🔒 Relegation is real competition, time to introduce to US leagues

In a poetic narrative, the authors contrast European and American sports cultures, highlighting the thrill of relegation battles in European football versus the safety nets of closed leagues in the US. Advocating for promotion and relegation in American sports, the authors urge embracing the excitement of uncertainty and rivalry.

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By John Micklethwait and Simon Kennedy

Look around the world and you can find poetry and beauty in sporting rivalry. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Witness what Don DeLillo and Philip Roth wrote about baseball in New York. When Juventus hosts AC Milan, the two Italian teams play with the Alps glistening behind them. The prize at stake when Australia and England compete at the longest form of cricket is a simple urn.

But we are ancestral enemies of a particularly tragic kind.

We support Leicester City and Nottingham Forest, two football teams separated by 30 miles of England’s (distinctly Alp-less) East Midlands. It pits the town that gave the world entertainers Engelbert Humperdinck and Showaddywaddy against the home of ice dancers Torvill and Dean. And far from it being a footballing tale of continual success, both clubs have married occasional highs with a longer-term habit of courting disaster.

Our main joy usually comes from exulting in each other’s calamities, which we do with childish abandon — with the more senior of us regularly threatening the other with a rapid transfer to Pyongyang.

Our sporting drama is like Apple TV’s Ted Lasso — but without the glamour or, frankly, the maturity. Our partners ask: “Why don’t you support a team that wins something?” To which we answer, “We did back when …” But by the time we have recalled Jamie Vardy’s outrageous volley against Liverpool in 2016, let alone Trevor Francis’ diving header versus Malmo in 1979, our audience has strangely already left the room, sighing.

So, we deserve to be mocked.

In one respect, however, we are proudly united. For all the laughable elements of our competition, we, like all European soccer fans, feel superior, even noble, whenever we compare even our tragic interchanges with the soppy socialist world of American team sports.

Normally, when you compare the US to Europe, the stakes are always higher in the former. Win an American competition — whether it be an election, a scholarship or a takeover — and you are garlanded by the gods and showered in gold. On the other hand, lose, and the floor falls out beneath you.

The US works so well because the floor and the fear matter as much as the gold and the glory. Meritocracy makes America generally a much more exciting and vibrant place to do most things.

In sports, the winning part of the American approach still works. A World Series title or a Super Bowl champion is just as heralded as any winner of Europe’s Champions League (even if nobody outside North America quite knows what the “World” refers to).

But when it comes to losing at team sports, America wimps out.

We can say this because as the English football season nears its end, one of us lives in daily fear of Forest (named for the location of its first ground) being demoted from the Premier League because of losses. Meanwhile, the other, having watched Leicester undergo that nightmare last year, is cheering their just-secured elevation from the second tier into the world’s most popular sporting league.

Sponsors and some of the best players will surely leave teams that have been booted down a level, and for supporters, there is added heartache if a rival goes in the opposite direction. It will be hard to describe the pain of one of us knowing his side will soon be playing Millwall, the southeast-London-based team whose fans revel in the chant “no one likes us, we don’t care,” while the other is visiting Manchester City, Liverpool and Arsenal.

Across the pond, however, from Major League Baseball to the National Basketball Association, there is no punishment if your team finishes at the bottom. They are closed-league systems. The same teams automatically reappear the next season.

Take, for example, the National Football League’s Carolina Panthers. They won just two games last season and lost 15. But the slate will be wiped clean — and indeed, failure is often rewarded with a lofty position in the next drafts of new players, something which can sometimes draw accusations of so-called tanking, the fielding of poor players as the season ebbs.

For a sport that revels in macho pantherish imagery, it’s all a bit pathetic. It’s as if Gladiator ended with all the people whom Russell Crowe’s character Maximus had vanquished reappearing the next day at the Colosseum with new arms and legs.

The absence of peril also makes for boring contests. As an American sports season ends, it is littered with games that mean very little to at least one of the teams (which stands no chance of getting to the playoffs and none at all of being demoted to a lesser league).

By contrast, in the Premier League, or any European team sport, as the season wraps up, the stakes are high at both ends. If your side is not trying to win the league or qualify for a pan-European tournament, it is oftentimes frantically trying to avoid the drop. Last weekend, Forest, desperately striving to avoid relegation, fought like tigers against Manchester City, which is seeking to win the title. Forest still lost.

The balance between risk and reward is considerable. Teams stand to lose around £100 million in broadcast revenue if relegated from the Premier League (which perhaps explains why both our teams are being investigated for breaking financial fair play rules — but let’s skip past that fact).

And promotion is worth even more.

Thus, for many, a season can run until the very last days or even seconds, demanding engagement and igniting excitement. Of the 20 current Premier League teams, just six have never been relegated from it. Forest and a fellow relegation battler, Burnley, meet on the last Sunday of this season. Back in 2005, West Bromwich Albion, another Midlands side, entered the final afternoon bottom of the league yet somehow managed to leap three places and escape. Others are less lucky, but the tension and thrill make for compelling viewing.

America is clearly missing out, so how did US sports end up with a communist “all shall have prizes” system? The reason is something that the country has driven out of most other industries: a system of monopolies. American sports are run by cabals of owners who paid to join a cozy club and can’t face the idea of being relegated. Some even dump their hometown if they can’t fill seats or win a tax break.

The chief reason why teams as poor as the Panthers or baseball’s Pittsburgh Pirates (which have lost around 60% of games in the past five years) have not been dumped out of their leagues is so their franchises can retain their value. Indeed, Forbes recently estimated the Panthers to be worth $4.1 billion and the Pirates $1.32 billion, multiples of the amounts they were bought for.

This is profoundly un-American. What would have happened in Silicon Valley if the good entrepreneurs had had to bail out the bad ones? We suspect we would still be using WordPerfect to write this column and calculating the probabilities on Lotus 1-2-3. It is the sporting equivalent of a monarchy — reinforced privilege.

Will this ancien regime ever be overthrown? Once again, there is fear and hope.

The fear is that some big European clubs (some of which are now owned by monopolistic Americans) would love to get rid of relegation. There was an attempt to introduce a relegation-free European Super League a few years ago, which a backlash from fans helped mercifully scotch.

The hope brings us back to Mr. Lasso. The series, which is about a manager who uses homespun wisdom and American-style optimism to rally initially cynical and mildly talentless players, is not only creating new soccer fans. Alongside the FX channel documentary series about the actor Ryan Reynolds buying Wrexham AFC (an even lower team than ours), it is teaching Americans about the joys of moving between leagues.

There is, in some quarters, a “pro-rel” movement. The owners of American soccer teams used to hide behind Major League Soccer’s relative weakness to claim they could not allow relegation. Now, some in the lower tier USL Championship have murmured they might be prepared to give it a go.

Our message to our friends across the Atlantic is simple. Be bold. Do the American thing — and rise up against the spineless monopolists and Brezhnevs who control your team sports. Remember, you are Maximus, not the spindly, devious Emperor Commodus.

Instead, embrace the hope and the fear, and even the schadenfreude of petty rivalries. Why should a Boston Red Sox fan be denied the pleasure of watching the New York Yankees being tossed out of the major league? Yes, you may experience agony, but that will only make the ecstasy more enjoyable.

And you will no longer be looked down on by two people from the East Midlands — one of whom is nervously wondering if any channel will show next year’s game against Millwall while the other has begun looking at trains to Manchester again. And they are doing so with the gleeful knowledge that their roles could be reversed in a year, with perhaps one of us reporting from Pyongyang.

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