA, after all. I am saying pro/rel won't work here(at least not in the 30-40 years I've still got on the planet, which is the functional equivalent of forever).
Well, the intelligentsia have been accused of similar, or worse, since the dawn of the language. Our cross to bear.
The most creative, clever, ingenious, and deftly intellectual people I've had the privilege of meeting over the course of decades have never felt the need to refer to themselves as "the intelligentsia." Funny dat. "Bigsoccer expert" is an oxymoron akin to jumbo shrimp.
Honestly though, I think this is a product of soccer being so exclusively and overwhelmingly popular/the run away sport people give a shit about. Yeah there's cricket, and rugby ... what Tennis ? .... but comparatively to the popularity of our other sports, well there is no comparison. Looking at cricket grounds of the top tier clubs ... and it ain't close. Rugby shares some grounds, but I've watched plenty when I had good 'ol Gol TV and other outlets and yeah ... while crowds are decent, there's still not a comparison to the relative popularity that we see here between 3 sports. Is that because of actual interest, or the fact that one club is having a shit season spiraling out of the Premiership while the other is on a rocket up to it ? In part, this is the fallacy that pro/rel has helped to engineer at least at the top of the pyramid. Since the advent of that tv money and the investment the last 10-15 years I think the picture is much clearer than is admitted. Just looking at the EPL and Championship you could whittle down the clubs to 30 using the stadium size, market reach, historical support, commercial appeal, and "true level" variables. I'm not saying that the difference between 30-35 is huge or that teams 31-40 couldn't make cases .... I'm merely saying that sitting in the FA board room and looking at the cases on paper using set metrics, that a 30 team close top tier could be hashed out more easily than anyone will admit. Even though that's exactly what's happening with the money and the "rules" being put in place ? I mean is it just that nobody wants to admit it out loud ?
Right, I think that the chance of pro/rel happening because the 2nd division gets really strong, and then the USSF forces p/r on MLS, is as close to zero as it can be without actually being zero. On the other hand, MLS becoming a very large league but with really large disparities within the league, and THAT leading to p/r, that could happen. I think the necessary conditions would be as follows. 1. MLS continues to be a league like the NHL and baseball, in which national revenues are a small piece of the pie and local revenues are where it's at, rather than like the NBA or the NFL, where the national revenues are a big deal. I don't think that will happen just because of attendance disparities. However, if the top 10-15 clubs get local TV deals that are like what the Galaxy have, while the bottom 10-15 clubs are one step above a time buy, that would create a real disparity. 2. I don't think that's enough, because at that point, the rich clubs would just enjoy dominating the league. No, I think there would have to be another element...the poor clubs would have to be holding the rich clubs back. From what? Success in the CCL or even the Club World Cup. That would mean those competitions would have to become more important than they are now. 3. At this point, I think you'd have the conditions to create an incentive for the league to split in two. The next step would be for the rich teams to resist the kind of revenue sharing that MLB introduced and (somewhat) the NHL has introduced. There actually was more-than-idle-chatter in the 2005 strike that the NHL should look at p/r. Anyway, if we get to the point I've outlined above, you'd have tension between the owners. 4. The rich teams would then say, we want to be free to spend our money in order to compete internationally. We're willing to sacrifice part of our large profits (remember, in MLS, team expenses are going to be fairly similar from one team to the next, so high revenue teams are a license to print money) in order to challenge the top MFL clubs for regional honors. But we are NOT willing to sacrifice them in order to bring up the smaller teams closer to our level. Because the USSF and FIFA are in the mix in a way FIBA isn't in the mix with the NBA, those rich teams would have leverage that the Yankees and Red Wings did not. That, to me, is the path to a scenario in which poor clubs buy into p/r, if the rich clubs have the incentive and the clout to force through league rules that require the poor clubs to increase spending to a level they can't sustain. In that case, they poor clubs would be better off being in a lower division, albeit one they could climb out of if they manage their club well. The irony is that people like USRufnex kind of have to hope MLS is wildly successful in order to create p/r in the US.
Or the whole thing could crash, sponsors could bail, and we could have a nice pro/rel system in which the top teams play in high school stadiums and draw 4,000 fans max. But we'd have pro/rel!
I'm guessing you met none of those people in Oklahoma, and I'm also guessing they were interested in spending no more than a few seconds in your presence.
"57 paragraphs" of the normal dubious arguments about pro/rel and why it's not ok to use the previous season's results to decide positions in the pyramid, but nary a word about why it is ok to use the previous season's results to influence team selection and schedule (in the NFL's case). That's an interesting (but predictable) "argument" for someone who claimed that " The past is prologue. Dust in the wind. ". Not so much in US sports either, it seems.
Draft order, yes, but schedule not so much. NFL teams now only have two games out of 16 based on the previous year standings. Mostly it is just a rotation around the league. Teams play their division twice for 6 games, one other intra-conference division on a rotating basis for 4 games, one other inter-conference division on a rotation basis for 4 games, and then 2 games based on last year's standings. Those games may or may not create parity since teams move up and down the ladder in the NFL pretty regularly.
You've clearly confused me with someone who is a big fan of the draft. I forgive you. Your schedule concerns are balanced out by the end-of-season playoffs, where a Carolina Panthers will either prove they are better than their record, or not. I believe that's called "proving it on the field," but I'll confirm that for you.
Marginally realistic?!!! NFL sized stadiums are the last thing MLS needs or wants. Hell, a lot of NFL teams want smaller stadiums. And your list of cities you could see this happening ALL have huge stadiums to host international friendlys and World Cup matches. Lastly, not everything that has franchises that increase in value is a pyramid scheme.
