Tag: promotion/relegation

soccer

Why I don’t engage in most promotion/relegation discussions

Posted on by Beau Dure

Suppose someone told you Beethoven wrote Born to Run. 

“No,” you’d say. “All available evidence says Bruce Springsteen wrote Born to Run. It was recorded nearly 150 years after Beethoven died.”

You’d think that would be the end of the argument. But suppose the original person kept pressing you on the topic. No, no — it was Beethoven.

And as you continued to point to the evidence supporting your “position” that Springsteen wrote Born to Run — a review, a Slate story showing how The Boss obsessed over the song in an effort to save his career, a story about the house in which he wrote the song — the pro-Beethoven crowd grew more belligerent. You don’t really believe Springsteen wrote Born to Run, your accusers would say. You’re just afraid of losing your credentials to Springsteen concerts. Or worse, you’re actually taking money from Springsteen to denounce people who think Beethoven wrote Born to Run.

That’s how I feel about a couple of people who put forth the following proposition: Promotion/relegation is economically feasible in U.S. soccer, the lack of it is strangling investment in the sport, it will happen if we just get enough people to yell about it on Twitter, and everything from the fourth division to the U.S. national team would be infinitely better if we would just get all those people to yell about it and make it happen.

I have explained multiple times why this proposition isn’t true. The most popular of my posts on the topic is “The NASL and periodic restatement of facts on promotion/relegation.” You may also enjoy “The semiannual restatement of facts on promotion/relegation,” which will take you back to previous posts on the topic.

But every once in a while, people repeat a couple of mindless mantras about pro/rel and then insist I (or possibly someone else in the field) should “debate” the people involved, like Bill Nye taking the stage to debate a creationist over a topic on which the scientific community is in complete agreement.

I’ve debated Ted. On Twitter. On BigSoccer. Through a lengthy private message exchange on BigSoccer in which he came close to conceding that my position was not the result of clandestine payments from MLS or a need to protect my lucrative writing career. (For the record: The fantasy columns I wrote for MLSNet were ages ago, USA TODAY rarely cared if I did any MLS coverage while I was employed there, and I’ve written very little on the league in the last two years.) I even agreed to participate in a story in which the writer was also chatting with him.

Since then, nothing has changed. Everything I’ve written is still true. Teams in the third and fourth divisions (and, frankly, most of the teams in the NASL) are content to stay there. There’s no indication whatsoever that people who have the means to make a pro/rel league happen are doing so. (No, I’m not counting an occasional “Hey, pro/rel would be cool!” comment from an NASL official as actual progress on getting it done, nor am I counting the countless amateur leagues — including mine — that use pro/rel because there’s nothing else at stake besides giving teams reasonable competition. My team was promoted against its will this season. It stinks.)

At one time, there was some sort of movement to make change happen within U.S. Soccer, thinking that if the federation simply put in rules for pro/rel, the investors would magically appear, like the profit in the South Park Underpants Gnomes episode. I’ll guess by Sunil Gulati’s recent unanimous re-election that such a movement did not come to pass.

And nothing has come to pass. People have yelled, harangued, browbeat and screamed. And the pro/rel movement in this country is still a few people on Twitter who have lined up no sponsors, no owners, no nothing. (Ted used to raise money through his site, and I’m sometimes tempted to ask what happened to the dough.)

Here’s the funny part. Ready?

Personally, I would love to see pro/rel happen in the USA.

Perhaps a modified form that minimizes risk. Maybe something in which we have some interdivisional play so second-division teams will still have a chance to see Thierry Henry or Landon Donovan once every two years.

I wish Don Garber hadn’t shut the door so conclusively when he was asked about it before the season. But I have no doubt that he’s reflecting the sentiment of the people who have sunk tens of millions of dollars into rescuing U.S. soccer from where it stood in 1993, with a bit of semipro ball and nothing else. Garber isn’t going to force them to accept more risk, and I’m in no position to say otherwise, any more than I’m in a position to say I think it’s stupid for European national teams to ditch friendlies for this new “league.” (Yes, I’m bitter about that.)

And I would love to see the lower divisions toss aside their differences and form regional leagues with pro/rel. MLS is stable. The other leagues, not as much.

