Professional sports leagues are organized in numerous ways. The two most significant types are a European model, characterised by a tiered structure using promotion and relegation to determine participation in a hierarchy of leagues or divisions and a North American model characterized by its use of franchises and closed membership.
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The term league has many different meanings in different areas around the world, and its use for different concepts can make comparisons confusing. Usually a league is a group of teams that play each other during the season. It is also often used for the name of the governing body that oversees the league, as in Major League Baseball or England's Football League. Because most European soccer clubs participate in different competitions during a season, regular-season home-and-away games are often referred to as league games and the others as non-league games, even though the separate competitions may be organised by the same governing body. Also, there is a rugby football code called rugby league, as distinct from rugby union.
Professional sports leagues in North America comprise a stipulated number of clubs, known as franchises, which field one team each.[1] The franchises have territorial rights, usually exclusive territories large enough to cover major metropolitan areas, so that they have no local rivals. New teams may enter the competition only by a vote of current members; typically, a new place is put up for bid by would-be owners. This system is sometimes called a "franchise system" in the U.K.[2][3][4] It was introduced in baseball with the formation of the National League in 1876[NB 1] and later adopted by the other North American leagues.
Although member clubs are corporate entities separate from their leagues, they operate only under league auspices. Partly because that relationship is so close, partly because the four major team sports leagues represent the top level of play in the world, North American teams almost never play competitive games against outside opponents. National Hockey League (NHL) and National Basketball Association (NBA) teams have played against European hockey and basketball teams in preseason exhibitions. The North American league, rather than any sport governing body, determines the playing rules and scoring rules of its game, and the rules under which players join and change teams.
The teams are organized so that each major city has a team to support. Only the largest cities have more than one team. As such the teams are often referred to as franchises. Even though they are not technically franchises in a business sense, the league is organised in a way that assures teams continued existence in the league from year to year, which fosters an ongoing connection with the team's supporters. On occasion a league may decide to grow the sport by admitting a new expansion team into the league. Most of the teams in the four major North American pro sports leagues were created as part of a planned league expansion or through the merger of a rival league. Only the few oldest teams in the National Hockey League, for example, existed before becoming part of the NHL. The rest of the teams were created ex novo as expansion teams or as charter members of the World Hockey Association, which merged with the NHL in 1979. The best teams in a given season reach a playoff tournament, and the winner of the playoffs is crowned champion of the league, and, in some cases as world champions.
Teams are organised into groups called divisions, usually based on geography. This structure encourages local rivalries, as teams from the same division play each other more often than other teams, and it is the teams that top each division that are seeded higher in the playoffs at the end of the season that determine the eventual champion.
Major League Soccer is a North American league that exhibits some aspects of the European structure because the sport it plays has a European rather than American origin. Major League Soccer is technically not an association of franchises but a single business entity, though each team has an owner-operator; the team owners are actually shareholders in the league. The league, not the individual teams, contracts with the players. Unlike teams in the four major sports, several Major League Soccer teams qualify to play competitive matches in the CONCACAF Champions League against teams from outside the U.S. and Canada, and MLS uses playing rules set by the international governing body of its sport. MLS followed its own playing rules until 2004, when it adopted FIFA rules. In another parallel with the European model, both the U.S. and Canada have separate knockout cup competitions during the MLS season that include teams from lower leagues. The six U.S.-based teams with the best records in each MLS season automatically qualify for the following season's Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup, while the remaining U.S. teams play one another for two more places in that competition. All of Canada's MLS teams compete in the Canadian Championship. However, the league structure of MLS follows the North American model, with a single premier league and no promotion or relegation.
Some other North American systems also have a hierarchical structure but without the promotion and relegation of clubs exhibited in the European model. Major League Baseball uses a minor-league system to develop young talent. Most minor league clubs are independently owned but each one contracts with a major-league club that hires and pays players and assigns them to its various minor clubs. The minor clubs do not move up or down in the hierarchy by on-field success or failure. Professional ice hockey has a system somewhat similar to baseball's, while the National Basketball Association operate a small developmental league. The National Football League does not have a minor league system as of 2011 but it has operated or affiliated with minor leagues in the 1930s, 1940s, 1960s, 1990s, and the early 2000s.
Football in England developed a very different system from the North American one, and it has been adopted for football in most other countries, as well as to many other sports founded in Europe and played across the world. The features of the system are:
European football clubs are members both of a league and of a governing body. In the case of England, all competitive football clubs are members of The Football Association, while the top 20 teams also are members of the Premier League, a separate organization. The 72 teams in the three levels below the Premier League are members of still another body, The Football League, which is itself divided into three competitive leagues. The FA operates the national football team and tournaments that involve teams from different leagues (except the Football League Cup, operated by The Football League and open to its own teams and those in the Premier League). In conjunction with other countries' governing bodies, it also sets the playing rules and the rules under which teams can sell players' contracts to other clubs.
