2013 Serie B and 2015 Serie C (7 teams from the NE, 2 from the West, 6 from the SE, 4 from the South, and one from the North) are much more evenly distributed.
football thread No11
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2013 Serie B and 2015 Serie C (7 teams from the NE, 2 from the West, 6 from the SE, 4 from the South, and one from the North) are much more evenly distributed.
MacAttack
Just the tip
barely, if that, you still have that huge blank space in the northwest the size of Argentina.
Also there are far more matchups that require cross country travel for MLS teams over those Serie C teams. That also doesn't include CONCACAF Champions League matchups where MLS teams are traveling to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean and also the US Open Cup tournament. Serie C and Serie B teams, don't have that extra burden of playing in the highest continental tournament that could possibly qualify them to the Club World Cup. They also get weeded out quickly out of the Copa Do Brasil.
It's not an excuse, it is a factor that requires consideration.
Also there are far more matchups that require cross country travel for MLS teams over those Serie C teams. That also doesn't include CONCACAF Champions League matchups where MLS teams are traveling to Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean and also the US Open Cup tournament. Serie C and Serie B teams, don't have that extra burden of playing in the highest continental tournament that could possibly qualify them to the Club World Cup. They also get weeded out quickly out of the Copa Do Brasil.
It's not an excuse, it is a factor that requires consideration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campeonato_Brasileiro_Série_C
According to that, the Brazilian third tier is split into regions so isn't really a fair comparison.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attendance_figures_at_domestic_professional_sports_leagues
Then this page lists the average attendance of the B league to be 5448 which is presumably enough to make the cost of long distance travel acceptable.
According to that, the Brazilian third tier is split into regions so isn't really a fair comparison.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attendance_figures_at_domestic_professional_sports_leagues
Then this page lists the average attendance of the B league to be 5448 which is presumably enough to make the cost of long distance travel acceptable.
The issue isn't just that America or Australia are bigger, it's that since soccer is a niche sport, financial stability and the strategic aims of soccer governance as a whole is threatened by relegation.
If the sport of soccer just doesn't have a top level team in, say, Brisbane then the sport loses visibility and lots of money in a major market. And due to the presence of top level Rugby League, Rugby Union, Cricket and AFL teams the suddenly relegated soccer club loses everything. We aren't one team towns, people won't keep supporting a relegated Brisbane like they do Real Zaragoza or whoever. They'll just follow other teams in other sports.
We have five big cities and maybe another six smaller centres, spread out over a continent roughly the size of the EU. A niche sport, the fifth most popular sport in this country, just can't afford to be randomly abandoning major population centres.
(There's also the case of Wellington Phoenix to consider, how does relegation work when there's a team from another country and confederation?)
That's just not comparable to Europe or South America. Football there is so dominant in these places that the governing body doesn't have to worry about such things.
If the sport of soccer just doesn't have a top level team in, say, Brisbane then the sport loses visibility and lots of money in a major market. And due to the presence of top level Rugby League, Rugby Union, Cricket and AFL teams the suddenly relegated soccer club loses everything. We aren't one team towns, people won't keep supporting a relegated Brisbane like they do Real Zaragoza or whoever. They'll just follow other teams in other sports.
We have five big cities and maybe another six smaller centres, spread out over a continent roughly the size of the EU. A niche sport, the fifth most popular sport in this country, just can't afford to be randomly abandoning major population centres.
(There's also the case of Wellington Phoenix to consider, how does relegation work when there's a team from another country and confederation?)
That's just not comparable to Europe or South America. Football there is so dominant in these places that the governing body doesn't have to worry about such things.
This is of course exactly the point of salary caps. Competetive balance and turnover. The idea that all supporters should get to have realistic faith that their team can make the finals and win a title. If a team is smarter than other teams they can manage to stay near the top due to good management but they can't just buy their way to perpetual dominance.
