Recently 12 European football teams announced their intention to form a “Super League”, which was poorly received by the football community at large. While I’m still learning about the details of the story, it seems that the mechanic of relegation is a central piece of the tension between the Super League clubs and the football community.
The structure of European football stands in contrast to, for example, the structure of American (Usonian) major sports, where the roster of teams is fixed, and never changes from year to year; instead, in football, the bottom two teams each year get relegated to a lower league, and the highest performing teams from the lower league get moved up to take their place.
The mechanic of relegation is celebrated because it ensures the teams in the highest echelons of the sport are always those that are most able to bring the best football to the table in games, and any team, even a small, scrappy, local team can work its way to the highest levels if they are good enough (see for example AFC Wimbledon, which was founded after the previous Wimbledon club relocated, leading the local population to found a new team that started from the very bottom again, and subsequently rose rapidly through the leagues).
But for all its benefits, relegation also introduces a large degree of uncertainty into the finances of the teams, since any team can be relegated to a lower-tier, and less profitable, league, which makes it hard for the teams to plan adequately for the long term. Addressing this instability was an important factor in the ideation of Super League, which proposed to operate without relegation, similar to American sports.
I found myself wondering, is there any way to capture the benefits of relegation, ensuring the very best teams are always in the same league, while allowing teams to have a less uncertain image of their long-term finances?
Clearly, to achieve this, no team can ever have too secure of a position, lest they grow complacent and take up space that a sharper team can use; but teams can still be given more security in their position than they have right now. At the highest league, instead of having only a single tier, there could be multiple tiers (which still play against eachother as if they were only one unit), but teams in the highest tiers would have to be relegated multiple times to be removed from the highest league. In this setup, the best teams would have to perform poorly for multiple consecutive seasons before they can be removed from the highest league, but would still need to play sharply in order to maintain their position. This arrangement allows for more stability for the teams that are able to do the best, while also providing the meritocratic structure that football fans find lacking in the proposed Super League.
One criticism that I anticipate of this proposal, is that by providing financial stability to the very highest-performing teams, it would ossify and fossilize a hierarchy of teams, where certain teams are able to more easily spend and obtain resources, and thereby outperform other (less stably positioned) teams in the league, thereby having an easier time defending the stable position, creating a positive feedback loop that hinders other teams from having a fair chance at dethroning the top teams.
One way to address this criticism, is to create a fee associated with the higher tiers of the league; if a team wishes not to pay the fee, they may avoid doing so, but the stable position will instead be offered to the next highest-performing team. The fee will be distributed to the rest of the teams in the league, ensuring that they can have a more competitive chance at rivaling even the entrenched teams.
On Relegation in Association Football
Recently 12 European football teams announced their intention to form a “Super League”, which was poorly received by the football community at large. While I’m still learning about the details of the story, it seems that the mechanic of relegation is a central piece of the tension between the Super League clubs and the football community.
The structure of European football stands in contrast to, for example, the structure of American (Usonian) major sports, where the roster of teams is fixed, and never changes from year to year; instead, in football, the bottom two teams each year get relegated to a lower league, and the highest performing teams from the lower league get moved up to take their place.
The mechanic of relegation is celebrated because it ensures the teams in the highest echelons of the sport are always those that are most able to bring the best football to the table in games, and any team, even a small, scrappy, local team can work its way to the highest levels if they are good enough (see for example AFC Wimbledon, which was founded after the previous Wimbledon club relocated, leading the local population to found a new team that started from the very bottom again, and subsequently rose rapidly through the leagues).
But for all its benefits, relegation also introduces a large degree of uncertainty into the finances of the teams, since any team can be relegated to a lower-tier, and less profitable, league, which makes it hard for the teams to plan adequately for the long term. Addressing this instability was an important factor in the ideation of Super League, which proposed to operate without relegation, similar to American sports.
I found myself wondering, is there any way to capture the benefits of relegation, ensuring the very best teams are always in the same league, while allowing teams to have a less uncertain image of their long-term finances?
Clearly, to achieve this, no team can ever have too secure of a position, lest they grow complacent and take up space that a sharper team can use; but teams can still be given more security in their position than they have right now. At the highest league, instead of having only a single tier, there could be multiple tiers (which still play against eachother as if they were only one unit), but teams in the highest tiers would have to be relegated multiple times to be removed from the highest league. In this setup, the best teams would have to perform poorly for multiple consecutive seasons before they can be removed from the highest league, but would still need to play sharply in order to maintain their position. This arrangement allows for more stability for the teams that are able to do the best, while also providing the meritocratic structure that football fans find lacking in the proposed Super League.
One criticism that I anticipate of this proposal, is that by providing financial stability to the very highest-performing teams, it would ossify and fossilize a hierarchy of teams, where certain teams are able to more easily spend and obtain resources, and thereby outperform other (less stably positioned) teams in the league, thereby having an easier time defending the stable position, creating a positive feedback loop that hinders other teams from having a fair chance at dethroning the top teams.
One way to address this criticism, is to create a fee associated with the higher tiers of the league; if a team wishes not to pay the fee, they may avoid doing so, but the stable position will instead be offered to the next highest-performing team. The fee will be distributed to the rest of the teams in the league, ensuring that they can have a more competitive chance at rivaling even the entrenched teams.