By Blaidd Drwg
It seems that the new owners of a bunch of EPL teams are not happy with the relegation system in British Football. If you are not familiar with the relegation system, here is an overly simple way of how it works:
A sport has 3 divisions, A, B and C, with A being the highest division and C being the lowest. At the end of each season, the three bottom teams in the standings in Division A would move down to Division B and the 3 top teams in Division B would move up to division A. The same thing happens with Division B and C.
This is the system that is used by almost every soccer league in the world (I believe the MLS is the only major soccer league that is an exception) and is also used by quite a number of other sports worldwide.
I really like the relegation system – it gives incentive for owners and general managers to build competitive teams and keeps the competitive level of the league higher than it otherwise would be. You don’t tend to get long stretches of team futility like you do in American sports (I am looking at you Pittsburgh Pirates) and it bring new talent into the league on a regular basis that you wouldn’t see otherwise.
The real reason owners are opposed, is of course, money:
“If you look at sports all around the world and you look at sports owners trying to work out how to invest to make money, you will find that most of them like the idea of franchises,” Bevan said. “If you take particularly American owners, without doubt, there have been a number of them looking at having more of a franchise situation and that would mean no promotion or relegation.
“Obviously if I was an American owner and I owned a football club or I was an Indian owner I might be thinking I would like to see no promotion or relegation, my investment is going to be safer and my shares are going to go up in value.”
I really wish the MLS would go to a relegation system. I think it would improve the quality of the game and the skills of US Soccer players in general. I also know that it will never happen for the same reason why some EPL owners don’t want a change – money. The American way of doing it is to create a brand and the possibility of that brand not appearing in the highest level of competition scares the billionaires who use professional sports teams as their playthings. Could you imagine the Yankees being demoted to AAA? Well, it did happen, in 2007 when Juventus of the Italian Soccer League (the team people call the Yankees of soccer) were demoted from Seire A to Serie B due to a scandal. It was only one year and they managed to win themselves back into Serie A, but you are talking about a team that is worth close to a billion dollars getting demoted to a lower league. No one in Italy complained or was outraged; it is part of the game and the Juve squad had to prove themselves to get back to the highest level of competition.
FlatbreadGarden 