UK vs US sports leagues – a little industrial organisation analysis

“London only accounts for four of the Premier League teams (Arsenal, Tottenham, Chelsea, West Ham). ”

…plus Fulham.

As I’ve said before, I’m with the moaners on this one, though there are things I don’t fully understand. Why, for example, does anyone bother to follow the Scottish football competition when the result could be replicated if Rangers played Celtic once a year? But people apparently turn out to watch teams that would need a miracle to make second place once in a lifetime.

Anyway, my main point is that the US isn’t the only comparator. Australia has an even more thoroughly socialist system – most of the clubs are actually clubs, though a handful have individual or corporate owners. A population of 20 million has a choice of 50-odd football teams across 4 codes, all of which (except maybe rugby union, have a draft and salary cap system). Lots of local derbies – the AFL and ARL competitions are hybrids between the Melbourne and Sydney local competitions they started out as and the national, one-team or tw0-team per city setups the marketing guys would like.

The NFL would never allow a massive media market like the Leeds/Bradford or Sheffield conurbs to have zero representation

Tell that to Los Angeles

I have a tough time arguing with this. If you look at representation in the Champions League, it starts to look even more similar to American style sports. I think American college football and basketball have also shown that you can run a league successfully without much competitiveness. You need very strong local ties, local rivalries, and something to play for besides the championship. College football is a great example of this with all the intermediate levels of success teams can achieve. European football has the locality down and relegation makes for exciting games between midlevel teams. If there were going to be any kind of improvement to the system, perhaps they should look at the college bowl system to provide more end-of-year excitement to midlevel Premier league squads than to the NFL for salary caps.

I was just noticing a number of Americans saying the same thing about how much better the American leagues were than the English Premier League because it was more competitive. My initial reaction was something like Daniel’s, though much less carefully worked out.

I think the comparison with California briefly mentioned at the end is just as good as the comparison with the mid-Atlantic. California is the same population as a mid-to-large European state. If American sports were run along the lines of European soccer, California would have a popular state league in each sport, in which a few big LA and Bay Area based teams would usually dominate. But other teams, representing all sorts of parts of the state (Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, Palm Springs, etc) would frequently challenge for the title, and occasionally win (a la Wolfsburg this year in the Bundesliga). Meanwhile the big LA and Bay Area teams would play other big teams from NY, Chicago etc in continent-wide competitions on top of the state competitions. In other words, they’d play something like the current NBA/MLB/NFL as an extra competition. And that competition would be extremely competitive over the long run, though like the Champions League (and like the NBA/MLB/NFL) there may only be smallish year-to-year turnover of teams with realistic title chances. Of course as it is, the chance of Santa Cruz having the best baseball team in California is 0.

It’s a matter of taste whether one would prefer this structure of state-based competitions with continent-wide cups as an extra level, or the American version of continent-based competitions as the basic level. I certainly prefer the European model, but I can understand people preferring the American. What I think is wrong is the apples-to-paella comparison between a league that crosses the 50 American states, and a league from 1 of the 52 UEFA members.

“I suspect that it would not be all that much benefit for association football to create a structure which proliferated meaningless ties between teams like Wigan and their counterparts in the Bundesliga.”

There used to be such a thing. In fact, there were several. Until last year there was the Intertoto Cup, and before that, there was the Anglo-Italian cup, which featured teams from the second tier divisions.

“Why, for example, does anyone bother to follow the Scottish football competition when the result could be replicated if Rangers played Celtic once a year?”

I can’t speak for the Scots, but as a fan of a team which hasn’t played in the top flight for 20 years and hasn’t even been promoted for over a decade, I can say that there’s more to football than winning championships. The games themselves are fun, you know. Or at least they can be.

Personally, I think US and European sports have a lot to learn from each other. European leagues really need a salary cap, for instance. And the US really needs promotion and relegation. I’d like to see the US move away from the draft system, but more for the benefit of universities and students than sport. And I’m realistic about the prospects of that happening.