He should have voted for us then *grumble grumble*
classical_hero
In whom I trust
That was classic.
schlaufuchs
Break My Heart
Kind of? It comes down to how teams are oriented. In the US sports teams are private entities owned and operated by individuals or small groups of individuals. It's their thing. To do with as they see fit. There's a wider league body which handles league operations, and this is overseen by a commissioner, but the commissioner more or less acts at the behest of the group of owners whom comprise the league, and therefore anything the commissioner is doing is done to the benefit of the owners and nobody else. This relationship has created a rather different relationship between team and fan in the US. For all the BS owners and community organizers throw out about how everything is done for the fans and the power of the 12th Man or whatever, fans are regarded more or less as 3rd party observers. The league and its operations are an "owners and players" Thing and you fans should consider yourself so lucky that you get to watch it. Owners/GMs are free to bring in and discard whoever they want, build and tear down whatever stadia they feel like, and even pack the team up and move to the other side of the country, if it should please them. This is in stark contrast to the European Club system, where the club was for a long time (and in many clubs still are to a decent extent) owned by the city/its supporters collectively. The club is regarded as an intrinsic part of the city and to move Chelsea out of London or Barcelona out of Barcelona would be unconscionable. Just look at what Cardiff City supporters did for the mere sleight of altering the crest and colors of the team. Redesigns happen all the time in American sports. Two of the biggest, most successful baseball teams in the largest city in the country packed up and moved across the country, virtually without warning at the height of their success. It seems unthinkable that the Yankees would ever move out of New York, but that's the sort of thing we're talking about here. It's not that uncommon in American sports.
Now sure. At this point that is very much a cultural Thing. But it's also a rather interesting historical point, and serves as a useful counterfactual to how things could conceivably have played out in European Soccer. In the 1860s, much like with England's Football Association, Baseball had a large overseeing body NABBP (National Association of Base Ball Players). Much like Soccer Baseball had a controversy in the late 1860s/70s over the question of professionality in baseball. Just like with the FA the result was the group splitting in two: the NABBP (for Amateur leagues) and the NA (for Professional). Unlike the FA the NA collapsed under its own weight and inability to regulate the league. Power became concentrated in a select group of teams and the power dynamic from the outset of professional baseball was wealthy individuals employing and controlling players. With the collapse of the NA leagues broke down into scattered regional leagues. The most wealthy and powerful owners banded together to form the National League, which also happened to sit in the largest, wealthiest cities on the East Coast and Midwest: New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Cleveland, etc. As the owners called the shots it was therefore in their mutual interest to regulate their product. Unlike an organization like the FA, which is acting on the best interests of the entirety of Association Football as a sport, the National League was operating on the best interests of the league in question. Ensuring that the product was competitive and either cutting out (as in the case, for example, of the upstart Players League, the Federal League, the Pacific Coast League) or integrating (as with the American League) competitors as they saw fit. In the example of baseball particularly, there were "lower leagues" as you have in soccer, but those lower leagues were ruthlessly annihilated in the 19teens and 20s, and later bought and incorporated into a vertically integrated monopoly operating to the benefit of the individual team that bought them. Baseball's example set the precedent for all future professional sports leagues in the country - owners forming a tightly knit, and tightly regulated organization operating for their personal benefit. Competitors are either destroyed or incorporated into the existing system (both the NFL and NBA had situations similar to the NL where competing leagues were brought into the fold (the AFL, ABA, and AL respectively). It's certainly conceivable, had the National Association not folded, that baseball could have adopted a tiered pro/rel system similar to Soccer.
Personally I think pro/rel is more interesting to watch. But due to the way leagues are oriented - enterprises existing to enrich the owner (rather than fans, the league, the sport, or anything else) - they simply are never going to arrive at a system whereby an owner could risk being ousted through no fault of their own.
That being said the American system certainly has its own benefits. As much as I like the pro/rel system conceptually the results in actuality are kind of garbage. In the four major European soccer leagues you effectively have a severe stratification of teams. BPL has Chelsea, ManU, ManCity (admittedly a more recent admission), Arsenal, Liverpool, and Tottenham (once in awhile) seriously competing for titles at any one time. The same rota of 6 or 7 teams are altering between Premier and Champion year in year out. Money dictates European soccer at a level that it REALLY doesn't in American leagues. And because of that, and the MASSIVE gap between top flight and 2nd flight soccer you don't really see the same kind of long-term vision/cycle that you see in American sports. The 49ers and Seahawks went through a decade of gradual accumulation of talent through the draft and savvy trading before putting themselves on the top of the NFL. The Astros, Cubs, Padres, and Mets are now doing the same in baseball, reaping the rewards of the 5-6 years of planning, of carefully developing farm systems, and tradding at the right time. The Warriors and Cavaliers are in the NBA finals because of a combination of front office wizardry and enormous fortune. The Warriors haven't won a title since 1975, the Cavs have never won one. How often does that happen in the BPL? Could you ever see Leicester City or Norwich or someone winning the premiership? European soccer is interesting to me because the league setup is so different, but there's such an air of inevitability about the whole thing that makes it kind of depressing to watch. La Liga is just a competition between Barça and Real year in and year out. Bayern won the Bundesliga by 10 points, and last year they won it by 19. Arsenal, Chelsea, ManU, and Liverpool together haven't been relegated in over 30 years, and if you cut out Chelsea it's twice that stretch. Sure there are more things to watch for - Champions League berths, Europa League berths, pro/rel - but money rules things in soccer like they do in no American league.
