Promotion and relegation

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In many sports leagues around the world (with North American and Australian professional leagues being the most important exception), relegation (or demotion) means the mandated transfer of the least successful team(s) of a higher division into a lower division at the end of the season. Usually an equal number of most successful team(s) from the lower division enjoy the opposite procedure, promotion, but the number of teams relegated and promoted may differ. For example in 1995 the English FA Premier League reduced its numbers by two, relegating four teams while only allowing two promotions.

The system is seen as the defining characteristic of the 'European' form of professional sports league organization. Promotion and relegation have the effect of regularly rearranging the leagues according to the teams' playing strength. At the same time, they maintain the importance of games played by many low-ranked teams near the end of the season, where a low-ranked North American team might even purposefully lose for a better position in the next year's draft. The downside of relegation, however, is (potential) severe economic hardship or even bankruptcy for demoted clubs. It can also be a heart-wringing melodrama for the fans, but a narrow escape can be a source of pure bliss and continuing legends, sometimes more so than winning the title.

Contents 1 Structure 2 Non-relegation systems 3 Historical comparisons 3.1 Early baseball leagues in America 3.2 Early football leagues in England 4 External link 5 Notes and references

[edit] Structure

For example, here are the promotion and relegation rules for the English Premier League, Football League, and the Football Conference. For more details, see English football league system.

1. FA Premier League (level 1): Bottom three teams relegated.
2. Football League Championship (level 2): Top two automatically promoted; next four teams compete in a playoff, with the winner gaining the third promotion spot. Bottom three relegated.
3. Football League One (level 3): Top two automatically promoted; next four teams play off, with the winner gaining the third promotion spot. Bottom four relegated.
4. Football League Two (level 4): Top three automatically promoted; next four teams play off, with the winner gaining the fourth promotion spot. Bottom two relegated.
5. Conference National (level 5): Top team promoted, subject to stadium being of required standard; next four teams play off, with the winner gaining the second promotion spot (again with the same stadium requirement). If stadia are not of the required quality, teams from League Two are not relegated. Note that Conference National is not part of The Football League, but instead is the top level of the National League System, a comprehensive system of lower-level leagues which itself has promotion and relegation between its levels. Bottom four relegated along geographical lines (two to North, two to South).
6. Conference North and Conference South (level 6, running in parallel): Top team in each automatically promoted; next four teams in each compete in playoff, with winners getting their division's second promotion spot.

Formerly, geographical separation started at the Third Division (now League One), which from 1921 to 1958 was divided into North and South. The FA Women's Premier League, the top two divisions of women's football in England, are also geographically divided, but only the bottom two are relegated from the Premiership and replaced by the champions of the Northern and Southern divisions.

The current promotion and relegation rules for the top two divisions of other major European leagues are:

• Spanish La Liga: Bottom three teams relegated. Top three teams from the Segunda División automatically promoted.
• Italian Serie A: Bottom three teams relegated. Top two teams from Serie B automatically promoted. If the difference between third and fourth place is less than ten points, the next four teams play off with the winner gaining the third promotion spot, otherwise the third placed team is promoted.
• German First Bundesliga: Bottom three teams relegated. Top three teams from the Second Bundesliga automatically promoted.
• French Ligue 1: Bottom three teams relegated. Top three teams from Ligue 2 automatically promoted.
• Dutch Eredivisie: Bottom team automatically relegated; top team in Eerste Divisie automatically promoted. Next two Eredivisie teams enter into a play-off system with the eight best remaining teams from the Eerste Divisie (the six winners of six-match periodes plus the two best other teams), with the two winners being promoted to or remaining in the premier division.
• Scottish Premier League: Bottom team relegated and top team in Scottish First Division automatically promoted if its ground meets Premier League standards. Otherwise, the bottom team will remain in the Premier League.

Other relegation schemes consider points acquired over more than one season. For instance in the Argentine first division, the points average of the last 3 seasons is computed, and the 2 teams with the lowest averages are directly relegated. The 3rd and 4th from the bottom play home-and-away matches against the 3rd and 4th from the top of the second division respectively (process called "promoción"), and the winner of each key stays in, or moves to, first division. Thus, the number of teams promoted each year varies between two and four. Newly-promoted teams only average the seasons since their last promotion (see 2003/2004 Argentine Relegation for an example).

While the purpose of the promotion/relegation system is to maintain competitive balance, it may also be used as a disciplinary tool in special cases. On several occasions the Italian Football Federation has relegated clubs found to have been involved in match-fixing, most recently in 2006 when the season's initial champions Juventus were relegated to Serie B, and two other teams were initially relegated but then restored to Serie A after appeal (see 2006 Serie A scandal).

A small number of clubs have managed to avoid relegation for many years. Arsenal F.C. of England, for instance, has only been relegated once in its history, and has been in the top flight since 1919. An even smaller number of clubs have managed to avoid relegation altogether. Among them are Rangers, Celtic and Aberdeen (who did once finish in a relegation position, but were reprieved because Falkirk failed to meet stadium criteria) of Scotland; Inter Milan of Italy and Real Madrid, FC Barcelona and Athletic Bilbao of Spain.

Uniquely, Derry City, a Northern Ireland club from a city on the border with the Republic of Ireland, have avoided relegation in both countries. From 1929 to 1972, they remained in the top flight of the North's league system, the Irish Football League. Due to safety concerns surrounding The Troubles, Derry City were forced to leave that league. In 1985, they joined the Republic's league system, the Football League of Ireland, at the second level, earned promotion to the top flight in 1987, and have remained in the top level ever since.