_Why, for example, does anyone bother to follow the Scottish football competition when the result could be replicated if Rangers played Celtic once a year? _

I guess because winning isn’t everything … I follow Liverpool and Bristol Rugby (RU). For the first, winning is pretty much everything. Though their are moments of pleasure (stuffing ManU 4-1 at their place) the team has fallen short for nearly 20 years. With Bristol, on the other hand, the occasional successes give the pleasure, as would mere survival have been, had we not been relegated :(.

BTW, Lancashire will have 8 teams in the Premier League next year

The Scottish league isn’t actually much less competitive than the rest. In Scotland there 2 of 10 teams with a realistic chance of winning most years. With the the English Premiership there are 4 from 20, and I’d expect that pattern is roughly replicated in the other European leagues. I’d imagine it’s an inevitable result of concentrations of population and wealth that’s magnified by the winners receiving larger shares of media revenue.

For the fan of a smaller Scottish team there are exactly the same incentives as fans of smaller English teams. You want to see your team play well, improve their league placing, maybe have a good run in the cup [where smaller teams do have a chance of winning], see them turn over one of the big two, beat your local hated rivals, and so on. Winning the league is only one of the ‘prizes’ up for grabs, and if that’s not the one you have a realistic chance of winning, the others are just as able to attract people’s attention.

_he 2010/11 season could have the most northeasterly club in the Premier League being either West Ham or Oldham._

A cursory visual inspection of the UK on Googlemaps, suggests that a 45 degree line extending northwest from West Ham would pass through the middle of Birmingham and well to the south of Merseyside, so I’m not sure I get your meaning.

I’m an American, and the idea of replicating the European system here (with 5 or 6 regional leagues and the NFL/NBA etc in the role of UEFA) holds no appeal to me.

As it is, the 32nd best football team is usually pretty bad, as is the 30th best baseball team (go Nats!). I can’t even imagine the awfulness of, say, the 80th best football team.

yes you’re right, it’s definitely Oldham. But a line from Oldham to West Ham would (unless I’ve forgotten a club like I did with Fulham) mark the northeastern boundary of the PL.

I am not sure that the calls for a salary cap are to make the premier league more competitive. When I was a kid the league was Liverpool and everyone else, the Man Utd. and everyone else, then Arsenal joined Man Utd. There were always some other clubs doing well who could win the league or come second. Since the formation of the Premier League Blacburn, leeds and Newcastle come to mind. Then we got a 4th place in the Champions Leageue which Abromovich bought-up for Chelsea, and the funds they get for that keep the top 4 in place. So getting rid of the 4th Champions League spot or giving it to the FA cup winners should make the league more competitive again.

I think the call for a salary cap is more to do with fans feeling no connection with the players in their teams.

I’ve responded at length in a post titled “Premier League vs. American Team Sports.” Very short version: While I agree that the latter use anticompetitive practices, I find your artificial league rather wanting as an illustration.

I presume that you mean “Cleethorpes”.

Sorry for being pedantic, but I very much doubt if you would ever make the mistake of writing “Chelsee”.

There is still the question of why college teams fill this gap but not alternative professional leagues

Professional sports leagues are a natural monopoly (this has been found in successive antitrust trials).

Good article. As a fan of mid-league battlers Pompey _and_ Aberdeen, both mentioned above, I’m sceptical about arguments for reform of either of the Premierships for the same reason I’ve long been sceptical of arguments about quotas for foreign players. I don’t see what real benefit accrues from shielding players and teams against competition of the highest standard. Matt McGrattan has it exactly right, as far as I can see, on the subject of the pleasures of supporting smaller teams.

Oh and D2 I think you might mean “turned over by Dundee Utd”.

The Intertoto Cup has been abolished? I had no idea! I’m devastated! Oh, wait. No I’m not.

Canada has its own thriving football league, while Wales’s soccer league is pathetic, because the teams from Wales’s biggest and most vibrant cities, Merthyr Tydfil, Newport, Wrexham, Swansea, Cardiff, and Colwyn Bay, all play in the English leagues. Short-sighted Canadian investors must resist the push to have the Buffalo NFL team move to Toronto and try to displace the Argonauts.

