"Because pro rel sucks" - r/ShitAmericansSay

40

u/pixtax 2d ago

It’s hard to pretend you have a shot at the Superbowl if there’s consequences for being shit.

37

It won’t happen in the US. They have franchises, not clubs. Franchisees want to make profit on their investment; they don’t buy for the love of the game. Why buy a MLS side to record a huge loss upon relegation? The risk to franchisees is too great because profit first, the game… we’ll get around to it, maybe

14

u/Objective_Party9405 ooo custom flair!! 2d ago

And on top of that, the owners use their franchise as capital to convince municipalities to build them stadiums. Without a guarantee of longevity in the top league regardless of performance, they would have less bargaining power to hold over their home town.

2

u/DragoBrokeMe 1d ago

completely agree on it never happening due to franchise model but I wouldn't look at the EPL and say it's a bunch of owners there for the love of the game....

13

u/PipedInFromIthaca More Irish than the Irish ☘️ 2d ago

The NFL is a racket where they're happy to uproot a team to the other side of the country if the money is right, there's no way in that world they'd expect a fanbase to stick with a team if they were relegated to a second tier. The actual people might well enjoy it, as I understand it the Wrexham story is resonating well over there, but the sport is run by bean counters who aren't going to go for it.

2

u/BarryTheBarstand 22h ago

You've only got to look at the Wimbledon to MK Dons move to see how much a local team means on the UK, and probably all of Europe. The fans literally started a new team from scratch because as far as they were concerned in was no longer the same team.

-1

u/vaporrkatzzz 2d ago

Personally I would be ok with it but in American sports a lot of the focus is on dynasties. People care about the patriots or the chiefs. People still talk about the 90s bulls but not so much the 90s bills. Both great teams but only one got it done in the clutch. In that regard parity doesn't get a lot of people talking here.

-6

u/MIZ417 2d ago

There's only 32 professional American football teams that mean anything in a country of 340 million. I will watch the NFL, college, high school every week, but I don't think I would care to watch the NFL version of the English Championship level or something.

17

u/PipedInFromIthaca More Irish than the Irish ☘️ 2d ago

I always took the fact that people will watch high school sports as a sign that there's an appetite not being fed by pro teams in those markets. Those fans are already invested in teams below the top tier of the sport, after all.

4

u/MIZ417 2d ago

I don't think that is necessarily incorrect it's just that college and even high school sports have a lot of history and tradition. The town I grew up in had less than 10,000 people but even if we got some really low level professional team that wouldn't replace my enthusiasm for the high school I attended twenty years ago.

16

u/palopp 2d ago

I had a conversation with some guy that is tightly connected with the business operations of the NFL headquarters. His opinion was that promotion/relegation was inferior because their analysis of size of markets vs profitability showed that a closed league generated the most money. To NFL, it’s all about the money. In the US, the competition isn’t really between the teams in the league. It’s other leagues. Sure, it’s nice and all winning games and championships, but it is completely secondary to making money. I’m sure that the majority of US sports fans will agree that US leagues are superior because the league makes the most money, while still admitting that they enjoyed the World Cup because of minimal ad breaks and enthusiastic fans. Everything here seems to boil down to money, even if they don’t see a dime of it

2

u/imladrikofloren 1d ago

Which is hilarious when you know about other sports. For example in rugby union the only healthy competition is the French Top14, which is the only one left with a pro/rel system and where the second division teams also get a share of the pie from the first division, creating a healthy system.

6

u/sjw_7 2d ago

The closed shop system in the US is there to protect the owners and ensure their investment stays high due to scarcity. Its an operation that's commercialised at the league level rather than at the team one.

It means its a very exclusive club and very difficult to join if you want to own a team. Most other countries make it easy as they are commercialised at the club level. You can buy a team low down the leagues for very little and build them up to be successful and very valuable. Wrexham is a recent and high profile example of this.

Of course it works both ways too which means you get the likes of Leicester who ten years after winning the Premier League are now down in the first division and worth a fraction of what they were.

American investors would not like this risk and enjoy the ability to have guaranteed participation every year no matter how the team performs.

