Playoffs in the Premier League?
North American soccer fans often hope the structure of English football, with its deep pyramid of relegation and promotion and single-table championship, might some day be introduced into American soccer. This is, given the present business model of MLS, exceedingly unlikely. Ironically, it’s actually somewhat more likely that the reverse will happen, and the Premier League will adopt the American closed-shop franchise system and shift the league to a playoff model.
I don’t want to be giving Richard Scudamore — the Premier League’s Chief Executive and advocate of the woefully misguided Game 39 concept — any ideas, but Londonist recently posted an interesting analysis of what English football might look like if it did indeed embrace the playoff system that has been such a financial success in North American sports.
As Londonist puts it,
The refusal to let go of Game 39 shows that English football’s notables are ready to contemplate upsetting any tradition that might hinder the game’s global apppeal and, as we pointed out in 2006, the new international team owners haven’t spent all that money to welcome devaluation of their assets through simple sporting failure. Given the burgeoning links between the NFL and the Premiership it’s not unbelievable, especially given the project to play matches abroad, that the Premiership has considered what the NFL’s structure and relationship to television might offer it.
Indeed, shifting the top flight to a closed shop of, say, 30 teams would eliminate a key pitfall of investing in a Premier League club: namely, the threat of relegation. The buying and selling of “franchises” to play in such a league would raise considerable capital; do you think Premier League exectuvies haven’t noticed that the last NFL expansion franchise sold to investors in Houston went for $700 million and the next will probably raise over $1bn?
Londonist thinks that such a system would see the Premier League expand to over 30 teams, divided into divisions looking something like this:
Metropolitan – Chelsea, Arsenal, West Ham United, Tottenham Hotspur, Reading, Fulham, Portsmouth, Southampton
Mercian – Aston Villa, Birmingham City, Derby County, West Bromwich Albion, Hull City, Leicester City, Wolverhampton Wanderers, Nottingham Forest
Anglian – Newcastle United, Middlesbrough, Sunderland, Sheffield Wednesday, Sheffield United, Leeds United, Ipswich Town, Norwich City
Palatine – Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool, Everton, Blackburn Rovers, Bolton Wanderers, Wigan Athletic, Stoke City
I don’t think Londonist expects this to happen tomorrow. But even a decade ago, would we have predicted a proposal as outlandish as Game 39?
Such a system as this would, at a stroke, destroy much of what makes English football interesting from top-to-bottom. But that doesn’t mean that greed won’t see such a proposal floated some day.
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Tom Dunmore is the founder and editor of Pitch Invasion. Follow him @pitchinvasion on Twitter.
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If England did something like this, they could potentially cut themselves off from the rest of Europe. Given the money out there now (Champions League) and in the future (European Super League), moving to a closed system like this just seems politically unfeasible.
Promotion and relegation makes Association football what it is. Turning it into baseball, where only players get promoted instead of clubs, wouldn’t fly in England. Scudamore might be crazy, but he’s not THAT crazy.
Tom, great look at a provocative idea. But I can’t help but wonder if the Londonist piece isn’t backward on a few key points. It’s arguing that the big clubs would support an idea like this because of the threat of relegation. But the biggest clubs don’t have to worry about relegation now. A closed league would almost certainly bring with it a more robust, American-style form of revenue-sharing, which would reduce the huge financial advantage the big clubs currently enjoy. On top of that, the greater unpredictability of a playoff system would most likely end the monopoly of the top 3-4 teams on the title.
If I were running Wolves or Sunderland, I would jump at an idea like this. If I were running Arsenal or Chelsea, I don’t think I’d go anywhere near it.
Dave — I’m not sure why such a move would cut them off from the rest of Europe. Does UEFA mandate promotion and relegation systems in order to participate in European competitions? I don’t think Platini would be happy about it, but what could he do? Excluding the likes of Liverpool and Man Utd from the Champions League would also be hugely damaging to UEFA’s coffers, even if it would be legally possible.