The original post is baffling.

The moaners” complaint is that before the Premier League season begins you know that only one of four teams can win, except that it won’t be Liverpool. And it’s supposed to somehow answer this complaint to note that a North American League that doesn’t and never will exist — a mid-Atlantic league combining teams from four different sports — would have a lot of teams from New York City? WTF???

And the shot about “an illusion of competitiveness”? In actual North American leagues — the actual NHL, NFL, etc. — it’s often wide open at the start of the year who will win. Or if there are favourites one year, they’ll be different from the favourites a few years later. That’s actual competitiveness in an actual league, not the tedium of always Man U, Man U, Man U …

And at least for hockey (support me, Berube!), the claim that local teams don’t play each other is just false. Five of the seven mid-Atlantic teams — the five closest to NYC — form an Atlantic Division and play each other more than they play other teams. The New York Rangers and New York Islanders play each other many more times a season than Liverpool plays Everton. And yes, they hate each other.

Main point: the moaners are talking about actual competitiveness in actual leagues. How is it remotely relevant to speculate about what would be true in some North American league that doesn’t and never will exist?

Oh, and I meant to say something like this:

As it is, the 32nd best football team is usually pretty bad, as is the 30th best baseball team (go Nats!). I can’t even imagine the awfulness of, say, the 80th best football team.

I really don’t understand the premise of focusing on comparable population/regions rather than on full leagues and then trying to compare across sports. That New York has multiple teams in several sports hardly surprises. And aren’t the Belgian or Austrian premier leagues about as non-competitive as the English premier league? The only Belgian team I can think of off the top of my head is Anderlecht. So why not just compare the English premier league with MLB or the NFL?

And in any case, you’ve got the actual explanation for the success of millionaire socialism in US sports near the end of your tangential analysis of the northeast region: there’s no relegation in any major US sport. That’s why the main way in which a US sport changes its geographical profile is by moving an existing franchise from one city to another. I actually think that soccer might have taken better in its first round in the US if it had emerged a bit more organically from clubs with the possibility of relegation instead of trying to emulate the other major sports with ownership of franchises. Bill James did a very good job of describing how baseball’s minor leagues were transformed from competitive leagues to training grounds for future major league players during the 1920s and 1930s in his Historical Baseball Abstract. In football, college leagues provided the necessary training for future pro players while retaining the quality of competitive leagues.

“That’s actual competitiveness in an actual league, not the tedium of always Man U, Man U, Man U”

Except when it was Arsenal, Chelsea… gosh, Blackburn won the Premier League in 94/95, which isn’t all that long ago and and that’s bloody Blackburn (no offense intended to Blackburn Rovers fans.) Man U’s dominance is not absolute, nor guaranteed, even with the advantages it has. Moreover, whilst we’re talking about dominance of leagues, should I mention the New England Patriots (at least in the past decade or so)? The New York Yankees?

I know, I know, Man U, at least recently, have been far more dominant in the Premier League than even either of those two have been in their respective leagues. I would like to point out that the knockout structure of the latter stages of the NFL and MLB may have something to do with their vaunted competitiveness. After all, a knockout competition is a different kind of competition to a league competition; it’s far easier, relatively speaking, to have a run of luck in a knockout competition than a run of luck in a league campaign, and in the US, some of the teams in the playoffs don’t even need to have done particularly well in their division, if they’re picked on a “wild card”.

So let’s look at the premier knockout competition in England, the F.A. Cup, which is considered a worthy trophy in and of itself. Who’s the current F.A. Cup champion? Portsmouth! Having beaten Cardiff City, a team not even in the Premier League. Admittedly this is not a usual occurrence, and it’s usually one of the Big 4 that win it, but it’s definitely not “Man U, Man U, Man U” all the time. Man Utd have won it 4 times in the 16 years the Premier League has been going, which is quite a few times less than they have won the Premier League. So it may be that the inclusion of a knockout element in the American league structure increases competitiveness.