So what, exactly, should I “debate” with anyone on this topic? Whether or not pro/rel would be cool? No disagreement there. Whether or not it’s feasible? Not a debate.

Period.

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basketball

NBA dumping divisions? Why not add promotion and relegation?

Posted on by Beau Dure

I’ve long figured the NBA was the U.S. pro sport best suited to a promotion/relegation system. It’s not hard to find a half-decent arena, the college system produces hundreds of noteworthy players who don’t make NBA rosters, several franchises sit in moribund mediocrity each year, and switching things up wouldn’t trample on history as it would in baseball, football or hockey.

Today, the NBA is struggling with the imbalance in its regional divisions and conferences. The playoffs could easily have some rotten teams. The suggested solutions are creative.

And all this is happening in a year in which teams are being accused of tanking for a shot at Jabari Parker, Andrew Wiggins, Julius Randle or the other players expected to lead a deep draft class.

So why not go farther? Why not go to pro/rel in the NBA?

They’d solve the draft problem. The top three teams in the second division get promoted to the top division and get the top three picks in the draft.

That alone is a compelling reason to switch systems. And unlike the other U.S. pro leagues, the NBA offers no compelling reason not to go to pro/rel. No one has paid a franchise fee in years, so they shouldn’t have a lot of debt. All but two of the existing arenas were built after 2005, and the vast majority of teams are more than 10 years old.

And would anyone really miss the current system? Nah.

 

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soccer

The NASL and the periodic restatement of facts on promotion/relegation

Posted on by Beau Dure

prorelHow did a three-part Empire of Soccer interview with NASL Commissioner Bill Peterson start an epic Twitter beatdown?

Well, it helped that in the first part, he talked about promotion/relegation, the concept that governs most soccer leagues (and other leagues) worldwide, including a lot of U.S. amateur leagues. (I still don’t know whether my indoor team was relegated last season.)

Dan Loney responded with the blog post “Not a Sane League.” That brought out the usual mix of people with an interest in promotion/relegation — some well-intended dreamers who are curious to see if it could work here, plus the people who think promotion/relegation has been kept down by an evil mix of MLS executives, journalists paid off with access or possibly money, and possibly the NSA. I don’t know — I’ve lost track.

That led to the epic Twitter match between Loney and the leader of the accusatory gang. It was mostly off-track, centering on the assertion that the U.S. soccer community has covered up a colorful history in which the old ASL was bigger than American football. Loney showed evidence to show otherwise and demanded that his combatant defend his point, which he completely failed to do.

All of this demonstrates two seemingly contradictory things:

1. There are a handful of somewhat reasonable and capitalized people who think promotion/relegation may be possible in our lifetimes.

2. The people who make the most noise about promotion/relegation online make it really difficult to have a reasonable discussion about it.

For those who are new to the discussion, welcome. Please allow me to bring you up to speed. Read this post for some prior talks, and then please consider the following:

1. Bids for Division I sanctioning were taken in 1993. I have done a fair amount of research on this period for my book and out of curiosity. I know of no effort to have promotion/relegation at that time.

I do, however, know of a bid that had multiple-point scoring like indoor soccer on steroids, and it would have limited players to specific zones and then shuffle them around between periods. This is where soccer stood in the USA in 1993.

2. MLS owners have sunk billions of dollars into this league as it stands now. Municipalities have helped MLS teams build stadiums. The team values and revenue projections that convinced them all to invest in this are predicated on the notion of being in the first division. Many of these investments have been made in the past 10 years — in 2002, the league was down to three owners and had few facilities. People tend to get angry, maybe even litigious, when you get them to pony up tons of capital and then change the rules.

So if you plan to take over USSF and force leagues to have promotion/relegation, bring the lawyers.

3. I have spoken with many team owners and officials in lower divisions. Many of them have relegated themselves. Many owners prefer to play in the fourth-tier PDL than the third-tier USL PRO or second-tier NASL. Why? It costs a whole lot less.

A couple of organizations — Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Montreal, perhaps Orlando down the road — have made the leap from lower divisions to MLS. They did so over the course of a few years. They brought in owners with deep pockets. They worked out stadium deals. They built up a front office staff. These are not things you do in three months.