Brian — that’s a good point about the biggest clubs, though the spectre of Leeds surely haunts some of them to some degree still. Moreover, if we’re thinking of it purely in terms of the value of a “franchise”, being part of a closed shop if it became as valuable an entity as the NFL would raise the value of every “franchise” considerably, wouldn’t it?
Excuse me while I know go and cut out my own tongue for even bringing this up and typing the word franchise twice in one comment.
Tom, you’re right—for the biggest clubs, I guess it would be a question of whether being part of a closed-shop franchise system, but with less competitive dominance, would be more lucrative than the greater competitive dominance they enjoy under the current system. I don’t know the answer, though I would think that the fabled Asian market would be more welcoming to a perennial title contender than to one franchise among many.
Wait, I just typed “francise,” too…now you’ve got me doing it!
Brian, that does raise the interesting question of whether in such a closed shop the Premier League would also embrace things like the salary cap or revenue sharing that we see in North American sports.
The other key difference is that even with the top 30 clubs unavailable to it, the Championship would still be a pretty interesting league if it were top of the English pyramid. The North American leagues operate without any serious competitors — despite occasional challenges over the years — but nothing like the challenge that the Championship would present as an established competitor.
The final key question, related to Dave’s first comment, would be that it would have to be sanctioned by the FA for it to avoid UEFA and FIFA sanction for the players and clubs. Having bent over once for the establishment of the Premier League, would the FA again swallow such an audacious move by the biggest clubs?
Brian, I think your “almost certainly” with regard to the linkage between a closed league and revenue sharing is a hit just a bit too hard, like a Steven Gerrard pass.
From where I sit, revenue sharing would only come about if there was some sort of salary cap and/or “luxury tax”, and each of those concepts is of questionable validity as a matter of EU law (at least they would apply to EU citizens). Add to that the fact that none of the current “Big Four” would approve any such system in the absence of similar limitations on the European clubs they increasingly see as their “real rivals”, and you begin to get an idea of just how complicated it is to export North American constructs to Europe.
Title playoffs, on the other hand, don’t even require a closed league. It’s worth noting in that respect that Italy had a system of end of season playoffs to break ties on points (rather than rely on goal difference, goal average or head to head records) for decades. Bologna’s scudetto in 63-64, for instance, was won in a one game “spareggio” against Inter, while Parma and Bologna played a two legged “spareggio” in order to determine which one would keep their place in Serie A as recently as 2004-05.
Tom’s last paragraph sums up my feelings on the subject pretty much perfectly.
EU regulations…is there anything they can’t complicate?
Ursus, my understanding has been that there’s at least a good argument for football-league salary caps being legal under EU law. But since my understanding is basically limited to this one blog post I read about six months ago (uh…here), it could easily be wrong.
I’d think that if a salary cap and revenue-sharing were legal, it would be hard to keep them out of a closed-shop league for long, since the teams that would benefit from them would outnumber the teams that wouldn’t.
Anyway, my thought process resembles Steven Gerrard in at least one other respect. They both deteriorate when they move too far to the right. *rimshot*
Surely the EU couldn’t stop any law mandating how much money a team can spend on wages in a season?
It wouldn’t be that difficult to fashion a challenge to a hard salary cap as interfering with a EU citizen’s right to freely exercise his profession in another member state. Whether you would win would depend on the details of the rule in question, but recall that the football authorities thought that there was nothing wrong with the old transfer system before the Bosman case. As a matter of fact, the lawyer who represented Bosman in that case has already said that he would challenge any salary cap.
Keep in mind that European leagues don’t have collective bargaining contracts with the players’ unions; the system is very different than what North Americans are used to.
Are them ‘divisions’ meant to be done geographically? You should check where Hull is on a map! And the North East (Newcastle et al.) is hardly near Anglia!!