I’m not sure that comparing the regular season standings is valid – the playoffs are a part of the NFL, and if I was managing an NFL team I wouldn’t have winning the regular season as an objective (given that injury management is a big part of the sport, it could be really counterproductive). I think the more obviously valid comparison is Superbowl/Champions’ League, which also has a knockout stage and has been won by a different club in each of the last five years, and has twice in the last 15 years been won by teams from towns with a population smaller than 600,000 (Dortmund and Porto)

Freshly Squeezed Cynic, “and in the US, some of the teams in the playoffs don’t even need to have done particularly well in their division, if they’re picked on a “wild card”.”

I don’t know that much about US professional sports, but from what I know, I don’t see how a team that didn’t do particularly well can get a wild card. For that, you still need to do better than almost everyone else in your division, and almost everyone else in your league, right?

The confusion of people like Tom Hurka is understandable, since the poster started out by saying, logically, “Mid-Atlantic region of the US : England :: United States : Europe”, and then wrote about how a theoretical and nonexistent Mid-Atlantic league would resemble the EPL, while forgetting to describe how the actually existing NFL resemble the actually existing Champions League.

The PL moaners are typically fans of clubs like Tottenham or Aston Villa, who think they’re the equivalent of the Steelers or Packers, but who are actually the equivalent of some minor league team in a town that will never get a franchise.

London and Birmingham would never get a franchise? Those are some high standards.

North London would get one franchise, which would go to Arsenal, while Birmingham’s franchise could go to a lot of places, but would be unlikely to end up in Aston. Villa is a prime example of a big club that wouldn’t ever have been created ex nihilo but owes its existence to its history of success – Green Bay shows that this sort of thing happens in gridiron too, but it’s the only example. Substitute Everton and Man City if you like.

(Charlotte does have an NFL team, by the way)

Good spot, yes. Las Vegas, then, or Louisville or somewhere.

Oxford can’t win the Premier League, but it could win the FA Cup (Cardiff nearly did last year from outside the PL). Hartford can’t ever play against New York at all, but Oldham can play against Mancheter United. My basic point though is that if you compare the UK not to the whole USA but rather to a region of roughly the same size, you tend to find that there are actually only about half a dozen teams in that region who have any chance of winning their championship, whereas if you compare the USA to Europe, the football competition is a lot more “competitive” (if by that we mean, having lots of different winners).

Furthermore, the counterpart to millionaire socialism in the NFL, NBA etc is that they don’t have promotion and relegation, and this absence really does need to be taken into account when talking about “competitiveness”. No NFL team, no matter how awful, will ever be relegated, whereas Leeds and Nottingham Forest show that even European Champions can end up in the wilderness.

The only point the OP proved is that Americans have lots of cars. Yes, England manages to put 20 teams (well, 4 teams and lots of exhibitions) in a fraction of the space, but its not really all that interesting of a point. The real comparison is illusive, as Tom illustrates.

Celtic won’t be playing in a CL title anytime soon and you can say that for a lot of teams that make the CL.

Except in the NFL (or MLB/NHL/NBA) equivalent in europe, Celtic wouldn’t have a franchise, so Celtic have a better chance of winning the CL under the european system because at least they can qualify to take part in it. No matter how long their odds, it is at least greater than zero.

dsquared,

Post salary cap and probably even pre, but less so, I don’ think NFL has anything like

Real – Man U and won’t. [Barca – Liverpool – Bayern]

It is a mixed format with a group stage and then a knockout.

The quarters are harder to make than the NFL playoffs. A reduced number of spots and for the last 5 years a previous knock out round.

The CL Real 6 – 10. Man U 7 – 10.

The NFL Colts 7 – 10 Pats 6 – 10.

So the difference is much narrower than I thought. But I still say I see a continuity and concentration I don’t see in the NFL.

Good post.

For an NFL or NBA team which isn’t going to make the playoffs, their games become totally meaningless a long time before the end of the season.