4. Promotion/relegation developed in other countries when they had too many teams for one division. In England, the Football League went through its early years occasionally kicking out and adding a new team or two, but a second division wasn’t added until it merged with the Football Alliance. In England and many other countries, leagues developed after clubs had already built their names through Cup competitions.

5. Soccer history in this country has not been ignored as part of a conspiracy to … um … I don’t know exactly how this conspiracy is supposed to work. Seems to have something to do with trying to make people think nothing existed before MLS. Strange argument to make when a bunch of MLS teams are named after their NASL predecessors, or when U.S. Soccer is devoting a lot of resources toward celebrating its centennial this year. (Bill Clinton wrote the preface to the book, so if you like broadening your conspiracy theories, you can now include Whitewater.) Personally, the only reason I don’t often wear my Fall River Marksmen shirt (from Bumpy Pitch) more often is that I’m fat and I don’t fit into it that well.

Several people have made extraordinary efforts to keep U.S. soccer history alive through many dark decades. It’s not as if the NASL of the 70s paid tribute to the ASL of the 20s and 30s. We needed the efforts of Colin Jose, Roger Allaway, Sam Foulds, Jack Huckel, David Litterer and David Wangerin to bring it all to life, even as the National Soccer Hall of Fame ran out of money. (This was all summed up in a terrific story this week.)

The main lesson that can be drawn from those histories: Soccer has had a couple of opportunities to gain a firm foothold in the USA, and it fell apart through in-fighting over petty crap. Kind of like we could end up doing now if we try to upend 20 years of progress in pro soccer.

6. This might be the most important point: There is no evidence whatsoever that a lack of promotion/relegation is what’s holding back pro soccer in the United States.

The point gets muddied here because promotion/relegation is sometimes considered part of an “open system” in which clubs are free to spend what they want. That’s what we see in Europe, though “Financial Fair Play” rules may introduce some limits, and Germany’s Bundesliga is having tremendous success while refusing to break the bank.

But most soccer owners in the USA in recent years have set out to minimize risk. The NWSL, USL, NPSL, WPSL and APS are designed to keep costs down, and they’re not running the risk of losing revenue by being kicked down the pyramid against their will. That’s why MLS had such rigid cost-containment rules for its first decade and change. Only now, in the post-Beckham era, is that starting to change.

If you’re looking for the NASL to change all that, you may be disappointed. For all the bluster of the New York Cosmos and the lack of an official salary cap at the moment, they aren’t spending crazy money. I’ve been told by an insider (anonymous source alert, though maybe he’ll step forward) that the NASL is operating with “less risk, lower operating costs.”

Meanwhile, MLS is spending with confidence — on stadiums, on youth academies, on players like Clint Dempsey. And the league has managed to do so even as the explosion of cable and new media has made it possible for U.S. fans to see every English/Welsh Premier League game (I plan to make “Ew-pull” stick) and every trick Lionel Messi has at his feet.

Would an “open system” help U.S. (and Canadian) teams develop into superclubs that can hold their own with the Man Uniteds and the Barcelonas of the world? Maybe when MLS and NASL owners have seen enough returns on their investments that they’re willing to risk spending more and seeing their teams relegated. The best-case scenario for the NASL, which is probably not the most probable scenario, is that the league thrives to the point at which it, too, meets the criteria for a Division 1 league. And then — maybe — we could talk about merging MLS and the NASL as the Football League and Football Alliance did in England.

Is that likely? Probably not.

But it’s more likely than creating a thriving U.S. league system by taking over U.S. Soccer and starting an “open system” from scratch or trying to force existing leagues to abide by drastically different rules.

And by pointing this out, I’m part of the conspiracy. And I’ll surely attract obnoxious comments. I’d encourage people to ignore those comments and relish the fact that, this weekend, you can see European games on several networks and then check out your local MLS, NWSL, NASL or USL team. If you’re over age 25, you remember when soccer was something that barely existed above the college level, and you have to marvel at the progress.

Simply put: There’s never been a better time to be a soccer fan in North America. And it’s all been done without telling people who step up to risk their money that they need to take risks that are even less likely to pay off than the ones they’re already taking.

