A Promotion/Relegation Primer

I’m working on a pretty sizable article about why Major League Soccer won’t adopt a system of promotion/relegation, and it occurred to me that there are a lot of folks who aren’t very familiar with the concept. It’s a system that is employed in most of the soccer leagues across Europe to reward teams for doing well, and punish teams who are less than good.

Before we get into the practical explanation, here’s what The Wiki says:

In many sports leagues around the world (with U.S., Canadian and Australian professional leagues being the most notable exceptions), promotion and relegation is a process that takes place at the end of each season in which teams are transferred between divisions. The best-ranked teams in each division are promoted to the next-highest division, and at the same time the worst-ranked teams in the higher division are relegated (or demoted) to the lower division. This process may continue down through several levels, with teams being exchanged between levels 1 and 2, levels 2 and 3, levels 3 and 4, and so on. Sometimes, qualifying rounds are used to promote and relegate.

So, now that you know how it’s defined let’s put that knowledge to use, using baseball as an example because baseball in America is a multi-tiered system. We’ll look at the American league and its lower leagues, namely the International League.

First we have to break all ties between teams. So your Columbus Clippers are no longer the AAA affiliate of the Cleveland Indians, and so on. Each team and each league are now their own entity. Get it? (Now, even though each league is independent, they all have agreements with each other allowing for pro/rel, as well as uniformity of rules, etc.)

Ok, now that we’ve made every team its own club the fun can begin. The IL has its own playoff system, and the 2008 winner was was the Rochester Red Wings. Second place, via the playoffs, went to the Durham Bulls with the Louisville Bats collecting third. The three worst teams in the AL for 2008 were were Baltimore, Detroit, and Seattle.

Now, if baseball had promotion and relegation, Rochester, Durham, and Louisville would have played 2009 in the AL, with the Orioles, Tigers, and Mariners playing in the IL. The teams would not move geographically, or change anything about their team, they would just move up, or down, a league. And therefore be rewarded, or punished, for their performance last year. Hence the name: Promotion/Relegation.

And the same would happen all the way down through the lower leagues. The cool thing about a system like this is that you could start a baseball team and play in the local recreational league and, in theory, move all the way up to the Big Leagues. The downfall is that a Major League team could fall all the way to the point where it is just a barely a team playing in a local rec league. If only the Yankees could fall so far.

There comes a point though where you can’t get relegated anymore, and most teams just fold when they’ve fallen that far. A lot of teams fight and claw but most don’t survive, and teams fold more than people would like to admit.

There are all sorts of economic factors that play into a system like this, as you can imagine. How much money would a Major League team would lose in TV deals alone of it were to play in a lower league next year? And then there’s all the sponsorship cash, the endorsements, and every other revenue stream. It has been said that dropping from the top level of British soccer is worth $50 Million. But the value of going up, from the second tier to the first, can’t be measured.

I’m not even going to scratch the surface of what impact this system would have on college baseball. But I will say that it wouldn’t be positive.

So that’s the story about promotion/relegation. It seems kind of crazy at first, and it would take some getting used to if one were to move over there. But it works for them, and might have worked for us. But because of the way our leagues were formed and are maintained, we’ll never see it on this side of the pond.