Should pro sports have a relegation system?

[chiefzilla1501]

I had a really interesting conversation with a dude who loves international soccer.

The English Premiere league has what they call a relegation system. The worst three teams every year basically get demoted to a minor league type system. I would love to see baseball use this system. It would be a much more effective system than installing a salary cap, in my opinion. Too many owners are cheapskates because they have no motivation to win. In many cases, you see teams tanking at the end of the year because there's a huge incentive for being the worst team in the league. My buddy said this system forces owners to spend, to care about winning, and to be held accountable for poor results because now they get dinged when their team is terrible.

I know this would never happen because it would be such a culture shock and owners would never agree to it. But what do people think of this idea in American sports?

[alnorth]

Originally Posted by kccrow

If a team drafts in the top 10 for 5 consecutive seasons, they shouldn't get a high pick again for the next season. Instead they will be the last team to draft in the 6th year, regardless of their record (#32) with all other teams moving up and lose rights to any compensatory selections they might otherwise receive (to be viewed as purging to lower costs by a bad team) in that year.

This is not a real solution. First of all, if you think teams might not be trying hard to win for an extended period of time, well that doesn't really exist but if it did, then they obviously wouldn't care about the draft, so this is not a deterrent to this mythical bad behavior you seem to think may exist.

All you'll do is cement teams which have had a run of bad luck or stupidity into permanent mediocrity from which its very hard for them to ever climb out. The worst teams should always get the highest draft picks. Period. (in general at least, if you want to mix up the first 5-10 picks with a lottery, fine, whatever)

[carcosa]

Originally Posted by SNR

This would fix all tanking problems if leagues put my plan into place

Holy shit, this is an amazing idea. If I could give it a green box, I would.

In fact, I bet if you submitted an article about it to a top sports blog, it might get some play.

[UK_Chief]

Originally Posted by GloucesterChief

That rule sucks. Say I am a billionaire owner and I buy my hometown team. My home team is not a big market/traditional power. To get more revenue I have to have a better team, to have a better team I need to get more revenue. I simply can't pour cash in to get better to get more revenue even if I don't care about the cost to me because this is my hobby.

Basically all this rule does is keep the top teams on top and lower teams on the bottom.

The problem that soccer teams have over here is billionaires (usually Russians or Arabs) who buy up a small team and throw money at the club to try to make it big. That's fine for a time but in reality what happens is the owner gets bored because it isn't as easy as they first thought, and they leave the club with massive debts, players on massive wages that they can't afford and then it goes bankrupt. This has happened a few times.

The financial fair play rules try to prevent this happening because if a rich owner wants to buy a soccer club then they can, they can also spend a lot of money on it to try to improve it, but they have to spend their money on things like stadiums, training facilities, academies for youth players etc. The club can then grow organically by developing talented young players and bringing them into the team. I don't think it's perfect but it's better than what was happening.

As for the draft, it would never work in soccer in Europe - almost no soccer players go to college, they barely go to high school! They are scouted at 10-13 years old or younger and then brought into the bigger clubs to be developed. It just wouldn't work.

[UK_Chief]

Also worth pointing out that the three teams that get relegated get what are called 'parachute payments' for three years that they are out of the EPL. This money helps soften the blow of relegation (less TV money in lower leagues) and helps the club transition back to 'normal' wages.

[UK_Chief]

Also the thing that keeps the big clubs big is not really the EPL, it's the european champions league. The top 4 teams in the EPL go to play in the european league, which gives them mega money, so those 4-6 teams that regularly get into the CL tend to stay as big teams because of more money and the best players want to play in that competition.

The difference in prize money between finishing top of the EPL and bottom of the EPL is not much. The champions league money makes the difference.

[kccrow]

Originally Posted by SNR

This would fix all tanking problems if leagues put my plan into place

http://www.chiefsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=280441

Awesome idea actually. I'm all for it.

I'd have a tie breaker in this scenario preceding strength of schedule that reads: If two teams with identical 3 year records tie, then the team with the worst record in the most recent season will receive the higher pick. Then go into all the other tie breakers.

[GloucesterChief]

Originally Posted by UK_Chief

The problem that soccer teams have over here is billionaires (usually Russians or Arabs) who buy up a small team and throw money at the club to try to make it big. That's fine for a time but in reality what happens is the owner gets bored because it isn't as easy as they first thought, and they leave the club with massive debts, players on massive wages that they can't afford and then it goes bankrupt. This has happened a few times.

How can they leave the club? If they sell it, the prospective new owner should of done their due diligence when it comes to these things. If they don't then the club should go into bankruptcy where the old debts can be cleared out and/or the club being sold to a new owner.

The financial fair play rules try to prevent this happening because if a rich owner wants to buy a soccer club then they can, they can also spend a lot of money on it to try to improve it, but they have to spend their money on things like stadiums, training facilities, academies for youth players etc. The club can then grow organically by developing talented young players and bringing them into the team. I don't think it's perfect but it's better than what was happening.

Still sounds like old money wanting to keep their market share to themselves and keep the value of their clubs artificially high since purchase price is usually in part based on previous purchases.

As for the draft, it would never work in soccer in Europe - almost no soccer players go to college, they barely go to high school! They are scouted at 10-13 years old or younger and then brought into the bigger clubs to be developed. It just wouldn't work.

The NHL operates on the same system. In Canada they have junior hockey teams with high school aged kids. In the US, player usually go to college or head north to the junior hockey teams. I believe the other big hockey countries ( Sweden, Finland, Russia, and Czech Republic) have the same system.

The NHL still has a draft as the junior teams are independent.

[Eleazar]

I think it works in England and other countries because they only really have one pro sport, at least one that is organized into leagues and widely followed. There are a few hundred teams just in England, which is about the size of Oregon.

More so than that, their leagues can draw players from all over the world - there aren't a whole lot of countries feeding players into baseball but for soccer it's basically the whole world.

Baseball has a way for players to move up and down according to merit, just not clubs. In theory this would be a better system to feed the best players to the top level, rather than teams.

[GloucesterChief]

Baseball draws players from quite a few countries other then the US: Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and The Netherlands through their territories in the Caribbean off the top of my head.

[Discuss Thrower]

Originally Posted by GloucesterChief

Baseball draws players from quite a few countries other then the US: Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and The Netherlands through their territories in the Caribbean off the top of my head.

Notice how few Japanese players there relative to Americans though? And that's the top league outside of the USA.

[Eleazar]

Originally Posted by GloucesterChief

Baseball draws players from quite a few countries other then the US: Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, and The Netherlands through their territories in the Caribbean off the top of my head.

There are really the US, a few Central American and Caribbean countries, and a handful of players from elsewhere... that's a lot smaller pool, population wise, than soccer has