Well, only in one sense (the normal one). Many teams in the bottom of the NBA are regularly suspected to be trying to loose at the end of the year so as to increase their chances of getting high draft choices. Because this is hard to distinguish from the reasonable practice of bad teams playing their younger players more at the end of the year nothing much is done about it, but there does seem to be a real race for the worst record among bad teams. That makes the games “meaningful”, just not in the ways fans would normally like. (I think this is more common in the NBA than in the NFL, and certainly more than in Baseball, because a single player can have a much larger impact in the NBA than in the other sports, and the likeliness of success for draft picks seems somewhat more predictable.)

dsquared,

I guess my argument is that the presence of relegation/promotion can do all of the explanatory work for why an American style system won’t work in England. Hoffenheim is unimaginable in the US.

And so I don’t see why you need to go to all the trouble of comparing parts of leagues in different sports in the US with whole leagues in England to make some point about concentration of championships. The US is bigger than England. So what? If you accept the premise of a national league (and if you accept that there is a limit to how big that league can be and still have some kind of sensible round robin schedule), then it’s just about inevitable that only about half a dozen teams in any region of the US are likely to be competitive, even if the league as a whole is very competitive. Why you think that is an important distinction?

I absolutely agree that competitions like the FA cup provide an alternate way to win a championship for those cities not blessed with championship division teams.

As I mentioned earlier the lack of competition in the PL is a recent thing. It’s a bit before my time but gone are the days when someone like Brian Clough could take a team from the second division to be European Champions in only a few years.

The way I see it is hoologanism was forcing attendances at matches to fall and eventually English clubs were banned from European competitions. Once they were allowed back the likes of Liverpool and Man Utd. couldn’t compete with the best of Europe. So the PL was formed and TV rights were sold to SKY, football was re-branded as more of a family sport and tried to distance itself from hooliganism. This is very different to how things would happen in Spain or Italy where clubs are politically protected, Milan is owned by Berlusconi, Juventus by the Agnelli family, Barcelona and real Madrid have been able to borrow almost what they like from various banks (I think that’s right but don’t know the details). So basically the PL was a trade off of domestic competition for English clubs t compete in Europe. This ended up with the big 4. This could change again if one of the top 4 has a bad season and someone like Man City gets rich backers and takes advantage, Abromovich leaves Chelsea or there is a change in regulations.

As a Sunderland fan I know the last ten games were not exhibitions but many felt that they were to the players (same goes for Sunderland and Hull). Also does anyone know anything about Ellis Short, the rich Texan who has finished buying out Sunderland today?

I think my conclusion is that the American sports leagues achieve the illusion of competitiveness by severely restricting the number of teams

It’s not an illusion – different teams actually do win the championship in different seasons. You are suggesting that there would not be the same level of internal competitiveness if other, less populous cities were allowed to field teams and join the professional leagues. I don’t see why this would be the case. Such teams would likely not be economically viable, but assuming that the owners were willing to subsidize a money-losing team, there is no reason why small city teams could not be competitive, assuming that the rules meant to maintain competitive balance – the drafting system, free agency rules, salary caps, revenue sharing, and luxury taxes – remain in place. Even crappy baseball towns like Miami and Tampa have been able to make it to the World Series despite the fact that nobody in Florida wants to watch baseball.

The real reasons that the leagues restrict the number of teams is to maintain a higher quality product. Too many teams dilutes the quality of play by distributing the best players more thinly and allowing less talented players to play.

“The real reasons that the leagues restrict the number of teams is to maintain a higher quality product”
This is the funniest joke I’ve heard today.

The real reasons that the leagues restrict the number of teams is to maintain a higher quality product. Too many teams dilutes the quality of play by distributing the best players more thinly and allowing less talented players to play.

I think that this comes really quite a long way below the monopoly rents in the scheme of things.

Interestingly there are two top rugby union leagues in the UK and Ireland: the GP (club based) and the Celtic League (franchise/region based). Any lessons to be drawn?

I was about to nitpick, but then I grasped the sheer genius of this post. You have married the overeducated insecurity of an academic blog with the macho-nerd obsessiveness of a sports blog. Brilliant! The average ESPN comment threat has many thousands of entries; if they were all as long as the average CT comment, your server would poop a brick.