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soccer

The semiannual restatement of facts on promotion/relegation

Posted on by Beau Dure

Amid other lunacy on Twitter today, someone alerted me that the man whose Twitter ID rhymes with “locker deform” brought me into a conversation about the topic that has consumed most of his 70,000-plus tweets: the prospect of promotion/relegation and “open systems” in U.S. soccer.

We don’t have good discussions about such things in this country for a couple of reasons:

1. Soccer fans who have been on the Internet since the mid-90s have been discussing it since the mid-90s.

2. “locker deform” and a handful of others have dominated the conversation for the past five years, doing so with a conspiratorial bent that would make Alex Jones say, “Whoa, wait a minute, let’s be reasonable here.” The cycle goes as follows: Someone attempts to have a rational conversation with him and point out the logistical and financial hurdles facing a pro/rel plan, and he labels that person as a lapdog (or perhaps surreptitiously paid agent) of a USSF/MLS plan to undermine what would otherwise be a thriving multi-division ladder in the United States. As another journalist once put it — if anyone took him seriously, we’d have to sue him.

That’s a pity, because I think we’re getting closer to the point at which we could actually discuss such things.

MLS now has 19 teams. Orlando has made substantial progress toward being the 20th, even as the league is focused on a 20th team in New York. In a country of this size, a 24-team league with two geographical divisions is reasonable — each team plays its division-mates twice (22 games) and plays each other team once (12, for a total of 34). But once you get beyond 24, it’s time to talk about the options.

And so for those who have not been kicking this topic around for nearly 20 years and 70,000 tweets, here’s a quick guide to the issues as described in past posts:

December 2011: For all the talk of MLS as a “closed system” that imposes “limits” on its teams, MLS owners have no shortage of ways they can invest money. They can invest in youth academies (and some are doing so with eight-figure outlays). They can use their Designated Player slots to sign three of the world’s best players. The salary cap has about as many loopholes as the NBA’s.

Also, as you’ll see in other posts, no one with money or the hopes of raising money has backed a promotion/relegation league in the USA.

May 2011: A commenter on this post reminds us of something: This is a huge country. Geographic divisions make more sense here than they do in England. (Yes, Russia is also huge and manages the Moscow-Vladivostock trip, but do we really want to start following Russia’s lead on anything?)

October 2011: Plenty of teams are moving up the pyramid without official promotion/relegation in place.

February 2012: Along those same lines, I think this is the most succinct way I’ve summed it up to date:

– You can move up the ladder in American soccer if you have the capital and facilities to do so.

– Most clubs choose not to do so.

And that’s the issue. From a practical (and legal), you are not going to see U.S. Soccer force the Carolina Railhawks to move up to MLS if they win the NASL title. Nor can it force the Columbus Crew into what certainly would be a death spiral with a relegation.

Pro/rel fanatics never admit this side of the equation. They think pro/rel and open markets are great because they’ll encourage owners to build superclubs. That’s plausible. They also see second-division teams enthused by the possibility of promotion, which is less plausible — at least at the moment, when teams can compete in the NASL or USL Pro without risking a ton of money.

They don’t address this part of an “open market”: What happens to the crowds in Columbus if everyone knows that the Crew, like Stoke or QPR, will be doing little more than battling to stave off relegation? Or if they’re Fulham, which might not be relegated but isn’t likely to snare the prizes at the top of the table?

You can’t see a crowd of 78,000 for a couple of touring European giants and say, “See? The USA has deep soccer support!” It’s one thing to travel one hour or five to catch a one-time glimpse of a European team. And I have no doubt that the Sounders and Galaxy could keep up or even improve upon the crowds they get today if they were able to field eight Robbie Keane-level players.

The question is whether fans will turn out to see a team that is fighting relegation this year and doesn’t have the market size/ownership to to compete for the league title.

So to those of you who want to see MLS move away from its “closed” system, all I can say is this: Be patient. And understanding. Since 1996, MLS has moved away from its gimmicky tiebreaker and substitution rules, brought in the Designated Player, and issued all sorts of exceptions for “home-grown” academy players. Who knows what will happen in the next 17 years?

But what do I know? I’m just too busy counting all the money I’ve received from my closed-system overlords.

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soccer

Again with the promotion/relegation: Investors STILL needed

Posted on by Beau Dure

I was kidding when I mused aloud about suing a certain promotion/relegation zealot for defamation. I think.