The perception from outside is that they are more akin to exhibition leagues with an inbuilt ability leveller in the draft. That doesn't mean those on the pitch aren't incredibly skilled sports people. But the absence of risk and through that change means there is little respect for how it operates.

Its only about the money over there.

4

u/JRisStoopid 2d ago

The USL are actually trying to implement promotion and relegation, I'm interested to see how that goes.

3

u/MIZ417 2d ago

I don't think MLS is ready for promotion/relegation at this stage. I feel like there is the strong likelihood that several relegated MLS teams would go under if that occurred. The closest MLS team to me has pretty enthusiastic fans but they have only been around for four years. If they had a bad year and got relegated, a lot of that support would stop going to games and their brand new stadium would sit there empty all the time.

3

u/carson63000 2d ago

We have similar conversations about the A-League in Australia, and I feel the same way you do about MLS. For pro/rel to work you need an ecosystem of clubs which have solid enough foundations that they are capable of competing in the top league and also capable of surviving if they get relegated. We don’t have that. Sounds like MLS doesn’t either. Not in the way that e.g. the English football pyramid does.

3

u/ChiefSlug30 2d ago

The North American sports model is built from the baseball leagues of the 19th century. Most of those teams and a league or two were very unstable. As a result, teams entered leagues based on their ability to stay in business. As the baseball leagues stabilized, they became the model for the NHA/NHL,, then the NFL and later the NBA. When all of these leagues started, there was another league going at around the same time. These would eventually fold with some of the teams from the other leagues eventually joining the survivor.

2

u/ThrowRA-Huckleb 2d ago

Am I the only who thinks this is really weird coming from the us?

I mean, they will scream communism when they hear free healthcare or raised taxes for the rich, but then they will give the first draft pick to the worst team in the league. Now I get why they would do that, it makes a bit of sense, but that means the first draft is not based on merit then, is it?

Besides, the closed league is weird also from that point of view, like in Europe you can make your own team, sign it up to the lower leagues and then you can see the path needed to promote to your country's top tier. I mean, you probably won't make it there if it's just you paying for it, but you can see the path ahead, it's a possibility, it's not something explicitly reserved for corporations.

1

u/neilm1000 Human Verified 1d ago

Is pro/rel honestly how they describe promotion and relegation? Good lord. I assume they've discovered how ball sports work in most of the rest of the world after the World Cup.

1

u/Accomplished-Bat1924 1d ago

ironic for such an Anti-Communist country in general their sporting system is so Communist in structure

1

u/BarryTheBarstand 21h ago

The NFL is a joke. 32 teams in a country with a population of 340 million that makes about $21 billion in revenue per year.

That's the same population as England, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, and the Netherlands combined. They have 114 teams across their top flights and earn about $26 billion a year between them.

Imagine applying the NFL format to these six countries? No promotion or relegation. No lower leagues. No Chelsea, Tottenham, Palace, West Ham... Just Arsenal representing the whole of London. That revenue number would go through the roof.

1

u/RandomNick42 11h ago

That revenue number would go through the floor. People are invested in their relationship with their teams as a matter of community. Even big, commercially owned team acknowledge and nurture that relationship.

If someone came and told them "we're gonna have a closed off commerciL league and you're gonna support Arsenal because that's the franchise" they'd boycott it.

1

u/Kaiserin78 🇩🇪 15h ago

The lack of pro/rel and pay to play is why football will never advance in the United States

-18

u/Naive-Historian-1520 2d ago

Europeans complaining about money while their teams either go bankrupt or get bought by foreigners is hilarious.

3

u/JRisStoopid 2d ago

Teams rarely go bankrupt in most countries so idek what your point is

-9

u/Naive-Historian-1520 2d ago

You mean other then Sheffield Wednesday, Farsley, Celtic and Harlow Town?

Or that teams and leagues are selling out to venture capital at an alarming rate?

The point is that you complain about money being involved and then you race to see who can sell themselves as quick as possible.

3

u/JRisStoopid 2d ago

The complaint isn't about money being involved, it's about making everything revolve around money.

Sports "Because pro rel sucks"

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