Perhaps that's why Americans are obsessed with championships in a way European sports fans aren't - because they're that much more of a likelihood for any given team in the US.
Mise
isle of lucy
Personally I don't see the inevitability as a negative. Lots of things are inevitable, but are still exciting to watch. Like Arsenal finishing ahead of Spurs every season.
Pangur Bán
Deconstructed
The promotion / relegation system didn't used to be quite so different from the NFL sort of thing. In Scotland in the early 20th century for instance, teams had to be elected into the top league. Sometimes they got elected after winning the other league, but sometimes they didn't.
The NFL type system as it is today protects against the dynamics of 'Winner-takes-All' market and stops successful teams converting that success into destructive long-term superiority over rivals. In Europe the competitiveness of most leagues has been ruined by such forces, while Europe wide large clubs like Celtic, Ajax, Panathinaikos, Galatasaray, Dynamo Kiev, etc, have no chance of winning the Champions League and must watch as smaller clubs from bigger leagues with richer tv markets steal their players. The NFL system only works in the US because no one else plays the sport. If the NFL system could be introduced in Europe that would be great, but the football market is worldwide and players could just tell a Euro FL to stick their salary caps and draft restrictions where the sun don't shine, and go play in Qatar or Tokyo or New York.
The NFL type system as it is today protects against the dynamics of 'Winner-takes-All' market and stops successful teams converting that success into destructive long-term superiority over rivals. In Europe the competitiveness of most leagues has been ruined by such forces, while Europe wide large clubs like Celtic, Ajax, Panathinaikos, Galatasaray, Dynamo Kiev, etc, have no chance of winning the Champions League and must watch as smaller clubs from bigger leagues with richer tv markets steal their players. The NFL system only works in the US because no one else plays the sport. If the NFL system could be introduced in Europe that would be great, but the football market is worldwide and players could just tell a Euro FL to stick their salary caps and draft restrictions where the sun don't shine, and go play in Qatar or Tokyo or New York.
Personally I don't understand what's in it for fans of big rich teams in such disequal competitions. How much joy or satisfaction could Real Madrid fans get out of watching 500 million euros beat up on 15 million euros? Wouldn't 90% of games be boring and inevitable? What tension or uncertainty is there? The only possible strong emotion would be negative ones in the case of a shock upset. I get what's in it for like Sporting or Getafe supporters, but not the big teams.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
Defeating the other big teams, that's what.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
No, cause if you make a mistake and lose or draw a match against anyone, the other big team may take over in the classification. And there's always some third party trying to get to the top, which changes every wear but in Spain it tends to be either Valencia, Sevilla or Atlético de Madrid.
warpus
In pork I trust
You still need a certain amount of infrastructure in place to make such a system viable though. Lower division leagues exist in North America, but they are.. just not nearly there, yet. I mean, we have 2nd division clubs that draw 3,000-4,000 fans a game. Some of these teams don't have their own stadiums, youth academies, and so on. The lower divisions are going to have to develop quite a bit to make pro/rel feasible, but unfortunately we are still probably decades away.
The FIFA sanctioned 2nd division in North America - USL - is sort of turning into a farm team league for MLS clubs, too. A lot of teams now have teams in this league - TFC for example has TFC II playing there.
It's following the north american model as opposed to one that would make pro/rel viable.. for now at least. It's a step in the right direction, MLS really needed such a thing so that their younger players have somewhere to play (loans work, but not well enough), but it doesn't help pro/rel any. edit: but it does improve the 2nd division, infrastructure, etc. So it is a step in the right direction in that sense. The continent also seems to be seeing support for other low level teams - such as for example Detroit City FC, which plays in the 4th tier of the american pyramid. The popularity of the sport made such things possible - teams are sort of popping up all over the place. Interest and infrastructure is slowly growing.
I think eventually it might happen, but just not anytime soon. For now we are still sort of building the foundation for the future, which might or might not include pro/rel.
