Lalas: Relegation Too "Foreign" for MLS

With the excitement of the FA Cup and Champions League finals in the last week, I almost let this one slip by, but it deserves to be part of the conversation...

Alexi Lalas, the general manager for the Los Angeles Galaxy, made an appearance on Fox Football Fone-In a week and a half ago and took call-in questions from soccer fans. Inevitably, a European soccer fan asked him why there was no promotion-and-relegation system in Major League Soccer, and hosts Steven Cohen and Nick Geber continued along those lines by asking why teams at the bottom of the standings seem to be rewarded in American sports.

"Because we are a business," Lalas replied, "and in order to attract new business and new ownership to an already very powerful and excited ownership group that we have, we need to make sure that when they come into the league, that they're going to stay in the league.

"Will we have relegation in the future?", he continued. "I don't know. It's a very foreign concept to sports in the United States. I don't see that coming any time soon."

Lalas' answer here illustrates the key differences between American and European sports -- and it was actually baseball that made American sports the way they are...
In Europe, sports clubs are just that -- clubs. Anyone can start a club in any town for any reason, and believe me, they do. A club can then join a league on the local or regional level, and if it wins its league title, it gets promoted to the league above it. Likewise, if a club finishes at the bottom of its league, it gets relegated to the league below.

The English League System for soccer goes more than 20 levels deep, with the Premier League at the top and local city leagues at the bottom. Theoretically, though, a club can start in a local and regional league and win its way all the way up to the Premiership.

You don't see this in baseball, do you? Sure there are lots of local and regional leagues, but there's no chance that the Class A Peoria Chiefs will ever win promotion to the Major Leagues. Why is that?

When the National League began forming in the late 19th century, its member wanted to make sure they didn't have to compete with lots of rival clubs in the same cities, so they created a system where the league was a closed corporation that had central authority, giving each club exclusive rights to the city in which it played. A National League baseball club wasn't just a club; it was a franchise of the league itself.

This had the side benefit of balancing out the travel schedule, so that every club had to travel mostly the same distance in a season -- which was in important in the early 1900s, because travel then was much harder than it is now. If clubs could be formed as freely as they were in English soccer, you might have a situation where multiple clubs from big cities like New York, Boston and Chicago would dominate the majors, and clubs from smaller cities would struggle with travel issues and quickly suffer relegation to a minor league.

Every major sports league that has formed in America since then uses this franchise model that the National League created. Hence, American sports leagues -- especially the NFL -- began to thrive on the idea of parity. More clubs had a shot at winning the title every year, and bad clubs were rewarded with high draft picks that they could use to bring in college players that would help them improve their chances of getting back into title contention. In the NFL, everyone shares the wealth for the benefit of the entire league.

European soccer is completely different from that, though. Clubs that aren't successful aren't rewarded, but relegated, and as more Americans start following the relegation battles in Europe, they start asking why the American soccer league can't be like those leagues. It's a valid question, too, because while travel across America is still more difficult than travel across England, many of the limitations that existed in 1907 don't exist in 2007. Even the appalling inconvenience of airports in this particular decade wins out over train travel in the early 19th century.

Lalas, however, seems content to run MLS like a closed corporation league, because that's just how American sports leagues have always worked. MLS clubs are franchises of the league, and the owners who invest in those franchises don't have to fear being relegated from MLS after joining.

Whether this helps or hurts American soccer in the long run remains to be seen, but it does take some of the fun out of MLS. If there were a chance that Real Salt Lake would get relegated to United Soccer Leagues division one, while the Vancouver Whitecaps could be promoted for winning a USL title, fans of the Euro leagues might actually be more willing to give MLS a try. Until then, this league might prove to be too American for the world's football game.