Anyway, my question (possibly addressed somewhere above): is it fair to treat college sports in the US as equivalent to cricket and rugby in the UK? On any given Saturday in October, you could go to 50 places in the US and find ~50,000 people at a college football game. At a handful of places, 100,000+ people routinely rock the house. Are cricket and rugby really like that?

You have married the overeducated insecurity of an academic blog with the macho-nerd obsessiveness of a sports blog.

Ooh, get her.

The Champions League (well done Barca, by the way) isn’t at all equivalent to a national league because it doesn’t play often enough. There isn’t a game every week, or two a week, or six a week (as in baseball). For English fans it’s, in terms of time allotted, a minor addition to the main menu of PL football. And that menu is totally uncompetitive: always (at least recently) Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal, and not Liverpool. With one exception once for Blackburn: whoopty-do!!

Who cares about geographical concentration? North American sports fans don’t. Boston Celtic fans can hate the Lakers from across the continent; everybody everywhere can hate the Yankees. And everybody can enjoy a season that could have many different endings.

North American leagues start the season with lots of teams that can win, and which teams they are changes from year to year. This year in the NBA the last 4 teams include Orlando, Cleveland, and Denver, all long-time losers. That’s *interesting,* whereas the PL is terminally boring. Once again Man U vs. Chelsea or Man U vs. Arsenal … yawn, yawn.

It takes a very special mind to think it takes away from the actual uncompetitiveness of the actual main English football league that some genuinely competitive leagues are geographically dispersed. Who gives any kind of damn about that?

“The US system of millionaire socialism does seem to work to give a higher percentage of those thirty or so teams a credible chance of winning the championship. It’s not clear whether you are denying that, or asserting that population is also a factor, or what. I think the relative populations of the US and England are red herrings.”

I dunno, I think that argument is a red herring. The people who prefer the US system (as a whole) seem to think that what matters is who has a chance of winning the Superbowl/World Series/Stanley Cup in a given year, whereas the people who prefer the European system (as a whole) seem to think that what matters is that everyone has a theoretical chance of winning the title, eventually.

“Oxford can’t win the Premier League, but it could win the FA Cup”

Funny you should mention that. We did, in fact, win the League Cup. And I wouldn’t give that up for all the draft systems in the world.

So comparing like with like (ie, comparing the whole of major professional sports on the US side versus association football in the UK), what can we say?

I do have to say that this is pretty funny stuff. Comparing like with like means creating some wierd chimera sports leage where hockey teams, baseball teams, football teams and basketball teams all co-exist. What type of ball do you they use in this league?

College baseball is relatively insignificant because MLB has its own minor league “farm” system for developing new talent. The NFL and NBA use colleges for development purposes, which is the main reason why college football and basketball are major sports (and also why there are no minor league professional football or basketball leagues to speak of).

Yes, but the calendar is probably an important reason for this. Students, whether players or spectators, are generally not around during the summer, so if you want a development league the minor leagues work better.

I don’t think minor professional basketball and football leagues could ever compete with college sports. Some of the reasons have been mentioned, but let’s not overlook the economic advantage colleges get by not paying players, commanding sufficient loyalty to get contributions from fans, and not least, often controlling the only suitable venue around.

What size crowds does UK association football draw?

But for a large percentage of fans, seeing the same teams in the playoffs year after year is enough to turn them off.

Is there some evidence on this? I don’t believe it, specifically because the era of Big Four dominance in association football has been associated with massively rising attendances (despite excruciating price rises), not falling.

I think there is a very good chance that the EPL will drive English football towards a similar model to baseball in the US. Most of the lower league teams are in serious financial trouble or will be within a few years. The teams will face the choice of being of becoming amateur teams or becoming vassals for bigger teams and most will choose the latter. This took about 40 years in the US. The only likely way this won’t end promotion/relegation is if the bigger teams are in foreign countries.