The rules or Laws of The Game are determined by the International Football Association Board [5]
The Premier League negotiates television contracts for its games. However, although the national league would be the dominating competition in which a club might participate, there are many non-league fixtures a club might play in a given year. In European football there are national cup competitions, which are single elimination knock-out tournaments, are played every year and all the clubs in the league participate. Also, the best performing clubs from the previous year may participate in pan-European tournaments such as the UEFA Champions League, operated by the Union of European Football Associations. A Premier League team might play a league game one week, and an FA Cup game against a team from a lower-level league the next, followed by a League Cup game against a Football League team, and then a fourth game might be against a team from across Europe in the Champions League.
The promotion and relegation system is generally used to determine membership of leagues. Most commonly, a pre-determined number of teams that finish the bottom of a league or division are automatically dropped down, or relegated, to a lower level for the next season. They are replaced by teams who are promoted from that lower tier either by finishing with the best records or by winning a playoff. In England in 2011, Birmingham City, Blackpool and West Ham United were relegated from the Premier League to the Football League Championship, the second level of English football. They were replaced by the top two teams from the second level, Queens Park Rangers and Norwich City, as well as Swansea City (a Welsh club that plays in the English system), which won a playoff tournament of the teams that finished third through sixth.
The system originated in England in 1888 when twelve clubs decided to create a professional Football League. It then expanded by merging with the Football Alliance in 1892, with the majority of the Alliance teams occupying the lower Second Division, due to the divergent strengths of the teams. As this differential was overcome over the next five years, the winners of the Second Division went into a playoff with the worst placed team in the First Division, and if they won, were promoted into the top tier. The first club to achieve promotion was Sheffield United, which replaced the relegated Accrington F.C.
Relegation often has devastating financial consequences for club owners who not only lose TV, sponsorship and gate income but may also see the asset value of their shares in the club collapse. Some leagues offer a "parachute payment" to its relegated teams for the following years in order to protect them from bankruptcy. If a team is promoted back to the higher tier the following year then the parachute payment for the second season is distributed among the teams of the lower division.[6] There is of course a corresponding bonanza for promoted clubs.
The league does not choose which cities are to have teams in the top division. For example, Leeds, the fourth-biggest city in England, saw their team, Leeds United, relegated from the Premier League to the Championship in 2004, and then saw United relegated to the third-tier League One in 2007. Leeds will remain without a Premiership team as long as it takes for United, or in theory any other local club, to do well enough in the second-tier division to win the right to play in the Premiership. Famously, the French Ligue 1 lacked a team from Paris for some years.
As well as having no right to being in a certain tier, a club also has no territorial rights to its own area. A successful new team in a geographical location can come to dominate the incumbents. In Munich, for example, TSV 1860 München were initially more successful than the city's current biggest team Bayern München.[7] London has 14 professional teams, including five Premier League teams.
Clubs may be sold privately to new owners at any time, but this does not happen often where clubs are based on community membership and agreement. Such clubs require agreement from members who, unlike shareholders of corporations, have priorities other than money when it comes to their football club. For similar reasons, relocation of clubs to other cities is very rare. This is mostly because virtually all cities and towns in Europe have a football club of some sort, the size and strength of the club usually relative to the town's size and importance. Anyone wanting ownership of a high ranked club in his native city must buy the local club as it stands and work it up through the divisions, usually by hiring better talent. Buying an existing top-flight club and move it to the city is problematic, as the supporters of the town's original club are unlikely to switch allegiance to an interloper. There have been some cases where existing owners have chosen to relocate out of a difficult market, to better facilities, or simply to realize the market value of the land that the current stadium is built upon. As in the U.S., team relocations have been controversial as supporters of the club will protest at its loss.
Leagues around the world generally follow one or other of these systems. Most sport leagues in Australia are based on the North American model, with the most notable examples being the Australian Football League (Aussie rules) and National Rugby League (rugby league). Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan uses this system due to American influence on the game. In cricket, the Indian Premier League, launched in 2008, also operates on this system. The Super League, which is the top level of rugby league in the United Kingdom and France, has been run on a franchise basis since 2009.[8]
The promotion-relegation system is widely used in football around the world, notably in Africa and Latin America as well as Europe. The most notable variation has developed in Latin America where many countries have two league seasons per year, which scheduling allows because many Latin American nations lack a national cup competition. Promotion and relegation has historically been used in other team sports founded in the United Kingdom, such as rugby union, rugby league and cricket.
The European model is also used in Europe even when the sports were founded in America, showing that the league system adopted is not determined by the sport itself, but more on the tradition of sports organisation in that region. Sports such as basketball in Spain and Lithuania use promotion and relegation. In the same vein, the Australian A-League does not use the pyramid structure normally found in football, but instead follows the tradition of Australian sports having a franchise model and a playoff system that better suits a country with a few important central locations where a sport needs to ensure there is a team playing with no risk of relegation. Likewise, another notable example of "European" sports using the American model is the Super Rugby competition of the southern hemisphere, featuring 15 franchises from across South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.
East Asian countries such as Japan, China, South Korea and Taiwan have a particular differentiation among leagues: "European" sports such as football and rugby use promotion and relegation, while "American" sports such as baseball and basketball use franchising, with a few differences varying from country to country. A similar situation exists in countries in Central America and the Caribbean, where football and baseball share several close markets.