[edit] Non-relegation systems

Main article: Major professional sports league

A notable exception to this system is sport in North America, where teams are not promoted or relegated. North American educational institutions, rather than sport clubs as in Europe, act as primary suppliers of players to three professional team sports — directly from university in the case of American football and basketball, indirectly in the case of baseball — while hockey has a separate youth club system, supplemented by school team participation, through which prospective North American players progress. American baseball and hockey do in fact have lower-level professional leagues, referred to as minor leagues, but most of these teams affiliate with a major league team in player development contracts. Players remain employees of (or, in the case of hockey, under contract to) the parent organization and assigned to the minor league level appropriate to their skill and development; control of the player remains with the major league organization. That major team control of all players and the resulting lack of minor league independence is incompatible with the promotion and relegation concept.

Recently, the United Soccer Leagues of North America, having teams from across the United States and Canada, discussed a relegation system and set up two leagues, the USL divisions one and two. This still differs from the promotion and relegation model because it is limited to two levels; the European systems usually extend over all ranks from the lowliest village amateur teams to the nation's top professional teams.

Australia also does not feature any promotion and relegation systems in any of the major professional codes—Australian rules football, rugby union, rugby league, or soccer. Many amateur club competitions in these and other sports have them, but only with amateur ranks.

In Japan, professional soccer uses a promotion and relegation system (for the first two divisions it is the same as the Spanish, French, and German systems above), but professional baseball does not, perhaps owing to American influence. (Professional American football, despite being an American sport, uses a promotion and relegation system in Japan as well - which NFL Europe does not have). Similar differences between soccer and baseball have become established in other East Asian countries where both games are played professionally, namely South Korea, China, and Taiwan.

Professional sumo wrestling, which is not a team sport at all, has promotion and relegation between ranks of individual wrestlers. A Yokozuna, or grand champion, however, can never be relegated once he has achieved the distinction; he is instead expected to retire when he is no longer competitive at the top level.

[edit] Historical comparisons

[edit] Early baseball leagues in America

Why didn't promotion and relegation develop in the United States? The answer may lie in geography. In baseball, the earliest American sport to develop professional leagues, the National Association of Base Ball Players was established in 1857 as a national governing body for the game. In many respects it would resemble England's Football Association when founded in 1863. Both espoused strict amateurism in their early years and welcomed hundreds of clubs as members.

However, baseball's National Association was not able to survive the onset of professionalism. It responded to the trend — clubs secretly paying or indirectly compensating players — by establishing a "professional" class for 1869. So quickly as 1871, most of those clubs broke away and formed the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP).^[1] That new, professional Association was open at a modest fee, but it proved to be unstable, and it was replaced by the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs in 1876. The capitalist founders of the new League judged that in order to prosper, they must make baseball's highest level of competition a "closed shop" with a strict limit on the number of teams, each member having exclusive local rights.^[2]

The modest National League guarantee of a place in the league year after year would permit the owners to consolidate fan bases in their exclusive territories and give them the confidence to invest in infrastructure such as improved ballparks. In turn, those would guarantee the revenues to support travelling halfway across a continent for games.^[3] Indeed, after its first season the new league banked on its still doubtful stability by expelling its members in New York and Philadelphia (the two largest cities), because they had breached agreements to visit the four western clubs at the end of the season.

The NL's dominance of baseball was challenged several times but only by entire leagues, after its first few years; and usually with eight clubs, the established norm, a prohibitively high threshold for a new venture. Two challengers succeeded beyond the short-term, with the National League fighting off a challenge from the American Association after a decade (concluded 1891) and accepting parity with the American League in 1903 with the formation of the organization that would become Major League Baseball. The peace agreement between the NL and the AL did not change the "closed shop" of top-level baseball but rather entrenched it by including the AL in the shop. This was further confirmed by the Supreme Court's 1922 ruling in Federal Baseball Club v. National League, giving MLB a legal monopoly over professional baseball.

[edit] Early football leagues in England

In contrast to baseball's NABBP, the first governing body in English football survived the onset of professionalism, which it formally accepted in 1885. Perhaps the great geographical concentration of population^[4] and the corresponding short distances between urban centres was crucial. Certainly it provided the opportunity for more clubs developing large fan bases without incurring great travel costs. Indeed, professional football did not gain acceptance until after the turn of the century in most of Southern England, and the earliest league members travelled only through the Midlands and North.^[5]

When the Football League was founded in 1888, it was not intended to be a rival of the FA but rather the top competition within it. The new league was not universally accepted as England's top-calibre competition right away. To help win fans of clubs outside the Football League, its circuit was not closed; rather, a system was established in which the worst teams at the end of each season would need to win re-election against any clubs wishing to join.

A rival league, the Football Alliance, was formed in 1889. When the two merged in 1892 it was not on equal terms; rather, most of the Alliance clubs were put in the new Football League Second Division, whose best teams would move up to the First Division in place of its worst teams. Another merger, with the top division of the Southern League in 1920, helped form the Third Division in similar fashion. Since then no new league has been formed of non-league clubs to try and achieve parity with the Football League (only to play at a lower level, like independent professional leagues in North American baseball today).

For decades, teams finishing near the bottom of the Football League's lowest division(s) faced re-election rather than automatic relegation. But the concept of promotion and relegation had been firmly established and it eventually expanded to the football pyramid in place today. Meanwhile, the FA has remained English football's overall governing body, retaining amateur and professional clubs rather than breaking up.

[edit] External link

• Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation Source for historical information on promoted and relegated teams.

[edit] Notes and references