Compelling Soccer

I've mentioned before how much MLS tends to annoy me with it's the strange attempt to appear soccer-ish in name but not in principle. There was a strange dichotomy set up, especially at the beginning, when you had this allusion to traditional sounding soccer names like DC United, while setting up rules to differentiate it from international soccer like it's old way of doing penalty kicks and the fourth substitution. In fairness to MLS, while that naming convention has continued (Real Salt Lake, FC Dallas, Seattle Sounders FC) they've gone much more towards the traditional format in terms of rules. However one thing that is missing is the thing that would make a soccer league in this country truly unique; relegation.

Frankly relegation is something that needs to happen across sports in general more frequently. Baseball and hockey would admittedly be hard considering they have minor league systems but it would be nice in the NBA and NFL. But it's something that will never happen, because that would involve opening up the marketplace and lord knows competition is in fact evil. It's actually sort of funny, if we practiced what we preached, relegation would be the order of the day here. However, we don't and in actuality businesses want to guarantee they remain on top despite complete and total incompetence. Contrary to popular belief, this is not localized to the banking and auto industries; it happens in sports as well. When there is no punishment for failure, you get the Kansas City Royals and Los Angeles Clippers.

MLS does have a potential set up in place for relegation. The USL-1 and USL-2 are already in existence and could easily be co-opted into a lower division league. There is every incentive for those leagues to do it; they'd have a chance to get a bigger share of the profits.

The problem is MLS teams have no incentive. What owner in his right mind would risk losing money if his team tanked and got sent down? Fair play or not, it's not good business and as we all know, sports is a business. You would have to create an reason for owners to agree to such a thing. Basically you'd need someone to flaunt money at them and say "If you want this cash, you need to agree to the relegation system, now." I suppose a network like ESPN could do it, but that would only happen if ESPN saw a major profit motive for doing it. With very little to go on with regards to how the American public would react to a relegation battle, that's unlikely to come any time soon.

But supposing for a moment we could pull this off, what then? Courtesy of me and my roommate brainstorming a couple of weekends ago, we got to thinking of a way to combine relegation with America's love of dramatic playoffs. Yes that's right, it's all about the relegation playoffs.

Let's say for a moment, you have three teams relegated and three teams promoted from USL-1. Instead of an automatic promotion, the six teams face each other in a home and home. The worst team in MLS gets the best team of USL-1. The second best team in USL gets the second worst in MLS and the third best team in USL faces the third worst team in MLS. The winner based on aggregate of the home and home plays the next year in MLS. The loser goes to USL-1. If the MLS team finishes last but beats that USL team? They stay up. If the third worst team loses to the third best USL team? The USL team goes to MLS and the MLS team goes down.

The reason why no one cares about anything other than the championship game in sports is because nothing else is on the line. Well there's something on the line here; your chance to remain top flight. As a novelty, it would draw interest alone. It could actually get interesting. Imagine if the Clippers had to play someone for the right to stay in the NBA? Would you be at all curious if they would win? Would you find yourself rooting against them, wondering if the new team could do better?

I think there would be interest in seeing the spectacle. And over time, I think it would help a league like MLS stand out.

The plan isn't foolproof of course. How does a fan base take getting the boot? It's certainly going to result in a loss of revenue and support.

The flip side is that bad teams don't draw well anyway. Seriously, how well do the Royals or the Clips draw? The Detroit Lions had their first win since 2007 blacked out because they couldn't sell out their game against the Redskins. Maybe relegation speeds up the process, but teams that out and out suck every year don't break ticket records, at least not on the positive side.

The other thing to keep in mind is that people like winners. They don't care what level they win at, so long as they are doing it. It's a fair question to ask, would a team that is doing fairly well at USL with the hope of getting to MLS do better than an MLS team that just plain blows? Is winning consistently at the second level preferable to losing consistently at the top level? It's a question I don't have an answer for.

The other potential issue with this plan is that being top division is always a tremendous advantage over lower division teams in terms of the type of players they can bring in. Relegation is automatic in other leagues, so we don't know if those sides are as good as the sides they are replacing. A playoff could just result in MLS teams always winning and there never being a change at all. That depends on the level of the USL-1 teams. Again, that's also something I don't have an answer for. On the other hand, the potential of being able to get a piece of the pie could give a USL team reason to spend a little more. If your potential haul is greater, your investment will be more.

Either way, perhaps MLS refusing relegation is going about it the wrong way. Their initial thought was to Americanize soccer, to make it something a "casual fan" who grew up with the other sports would recognize. Instead, perhaps they should be creating a sport that is different in structure than what most American sports fans are used to.