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Appearing at a news conference last week during Major League Soccer’s all-star festivities, deputy commissioner Mark Abbot was asked about the chances the league would institute the promotion/relegation mechanism that exists in most other world leagues. The word “never” was a significant part of his answer. It was as though he were asked whether MLS might allow its players to use their hands.
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Don Garber (AP Photos)
This would not seem like such a big deal. There isn’t another U.S. professional sport that has a system of promotion and relegation, in which teams that finish at the bottom of the highest league’s standings are dropped to a minor league, whereas the teams that finish best in the minor league are promoted to play in the big time.
It turns out, though, there is this curious sub-culture of American soccer fans who reject MLS not because the standard of play is less than the best in the world or the absence of a nearby team, but rather because the league declined to embrace the promotion/relegation concept when it was founded in 1996.
Hey, some people enjoy dressing up like zombies and others attend conventions dressed as stuffed animals, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by any particular or peculiar passions.
And yet, I was.
I stumbled into this debate, which isn’t really a debate, by writing an article a week ago that suggested MLS needed to assure the excitement created in this country by the 2014 World Cup isn’t spent entirely on Premier League teams thousands of miles away in England. I was immediately assailed on Twitter for endorsing a league that rejects the concept of promotion/relegation.
Although I was vacationing in Santa Monica when that article appeared, the overwhelming dudgeon of the three or four most committed pro/rel supporters led me to spend far too much of a couple lovely beach days proving them wrong responding to their points. Perhaps I should have been reading Frederick Forsythe, but it’s not often one gets to be this correct in an argument.
The biggest argument in favor of pro/rel seems to be: That’s how everyone else does it. However true that may be – Mexico’s Liga MX is smart enough only to dabble, relegating just one team per season — it’s certainly not a good enough reason to do it here.
Everyone else does it mostly because that’s how the English did it at the beginning, and the sport was invented in the British Isles. But America had professional baseball, football, ice hockey and basketball long before it had an enduring professional soccer league.
Major League Baseball does not have promotion and relegation. The National Hockey League does not. The NBA is not swapping the Fort Wayne Mad Ants for the Milwaukee Bucks. Not now, not ever. The National Football League, the most lucrative pro sports league on the planet, does not even have an official minor league.
The absence of pro/rel has made purchasing a major-league sports franchise in the U.S. a far more stable investment. Franchise values in this country’s four established leagues have continued to escalate over time, and relative newcomer MLS is getting 10 times more in expansion fees for NYCFC than what it charged Chivas USA and Real Salt Lake to join roughly a decade ago.
Some contend it’s not a true competition if the worst teams don’t get kicked out of the league every year, and yet that system is largely responsible for the absence of true title competition in Europe’s best leagues.
Under pro/rel, wealthy, entrenched clubs such as Manchester United, Arsenal and Chelsea needn’t worry in the least about being dropped out of England’s Premier League, whereas Fulham went from playing in the Europa League final in 2010 and an eighth-place league finish the following season to being shoved out the door and into the bushes following a disappointing 2013-14.
The scramble to avoid relegation, which carries with it an enormous financial penalty, is consuming for all but the wealthiest clubs. Which is exactly as the wealthy teams want it to be.
There is a presumption among its ardent supporters that pro/rel is an open, democratic system of running a sport. That’s the con the wealthy teams have been running for the past couple decades, since real money began flowing into the sport. The pro/rel system actually functions like a relic of England’s old caste system, when the working class scrambled for survival while the privileged lived off their fortunes.
During the past decade, the average number of different league winners in England, Italy, Spain and Germany is 3.5. In MLS, seven different teams have won the MLS Cup and six have won the Supporters Shield for accumulating the most points in the regular season.
The absence of pro/rel is a serious factor in the growth of MLS through the construction of soccer-first stadiums in such places as Salt Lake, Philadelphia, Dallas and Los Angeles, all of which enrich the experience of American soccer fans. Communities that provide tax breaks or funding for major-league facilities, such as Sporting KC Park, won’t want to see those investments tank because the star striker blows out his knee one year and the team gets relegated to a minor league.
It’s easy to figure it was that way at the beginning, as well, when Alan Rothenberg was selling investors on Major League Soccer with the memory of the North American Soccer League’s implosion still reasonably fresh.
Can you imagine?
Rothenberg: I need all of you to put up several million of your personal fortunes and to be willing to absorb many millions more in losses as we establish this league. It’ll be a while before anyone’s making money. And, of course, the two of you that field the worst teams are going to be kicked out at the end of the year and will have to win in the minors to be able to rejoin us.
Wealthy potential investor 1: Uh, about that last part: why?
Rothenberg: Because the English do it that way.
WPI 2: Yes, Mr. Rothenberg, we’re all leaving now. Do you validate parking?
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