I’m no expert on soccer, but based on what I know, I think college football in the US might be *more* like UK association football than any US pro sport is. College football is dynastic (ie, the same handful of teams seem to dominate year after year based on institutional advantages), there are different leagues at different levels of talent (eg, the six “BCS” conferences versus all the other Div A conferences, not to mention Div II and II), while at the same time as there is interleague competition with the real chance of significant upsets from time to time (see Utah over Alabama or Boise St over Oklahoma — bar none the best sporting event I have ever seen, live or on TV). Last but not least, college football is about 10000x more provincial — and fanatic — in its appeal than any pro sport. UK soccer’s more or less like that, right?

@99: Alex Massie thinks so [cached version], too. That and college basketball are shielded from non-American eyes, for the most part. There are significant differences, though: scheduling, particularly for non-conference “creampuff” games; subjective ranking; and particularly the NCAA’s amateurism rules, which lead to vastly different treatment of young, talented players. Still, the Final Four, for instance, is “the magic of the FA Cup” compressed into a few weeks, and the bowl games can deliver some of the same.

DD, you (and others) have misunderstood my point. The top teams can indeed support themselves from cash flow, and that’s likely to be increasingly true as the fan base and advertising support focuses on teams that have a chance.

What I said was that a billionaire (or at least many-millionaire) backer is needed if you want to live the dream of promotion from the second division leading ultimately to first division success (if it isn’t already too late for this).

the US is the size of Europe yet with only ~30 teams per sport. This is no coincidence, as it has been found to be a good number to keep teams competitive.

This is some meaning of the word ‘competitive’ with which I’m not familiar. Football teams at every level in the English & Welsh league[s] are massively competitive, with other teams at that level – and, when they get the chance, frequently hold their own against teams at higher levels (google “FA Cup upset”). Yes, promotion to or relegation from the Premier League is a very big deal – much bigger than it used to be – but even now it’s not as if nobody cares about promotion & relegation in the lower leagues, or the teams that get promoted and relegated. (Example. My brother-in-law’s got a programme for that 1996 match framed on his wall.)

As for the PL, speaking as an impartial – nay, uninterested – observer, it seems to me that the health of the PL depends on its continuing to function as Division One (of four + Conference + regional leagues), and a lot of its more pathological features stem from attempting to break with that model.

DD, I’m not attuned to all the regional nuances here but Wikipedia says that Blackburn Rovers was a founding member of the Football League in 1875, won the FA Cup and Football League championship and drew crowds of 60 000 in the 1920s, before being relegated in the 1960s. That sounds like a famous club fallen on hard times to me, and not like the typical local club for a town of 100 000 people.

John Q: the whole of Lancashire consists of famous clubs fallen on hard times. See Preston North End, for example. DD is quite right on this one.

On another matter, I’m not sure it’s correct to divide the big 4 in the way DD does above. Liverpool and ManU look rather similar from the point of view of ownership/revenue structure (Hicks & Gillet/Glazer), except that Man U are doing rather better. Partly that’s stadium size (which Liverpool are trying to address), partly it is the thoroughly inept management of Liverpool’s commercial side under Rick Parry. Chelsea, otoh, are just a rich man’s toy.

What about little countries and international competition? Do Icelanders and Maltese tune out the World Cup and the regional competitions because they know their teams have no chance of getting out of the qualifying rounds? Or does the prospect of maybe knocking off an Estonia from time to time keep them invested?

Tom, my point was not that the Champions League is a national league, of course it isn’t; it’s that it’s structurally similar to the NFL (league portion then knockout section), it’s pretty competitive, and I hypothesized that there might be a relationship.

And that menu is totally uncompetitive: always (at least recently) Man U, Chelsea, Arsenal, and not Liverpool. With one exception once for Blackburn: whoopty-do!!

Previously you were complaining about how it’s “all Man U, Man U, Man U yawnyawnyawn.” Now it’s “all big 4, all big 4, yawn yawn yawn.” Can I hear the sound of goalposts being shifted?