As I’ve said before, the people (particularly the ringleader) of the promotion/relegation movement tend to personalize things. We’re not just idiots if we don’t see how American soccer would obviously be better if everyone saw the “open system” light. We’re on the take from Major League Soccer as part of a grand conspiracy to rid the world of the league system that began when England had too many soccer teams applying for its league.

We soccer journalists can say we like pro/rel but don’t find it feasible in this country at the moment, we can say it might happen someday when we reach critical mass, we can say our income wouldn’t change if MLS were to disappear tomorrow. We could probably even post our tax returns online, and they’d insist that someone from MLS is slipping us cash in a secluded room somewhere.

That’s all a good way of deflecting attention from the fact that we soccer journalists have plenty of evidence — some of it brilliantly compiled this week by Kenn Tomasch — and they have little but a voice in their heads saying, “If you build it, they will come.”

The current argument tack appears to be that they don’t need investors to build a league. They can just change things at the federation level, and then everyone will have to get on board with promotion/relegation.

Just a couple of problems with that thought:

1. Current investors could easily run screaming from such a change.

2. Again, there’s no evidence that we have people who would invest in soccer clubs that want to get promoted. In fact, the current leagues of choice are cheap amateur leagues — PDL, W-League, NPSL, WPSL.

If, over time, these teams find that they’re ready to make the leap up the pyramid, they can. But the vast majority of these clubs are in no position to be forced up the pyramid, and they dang well know it!

Let’s reiterate this:

– You can move up the ladder in American soccer if you have the capital and facilities to do so.

– Most clubs choose not to do so.

So how could anyone think there are tons of investors who would invest in soccer if they had a chance to climb the ladder through on-field performance? They can already do so, and they’re not.

3. U.S. Soccer knows this. So they’re not going to ruin the most stable league they’ve ever had by forcing teams to move up and down.

And no amount of personal attacks, no jabs at MLS’s TV ratings, no scoffing at WPS’s troubles will change those basic facts.

 

7
soccer

Great time for promotion/relegation fans to step up

Posted on by Beau Dure

Because I wrote a book about Major League Soccer that sold at least 10 copies and long held a position in which USA TODAY tolerated a small amount of soccer writing, I’m something of a lightning rod for what we might call “promotion/relegation zealotry.”

The funny thing is that these folks don’t say, “Hey, you’ve done a lot of painstaking and not particularly profitable research on the business of American soccer — let’s talk about what would need to happen to make a traditional league system work in this country.” These folks insist on yelling at me and ignoring what I have to say in response, as if I’m completely ignorant of the issues but would have the power to push their cause forward if I’d only adopt their slogans. People don’t do this in MMA — I’ve never had people yell at me to say, “Admit it — you’re part of the coverup to keep the UFC from adopting a tournament format!” In soccer, I’m not alone in this — every once in a while on Twitter, you see another soccer journalist say, “Enough. I’ve tried to be reasonable, and now I’m blocking you.”

Every once in a while (and it happened in the past week), someone’s reasonable about it. But more typically, I draw people who think (A) promotion/relegation should happen now or (B) there is an active conspiracy to prevent promotion/relegation from happening.

The simple fact is this — to my knowledge and to the knowledge of other journalists and soccer scholars,  no one has ever put forward a plan to put capital behind a promotion/relegation system. You can’t vote “yay” or “nay” on something that doesn’t exist.

Soccer leagues of the past certainly weren’t lining up to mimic the English way. David Wangerin’s must-read Soccer in a Football World tells us about owners of 1920s and 1930s who came from other sports and sometimes resisted putting their “major league” clubs in the same Cup competitions. The NASL pretty much didn’t even bother with the Open Cup, and it had quite a few gimmicky rules. And yet its “closed system” and Americanized game didn’t prevent a flood of investors, including quite a few English and European folks, from jumping in with both feet.

The reality is that promotion/relegation has simply never been on the table. If you don’t have 20 or more teams lined up and ready to go, there’s not much point. And when we’re still facing the reality of a successful MLS team (D.C. United) unable to make a deal with any of the quirky municipalities in its metro area to get a stadium built, we can’t say we have the facilities in place, either.

