Yes. Remarkably so. Moreso than you, that's for certain.

What do you really get from a promotion and regulation system?

In the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL we know what teams are in the league, everybody knows. They have the ability to regroup and get stronger in the next season after a bad year. The stability creates consistent finances and planning.

In the Euro soccer leagues every year you have new teams that come up, many of them then go right back down again. They have to take huge risk and completely change the team to try to stay up, or like Burnely this year maybe they don't change everything and they just build a team that might stay together as they go back down to the level they will likely be at in years ahead. It creates less stability to have teams change everything in just one season. Many teams don't grow stronger in the long run by being encouraged to change the amount of risk they are used to in the short term.

Every Euro soccer league has three types of teams within their one top league. The top teams that are not going anywhere soon. They consists of only four or five teams. They are the only teams that can really win the league because they will only loose a few games, if any, against each other and will win almost all the other games in the league.

Then there are the middle teams who can't compete with the spending of the top clubs and so they struggle with the possibility of not improving enough to stay where they currently are, but rarely get a real chance to pop up into the top group. So, even if they spend some money on players those players know they won't win titles and trophies against the top group very often. Creating a situation where the team's top players don't really want to stay on these teams for their whole career. The best players are snatched up by the top group teams. They have more to lose then to gain in the long run.

The bottom teams don't really belong in the top league and it's great when they do have success for a few years, but is the risks/change they have to take just to stay up for a couple of years really worth the risk to the club in the long run?

This system really is a huge benefit only to the top four or five clubs because they are much more immune to the chaos of P&R, while every else has to scramble just to keep what they have every year. It's less competitive in the long run for the top teams. It produces an overall less competitive league in the long run, which is exactly what you have in Europe's soccer leagues, a few big teams at the top with way more power than just about everyone else in their league.

This creates some big games, but also many not so exciting games when a mismatch is the next one up.

The best leagues are ones in which every team has a good chance to win, every week if they don't make too many mistakes in their play. Our US sports leagues are more like this with most teams that start the season in a more even position of a chance to win it all. It's more about the players/teams execution on the field, less about the size of the stadium and the owners finances off the field.

A team like the NFL Green Bay Packers would have been gone a long time ago under NFL P&R. They would have been replaced by another new team from LA. Only the biggest cities with the largest stadiums would have a consistent financial planning advantage.

Why would this be better?

Moreso, certainly... 3 sentences out of nine words??

Less is more.

Can someone answer these questions?

1) How long will it take to get to 60 professional, profitable soccer franchises, in 3 leagues across the USA and Canada, with proper stadiums and reasonably sized fanbases, to make Pro/Rel for MLS to be anything more than an academic pipe dream?

2) Considering that MLS is one of the very few soccer leagues representing more than one country, how can Pro/Rel be handled in a way that accounts for international tournaments, while at the same time protecting the investments of the initial MLS investors who, after 14 seasons, are just beginning to see their investments reimbursed, let alone making any profit off their investment?


3) Considering MLS, and its single entity system, are incompatible with the Pro/Rel system so commonly practiced all over the world, why are executives and team owners all over UEFA so interested in the economic model as a way to finally establish stability and profitability for their investments?

[quote=whitestar warriors]Can someone answer these questions?

1) How long will it take to get to 60 professional, profitable soccer franchises, in 3 leagues across the USA and Canada, with proper stadiums and reasonably sized fanbases, to make Pro/Rel for MLS to be anything more than an academic pipe dream?

[quote]
Love your posts, WW but to answe your question above: Just getting to 16 poressional and profitable franchises with soccer specific stadia between the US & Canadea with reasonably sized fanbases would be a huge accomplishment...

There's no way you wrote these questions, right?



60? Six-oh? SIXTY?

Don't hold your breath. If you want 60, absolutely, 100% forget about it in your lifetime.

If it's going to happen, it's going to start at lower levels and in a limited form. It's not going to be a situation where we get to a certain number of teams and everybody says "Okay, NOW we have pro/rel. GO!"



The first doesn't have a lot to do with pro/rel, except in the case of tournaments that lag a year. Then again, if you're finishing high enough in a league to qualify for a tournament, you're probably not getting relegated anyway. And if you get promoted during a year in which you qualify for the Champions League or something...well, the only way to do that currently is by winning the US Open Cup or the Caribbean or Canadian championships, which may have a different look within a few years.

So I don't think that's an issue.

The second part is almost COMPLETELY what the issue is about. One or two of the people who have invested millions in this thing are going to get relegated, and they're not going to go for that just because YOU think Pro/Rel would be cool.



Because most of them would probably vote to get rid of Pro/Rel if they could. If they weren't stuck with it as a matter of history going back 100+ years, it seems very unlikely to me that they'd vote in such a system.

And, again, there's a disconnect in your question, because one doesn't have anything to do with the other. You want to know why those UEFA people are interested in it? To control costs. Period. Full stop. How is that not obvious to you?

I don't care if we see a pro/rel system any time soon. I just want to see a league ownership model that gives proper power to the clubs and one which also has a sound marketing agenda. USL has been profoundly mishandled in that the league has accepted its 2nd tier status, while the clubs' ownership groups have consistently tried to push the level of play in the league. The league has all but rolled over whenever MLS has set its eyes on a powerhouse USL franchise.

Who cares about pro/rel; let's just worry about defending our teams and promoting the sport.

To do otherwise would require an unrealistic level of investment. 2nd tier doesn't have to mean 2nd class citizen. There are USL-1 clubs that do things in a more professional manner than some MLS franchises do.

It's fanboys who have been droning on about some USL superiority overall and how USL should charge up the hill with guns a'blazing to take its rightful place alongside MLS at the top of the heap. I think that's unrealistic. There's a reason why some things are where they are.




I forget sometimes that you're new to the party.

Let's be honest about something: for much of the last 15 years, most of "the clubs' ownership groups" have had enough trouble getting 2,000 people to games or looking less like a monkey f***ing a football and more like professional soccer clubs. Only in recent years have people realized that more can be done, and have pushed it.



Which it has done three times.

Oh, wait, what has ACTUALLY happened is that the ownership groups of those powerhouse USL franchise have CHOSEN to take their organizations to the next level.

And, at this point in history, USSF does not regulate this - this is all new ground being broken here. There's no precedent for what's been happening since Seattle "went up." Another example of American exceptionalism.

Having not seen a USL franchise agreement personally and having no knowledge of what USISL, Inc. has and has explored and discarded in terms of potential legal remedies, I'm left to speculate that there wasn't a whole lot they could have done.

Could they sue MLS? On what grounds? Hanauer, Kerfoot, Paulsen et al made applications for franchises in MLS. They were granted.

At this point in our history, I'm not aware of any territorial rights (unlike in baseball, which has a National Agreement defining the relationship between the major league teams and minor league teams) which require cash payments for violations. MLS is free to expand to Seattle or Toronto or Vancouver or Portland.

And I'm not sure what USL could have done. I'm sure you think there's something YOU would have done, but you're a fanboy, and it may have just been a lot of sound and fury, throwing off way more light than heat.

You've actually got good arguments; it's too bad you ruin them by being an ass.