Mise
isle of lucy
1) The big clubs play some very attractive football. They are the greatest collection of talent the world has ever seen. That's all very exciting for people watching them.
2) Football doesn't stand still: clubs are constantly buying new, better players to replace their old ones. Even the weakest teams in a division will improve their squad year on year. It's rare that a club's squad gets explicitly or noticeably worse; more often, a club simply improves less than the clubs around them, and thus slip down the table. Even clubs at the very top face these competitive forces. Barcelona improved their squad dramatically this season, with the addition of a few key signings. This kept them ahead of not only Real Madrid, but also the other heir pretenders to La Liga. Had Barcelona's transfer ban actually been effective, it is quite conceivable that they would have slipped to 3-5th in La Liga, as other clubs below them improved their own squads. In other words, while it looks from the end of each season that everything is static, boring and predictable, it only looks so because everyone is running in order to stand still.
At the start of each season, each club buys a bunch of new players, or promotes some exciting young thing from their youth squad to the seniors for some pre-season games, and nobody's ever seen these guys play before. So all the inevitability disappears, because now every single club in the league has introduced a whole bunch of new unknowns. We don't know whether Suarez will get banned for biting a ref, whether Diego Costa can do it on a cold wet day in Stoke, whether Real Madrid can survive another season with Leaker Casillas in goal, whether Chelsea's ageing back-line can maintain the sorts of performances Jose Mourinho expects, etc etc. So the end result, that seems so inevitable in hindsight, becomes something nobody can really take for granted.
3) Leagues don't exist in a vacuum: clubs are competing with other teams from around Europe. Real Madrid won La Decima last season, and it was a huge deal for them. This season, they went out rather demoralisingly to a Big Club that has recently been reJuvenated. So staying top of both domestic and European competitions is not only challenging, but exciting to watch.
4) And top clubs attract top drama: the soap operas, media hissy fits, "bants" and public breakdowns are pretty exciting, even if nobody will admit that they're basically watching an all male version of Neighbours.
2) Football doesn't stand still: clubs are constantly buying new, better players to replace their old ones. Even the weakest teams in a division will improve their squad year on year. It's rare that a club's squad gets explicitly or noticeably worse; more often, a club simply improves less than the clubs around them, and thus slip down the table. Even clubs at the very top face these competitive forces. Barcelona improved their squad dramatically this season, with the addition of a few key signings. This kept them ahead of not only Real Madrid, but also the other heir pretenders to La Liga. Had Barcelona's transfer ban actually been effective, it is quite conceivable that they would have slipped to 3-5th in La Liga, as other clubs below them improved their own squads. In other words, while it looks from the end of each season that everything is static, boring and predictable, it only looks so because everyone is running in order to stand still.
At the start of each season, each club buys a bunch of new players, or promotes some exciting young thing from their youth squad to the seniors for some pre-season games, and nobody's ever seen these guys play before. So all the inevitability disappears, because now every single club in the league has introduced a whole bunch of new unknowns. We don't know whether Suarez will get banned for biting a ref, whether Diego Costa can do it on a cold wet day in Stoke, whether Real Madrid can survive another season with Leaker Casillas in goal, whether Chelsea's ageing back-line can maintain the sorts of performances Jose Mourinho expects, etc etc. So the end result, that seems so inevitable in hindsight, becomes something nobody can really take for granted.
3) Leagues don't exist in a vacuum: clubs are competing with other teams from around Europe. Real Madrid won La Decima last season, and it was a huge deal for them. This season, they went out rather demoralisingly to a Big Club that has recently been reJuvenated. So staying top of both domestic and European competitions is not only challenging, but exciting to watch.
4) And top clubs attract top drama: the soap operas, media hissy fits, "bants" and public breakdowns are pretty exciting, even if nobody will admit that they're basically watching an all male version of Neighbours.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
If only the gay ones would come out of the closet...
MacAttack
Just the tip
To support Arwon's point, the Chicago Fire, who are in a major market in the US, also have to compete for eyeballs with the Chicago Bears (NFL), the Chicago White Sox and the Chicago Cubs (MLB), the Chicago Blackhawks (NHL) and the Chicago Bulls (NBA). And that is just the Men's sports without college sports. Relegation would destroy the Fire.
BirraImperial
Pura Vida!
Blatter has reportedly resigned as FIFA president and has called for new elections...
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
Cue him being arrested in the next few days.
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