But remember, we’re dealing with conspiracy theorists here. So when you raise these arguments, you’re just part of the conspiracy. And you get asked questions like “I don’t understand why non-MLS shareholders work so hard to defend model which blocks more investment in the American game.” (Well, MLS teams now have a few Designated Players spots to use, teams can develop Home-Grown Players through youth academies, Toronto is spending $20 million on a youth facility, and Kansas City’s ownership has revitalized a moribund MLS market with great marketing, a good team and a beautiful stadium, so … what investment is being blocked?)

That usually leads to every criticism of MLS, just or unjust, being laid at your doorstep as if it’s your fault. Or that all of these problems would be magically fixed by waves of moneyed investors if U.S. Soccer would simply force a promotion/relegation scheme into existence even though no one has made a proposal for such a league (and certainly didn’t back in 1993, when MLS was the winner among the three bids to bring Division I soccer back from the dead in the United States).

And it doesn’t matter if you believe on a personal level that it’d be really cool if the USA had a promotion/relegation system, in part because it would mean that a lot of logistical hurdles and cultural antipathy had been overcome. I wouldn’t stop following MLS if it suddenly went pro/rel, and I think most fans would stick around. (At the league level, at least — demoted teams tend to lose a little bit at the gate.)

Anyway, the point isn’t to rehash what I’ve said before or what keeps going around BigSoccer (coincidentally, a great summary was posted on Tuesday). It’s tempting to do a thorough list of promotion/relegation myths akin to anti-creationism sites like TalkOrigins.

Here’s the point: Promotion/relegation fanatics have a golden opportunity to step forward. In women’s soccer.

As of today, WPS is awaiting word on Division I sanctioning for 2012. Regardless of whether that goes through, 2013 might be wide open. WPS likely will need some expansion to maintain sanctioning for 2013.

If someone wants to present an alternate plan for a soccer league based on promotion/relegation, now is the time.

So there you have it. Want promotion/relegation? Convinced investors would be more likely to go for that than the U.S. model? Great! Let’s see it.

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soccer

The ups and downs of promotion and relegation

Posted on by Beau Dure

Long the province of cranky conversations in the virtual soccer community, promotion and relegation leaped into the news in recent days with a couple of pieces of bad reporting:

1. An English executive of some kind, Richard Bevan, claimed that some overseas owners of Premier League clubs want to scrap promotion and relegation. American-owned Aston Villa responded: “Put up or shut up.” Neither happened. Liverpool’s John Henry has now weighed in with his own denial.

Let me back up with a disclaimer: My love/hate relationship with Britain (probably 80% love) can be summed up like this – Britain invented many things I love in the arts, sports, sciences and intellectual thought. That includes Monty Python, the Beatles, the Comedy Store Players, soccer, antibiotics, economic theory and (eventually) the notion that a capitalist country should find a way to take care of its least fortunate.

But don’t let anyone tell you it’s not provincial, especially in sports. They’re miffed that the rest of the world doesn’t play the same sports they do. Some people even prefer the “awkwardness” of the UK version of The Office to the full-fledged character development and creative situations of the American version. They’ve spent decades thinking there’s something wrong with the way South Americans play soccer. They STILL think the 1930 U.S. World Cup semifinalists were all Brits, no matter how many times Roger Allaway and company smash that myth into pieces.

So we shouldn’t be surprised when the bad old Americans are seen as overlords who want to turn the Premier League into the NFL. They really should be more worried about people who want to form a pan-European NFL of their own.

2. Meanwhile, in Korea, the soccer powers that be want to start promoting and relegating. Here’s the problem: They tried that just a few years ago, and the lower-division teams didn’t want to move up.

That’s not unusual. In the USA, teams have often preferred to move down or stay down. The USL’s sprawling three-tier system of 15 years ago is now a scaled-back third-division pro league with scores of teams opting instead for fourth-division amateur status. Some clubs, like the well-rooted D3 Richmond Kickers, have no desire to bounce back up to a division that would require cross-country travel every other week. (Yes, I’ve asked.)

Teams also aren’t that likely to see a giant leap in revenue with each step up the pyramid. Consider other U.S. sports. I saw Greensboro’s minor-league hockey team move from the brutish ECHL to the flashy AHL, a big step up the ladder that brought much more talented players to the Coliseum. Attendance dropped.

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