There would be no legal challenge to a cap system in the Prem is such a thing was instituted. The only thing they could do that would be illegal would be if they said ‘Englishmen only’ or put up some other barriers limiting the number of non-Englishmen in the league. There is nothing in the EU laws that say a business (and yes, football is a business now folks) can’t limit how much money they will spend on their employee rosters. I mean, clubs set budgets all the time thus capping themselves. Because once they all became ‘franchised’ to the Premiere League, the Premiere League would technically be the ‘corporate office’
Also, the act of having playoffs and such wouldn’t preclude them from participating in Champion’s League. If it did, there would never be another Dutch team in there again or even Scotish team with the whole ’spliitng the league’ thing not being ’standard’
I’m not saying I advocate the change or not, it’s up to the English people to decided honestly. they can run their league however the hell they want IMO (as can any other nation) However, it is kinda funny to see the teeth gnashing over the prospect of it all. It reminds me of talking to my grandpa a long time ago when he’d reminisce about how sports in the US used to be. They were run a far cry from how they are now. there were tons of baseball leagues that would play each other and they would have teams drop in and out of leagues and switch leagues all the time when it was still semi-pro/amateur. Once big money could be made, they realized the way to make the most was going the way of the modern system for better or worse.
Football in Europe hasn’t been ‘full pro’ for as long as sports here have and it’s only a matter of time until some started thinking of going the ‘big bucks’ route, the formation of the Premier League was one of the first volley’s in the battle for that push. I mean there were people in the 1970’s and early ’80’s in many leagues that were still working side jobs in Europe. Thus the reason the NASL was able to pull in so many world class stars.
It would definitely be odd to see leagues change in that manner in Europe but I can’t say it would shock me to see it all that much. i honestly always thought it would be the Bundesliga that made the leap first given the heavy American influence in Germany and our (German) love of structure and ordered elements.
Tell you what .. I wish the concept of relegation was adopted in ALL American sports, not just MLS. The number one complaint of most sports fans I talk with here is owners who don’t care, who are in it to take the fan’s dollar, and see no reason to invest in players as long as the product is lining his pocket.
A trip to a lower league would do some baseball owners a world of good. In that regard, the idea of closing the EPL couldn’t be more misguided. American minor league teams have no hope of reaching a top flight, many have players with little or no connection to the communities or clubs they play for, and the pyramid scheme that results is bad for sports in general.
Hoping this doesn’t happen, but speaking as a Newcastle fan…damn, that’d be an easy division to manage, me thinks…
It’s not that I’m against playoffs in the Premier League, I’m just 100% against eliminating promotion/relegation.
Bulk: the exact opposite is the logic used in British sport. Rugby League’s Super League recently closed itself off because the threat of relegation is a barrier to the development of the league. Why would someone spend money on a team that, after one bad season, could be playing Leigh Centurions to crowds of 100? They also claim that the threat of relegation lead to too many poor quality, scrappy games where sides are terrified of losing.
In a closed system, the worst teams can play nice, entertaining Rugby without fear. The fans win.
I dunno what a fan of KC Royals or Miami Dolphins would have to say to that, though.
But yeah, on the actual topic, 10 years time I’m fairly sure we’ll have a play-off system although not in the American style. Top 6 in the league involved in a fairly convoluted system. Grand final at Wembley, FA Cup finally killed.
before a playoff to win the league, i think we`ll see a playoff for one or two of the euro comp places … that`ll have the same effect of more interest for more teams.
looking ten years ahead, who knows what the circus will look like.
on a tangent – i hope the fabled asian riches evaporate because the asians are too busy supporting their own teams in their own cities … for myself i know my antipodean interest in arsenal has all but evaporated since a new, hopefully more stable australian competition was started.
Hi, Alex:
Classic case of “grass is always greener,” I suppose. Quite interesting logic with regards to rugby, but I’d point out that baseball is quite a different sport in that it’s the only team sport where the side on defense has the ball.
To win in baseball you’ve got to throw it over the plate and give the other man his chance. Not every sport can say that. Yes, the threat of relegation would make some NFL games uglier than they already are to watch, but I’d think the threat of losing enormous TV money would make greedy owners want to win. JMO.
The English already have a 39th game (for two teams at least), it’s called the Community Shield.
Why not set up 10 exhibition games to happen the week before the start of the season just like the community shield. Just let them play overseas… make lots of money, spread the fanbase, just don’t count the result.