Relegation in American sports would be outstanding imo, but it would require a complete reorganization of all professional leagues and a HUGE increase in the numbers of teams.

Major League Baseball is probably the closest sport to being equipped to handle relegation in one respect of the number of teams, BUT, all of those teams are affiliates of the major league clubs. There are triple A, double A, and several single A leagues, but the teams in those are all (or virtually all) owned by their respective major league clubs to my knowledge. For example, the State College Spikes is a so-called "Single A Short Season" (the second lowest pro/semi-pro level) baseball team local to me but they are an affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Interestingly, for teams like Pittsburgh, relegation would be very healthy imo. See, the Pirates franchise has been one of the most profitable ones in baseball for the past several years, and they've had close to 20 years of sub-500 play. The ownership of the Pirates has this horribly low payroll, and simply rely on the fact that the Pittsburgh die-hard sports crowd will still come out and watch the Pirates suck ass, thus making their profits huge. The ownership will not keep marquee (expensive) players and is basically bilking their fans with a substandard "product" (and that product is the competitiveness of their baseball team). Meanwhile the fans are too die-hard to stop supporting them - and so they are partially to blame as well.

In order for relegation to work in MLB though a salary cap would be necessary as well and the league itself would have to be restructured to allow "competition" from non-affiliate teams in "lower leagues".

I could imagine a scenario where the stadiums were owned entirely by the cities and the teams were granted the right to play in one of those stadiums if they were not relegated and so on and so forth. However, it gets even more complicated because so much of the market is about TV viewership and with the way the league and teams have various and sundry deals with broadcasters and so forth... it's all very complex and basically set up to be a monopoly.


It's kind of a chicken or the egg issue too... would there be enough fan dollars to support a "relegation" league in MLB that wasn't made up of teams all owned by the clubs in the majors? Maybe there would be if there were enough teams... but more teams might not be able to exist because maybe not enough fans would financially support them and so on and so forth.

I'm not sure there is enough talent available to provide that many teams. Let's face it, in order to be a contending team in the lower leagues, you've got to have a lot of talent, you've got to be able to step onto the field against the big league teams and make a game of it. Even the worst of the worst MLB teams would absolutely CRUSH the hell out of the best teams' triple-A affiliates...

In all, I would love to see the league restructured to provide for salary caps and relegation, but to do so would basically mean tearing the league down and rebuilding it from the ground up. Municipalities, broadcasters, and of course private enterprises would all have to come to terms with that... good luck!

 

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Right back at you Soccer girl.

And you misspelled embarrassing.

 

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I am not going to rub it in your face any more because I know it gets you flustered but that was seriously one of the silliest things I've ever heard. No team would ever deliberately try to get relegated.

True enough.

Can't spell embarrassing without USC.

 

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I think this would work fantastically at the collegiate level.


Boise State would benefit considerably.

 

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You can rub it in my face all you want. I don't pretend to know shit about Soccer, I see everything through the context of real Football. Although I know what relegation is I have never cared about a sport that really uses it so who cares? Maybe what I said doesn't make sense for soccer. I suspect there are reasons that a team might decide to drop inentionally and that you just don't want to admit it.

Like you don't want to admit you are looking at the NFL through your metrosexual soccer glasses.

Again, what part of soccer doesn't matter don't you get? You want to apply that crap to the NFL and you want to do so because you are biased and don't like football.

Grtz on latching on to one issue so you don't have to address the larger one, which is that the NFL rules make perfect sense for the NFL.

I'm sorry the football players picked on you when you were small. You should prolly get over it already.

 

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Apparently you can't spell at all.

 

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The other point you have to look at is safety. In professional sports that are full contact it's too dangerous to have the lower tier teams play top flight athletes.

 

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The NFL rules are there to protect a cherished monopoly. Ofcourse it works well for the NFL. The rules exist to work well for the NFL.

Soccer is a contact sport.

It's obviously not as violent as Football, but it is a full contact sport.

 

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