With the European seasons closing in on their final matchdays, here's a primer on the ideas behind relegation and why it's such a topic among American soccer fans.
Simply put, promotion and relegation allows for teams to move up and down between professional divisions. No team is guaranteed a place in the top league season-to-season. They have to finish out of the relegation slots to maintain their status.
Though the number of teams in the biggest European leagues differs, the relegation slots are almost always three up and three down. That means at the end of every English Premier League season, three teams are relegated to the Championship and replaced by the two teams that finished top of the Championship and a third playoff winner among the team finishing third through sixth. In the Bundesliga, the third from bottom team plays off against the third-place team from the second division. In Italy, the third place Serie B team needs to finish ten points ahead of the fourth-place team to avoid a playoff.
For all of these variants, the result is still the same: clubs moving between divisions. So why doesn't this happen in North American sports?
The lack of relegation goes back to the way American pro sports leagues were founded. Baseball was the earliest professional league. They set the standard of what a ‘major league” market looked like, and the other leagues followed that model. It’s worth remembering that baseball absorbed an entire rival league when they added the American League and stopped another rival in the mid-1960’s through expansion.
With American sports, it’s always been more of a question of major markets instead of competition. When the National Hockey League refused to expand during the Original Six era, the top minor league club, the Cleveland Barons, challenged them for the Stanley Cup. Pro hockey’s origins go back to challenge series, but the NHL refused to allow a “major league team” to play a “minor league team.” Most soccer leagues around the world don’t make that distinction.
Of all the major sports, the National Football League was the one with the small town background. But with the exception of Green Bay, they moved the original small town teams to the major cities and adopted something similar to baseball’s criteria for new members.
The NFL absorbed the AFL in the 1960’s, the NHL and the NBA both added teams from rival leagues in the 1970’s, and the NFL simply waited out the WHL and the USFL. The NASL fought the MISL in the early 1980’s, before the MISL absorbed four NASL teams.
Baseball has considered promotion and relegation between two divisions, basically dividing the current league in half. Whether this was serious or just a product of that league’s financial difficulties isn’t really clear, but it did get the expected media attention.
As to why soccer didn’t simply set aside the history of the other pro sports and adopt promotion and relegation, economically they were in no position to do that. The smallest of the pro sports has a hard enough time selling ad space and negotiating TV deals without adding a system that could see the biggest clubs dropped to what most Americans would consider the minor leagues.
Major League Soccer was built around economics with major markets, following the example of the established sports. In theory, the United Soccer Leagues has allowed for promotion and relegation in the US lower divisions, but with an added economic and facility requirement.