So we seem to agree that both the US closed leagues and pro/rel leagues use the previous season's results to base future actions on. So the " The past is prologue. Dust in the wind. " meme is hardly an argument in favour of one or the other. Just as a relegated team can prove it on the field of play by being better than the teams in the league it's been relegated to.
I'm sure that's true. It just doesn't change the reality of the fact that people here do follow the sport well beyond the top division, and in the USA, they don't. That doesn't really follow from what I said. My point was that if you have a 2nd tier where the clubs below look viable alternatives, you don't get that "who'd want to replace team x from a major city with team y from some backwater, as most team y's would be from major cities too. And that's the critical part. You can easily categorize teams in the USA. You can't here. Sure, you could decide some arbitrary cut-off number and say "Wolves, you're in at 32nd, but sorry Cardiff, you came out 33rd in our list, so you're out", but wherever you drew the line, you'd have a host of clubs where it'd be a judgement call, and they could fall either side of the line It's not anywhere near the same degree as permanently excluding them, and diminishing their whole status as a result.
Assuming this is an argument in good faith - and from where I sit, that's pretty tough - you still have to agree that the qualitative difference between drafting and scheduling, on the one hand, and which freaking league you play in, is, shall we say, non-trivial. Being relegated and picking twentieth in the draft are apples and orangutans. I mean, I've looked at teams' draft hauls per year over a decade. Draft order in MLS correlates to team performance almost not at all, and it's not likely to in the future. Homegrown player rules, the Generation Adidas system, the ability of highly-rated college players to try out Europe, the comparative unpopularity and inaccessibility of college soccer, and certain teams' almost institutional scouting incompetence (hi, Toronto) all combine here. I wasn't kidding when I said I could write fifty-seven paragraphs about this - I can't make it interesting to read, though, which is why I'm sparing you. But you should really, really take my word for this here. There's also plenty of evidence in more popular North American sports that tanking for better draft picks does not work. In any case, drafting is simply a means for leagues to regulated roster change that would happen in any case. It's about parity and labor cost, not about punishment. Let's say after Aston Villa gets relegated, they sign a bunch of new players. The new team then goes undefeated and unscored upon in the Championship in 2015-16. What have they proven? They were ineligible for the national title, because they didn't have the opportunity to play Premiership teams - they couldn't prove it on the field. If the Montreal Impact go undefeated and unscored upon, they will win MLS Cup. Which they will have certainly earned. Because punishing a team for last year's misfortunes is like shoveling your walk in July. Yes, I know, fans in England accept the pro-rel crab bucket, and don't care - yet - that the Premiership is creating strata that will eventually mean that new arrivals to the Championship will face a roadblock of anywhere from six to nine teams that have alternated from sharing in Premiership money to sharing in parachute payments. I realize the popular theory is that lower divisions are devotedly supported as clubs meander their way through the Chutes and Ladders board, but the promotion/relegation system seems more suited for a nation where most fans follow four or five teams at the very top.
The point stands that it's being taken out of context. The context is that a club has played their way into top flight, rather than just purchased a place. I don't think anyone is saying winning a division proves you are superior and therefore more worthy than a club in the relegation zone above. With no promotion, the championship would become a slightly pointless division. The title itself would mean very little. You'd see a reduced amount of coverage, especially if the premier league expanded to a 30 club style set-up. It would create extra focus on the top division, and the lowered interest in the championship would invariably filter down. At the moment, proportionally crowds between the premier league and championship are the same as they were before the premier league. Leagues 1 and 2 are lower, but some of that could be explained by the fact that season tickets are a lot more prevalent in the top two tiers, where people have one simply in order to get in (premier league) or sit where they want (championship) Beyond the top clubs who hardly ever get relegated from the top division, and the perennial 4th division strugglers of the past, there really aren't that many - certainly not if you count three generations - say 50 years. The League Cup isn't popular any more, but I still don't think the club or the fans would prefer an all premier league cup. They'd opt for it being scrapped if anything. They did it before. They could do it again. It won't be easy, simply because they have to beat so many other clubs to achieve it, but it's certainly not ruled out. For Oldham, the cynics would probably point out that it helped a large degree that they had a plastic pitch, even if the stats apparently show that none of the teams that had plastic pitches (and all suspiciously had good spells on the field at the time as well) had exceptionally good home records. One factor could have been the extra income gained from being able to hire out the pitch, in an era when finances were much more modest. Forest will get back, eventually. Any club with an above average fan base for their division will have more money to spend, and will tend to do well, just as a poorly supported side will do well to stay there year after year. Some clubs are just better run than others, and make better choices in personnel. Wolves, for example, should have made it to the top division in the mid 90s. They had everything going for them - support, a rebuilt stadium, and were a club on the rise. They just seemed to waste money though like they were doing it for a bet, and were a bit of a laughing stock. You have teams in US sports, no doubt, who have the same levels of incompetence. Forest, aren't actually that big a club. They've only averaged over 30000 four times in their history. People just think they are bigger because they won the European Cup twice. It's just not felt that it's needed. Maybe if the premier league reduced to 18 teams, and losing three from 18 seemed a large percentage, they might go down that route, but nobody here is complaining that teams haven't earned the right to go up. Take away the tv money and there wouldn't be that disparity. Take away pro/rel, and there still would be.
A closed league of 20 would only be suited to fans of those 20 clubs. What about the rest, which is very sizeable number? In a country like the USA, when you had the luxury of being able to cherry pick the arrangement of those clubs, and give fans across the nation a team when they didn't have a team before, it's all an up side. Here, you'd either have to push through mergers of clubs (that'd work well), create brand new teams for regions (nope) or just cast chunks of the country adrift.
Again, no one is asking for this. That would be terrible in England. And part of the beauty of the North American system is that it's not limited to twenty teams. Then again, you could probably make a closed league of six in Holland, Scotland or Spain, and how many would blink?