A few comments on the idea that the number of US pro sports teams is being artificially restrained by the pro leagues’ anticompetitive behavior:

1. As some have already noted, you cannot understand the demand for NFL and NBA games without appreciating the role that college football and basketball play in satisfying the demand for those sports. For largely historical reasons, college football is more popular than NFL football in many, many places in the US, even places with NFL teams. For example, on any given fall Saturday in the State of Michigan, you’ll have somewhere between 200,00 and 300,000 fans paying to attend college football games played by some combination of Michigan; Michigan State; Central, Eastern and/or Western Michigan; and a number of small colleges. Even when the NFL Detroit Lions were good, they would often struggle to sell out their 80,000 seat stadium. The same holds true for college basketball. There is no NBA team in Kentucky, a college basketball hotbed, and the North Carolina NBA franchise is of recent vintage and struggles with local indifference. The NBA hasn’t hesitated expanding into areas like that because it want to preserve its monopoly rents (the owners, frankly, aren’t that far-sighted); it’s hesitated because it knows it couldn’t compete with the college teams.

2. The US pro leagues do NOT enjoy general purpose exemptions from US antitrust law. The only thing they’re exempt from is the claim that the league members are engaging in price-fixing when they agree on rules like salary caps, and they enjoy that exemption only because they negotiate with unionized players. If the NFL took anticompetitive actions to drive a rival league out of business, it would be just as vulnerable to an antitrust claim as any other business would be. Which leads to . . .

3. There is, in fact, a robust history of alternative pro leagues being formed to compete with the incumbent North American pro leagues. The NHL faced a challenge from the WHL in the 1970s; the NBA faced a challenge from the ABA around the same time; and the NFL faced challenges from the AFL in the 1960s and the USFL in the 1980s. In all cases, the rival leagues were formed out of a belief that there was excess demand that the incumbent refused to meet. In the WHL, ABA and AFL cases, the upstarts were proved correct, and after several years of competition, the incumbent league assimilated some or all of the upstart teams.

In the case of the USFL, the upstart guessed wrong, and the league collapsed after a few years. The USFL then sued the NFL, arguing that the NFL had engaged in a variety of anticompetitive practices designed to drive the USFL out of business. The jury agreed — and awarded the USFL damages of $1 (trebled to $3), because they also concluded that the USFL had never had a chance to succeed in the first place.

There’s a certain amount of straw man in this because it’s been observed many times that the US franchise system is not really a suitable model to impose on European leagues, not least for the reasons Daniel gives here (i.e. that there’s not many teams in such a system) but because of others mentioned above (e.g. the absence of promotion and relegation). I can remember mentioning these and other points in a book I wrote well over a decade ago: the fact that occasionally someone will write a newspaper article backing a US-style system doesn’t really prove anything except that a lot of things get written about football and not all of them are sensible.

However, it’s worth mentioning the US system purely because it demonstrates that things don’t have to be as they are in English football: there may be other ways of doing things and “all power to the powerful”, which is what happens now, might not be the best of all routes.

It’s certainly true to observe that increasing elitism has actually gone alongside increasing attendances at all levels and that therefore there has to be a limit to how much damage it’s doing football: fair enough. But I think it’s perhaps worth observing that one serious change, among many, in the culture of English association football over the time I’ve followed it has been the development of hostility towards the Big Clubs, notably, though not solely, in the attitude of many supporters to the performance of Manchester United, Chelsea and others in Europe. When I was young, you’d have gone a long way to find anybody other than fans of local rivals who didn’t back them: now the picture is, to put it mildly, much more mixed. ( I wrote a piece in When Saturday Comes some time in the Nineties making this point.) This may change as a younger generation that has known only the Premier League and the Big However Many takes our place, in a kind of Thatcher’s Children kind of way, but I think they’re getting a league (and most certainly an FA Cup) which is significantly less interesting and culturally valuable than the one we had before. I say that, as do many others, fully aware of the drawbacks and imperfections of the old way of doing things.

In some ways it doesn’t matter so much because the strength and soul of English football is actually in its depth, in the lower divisions, rather than in what the superstars get up to. But you’d really like to enjoy football at all levels rather than have your pleasure spoiled by the bad taste in the mouth that you get from the consistent greed and “fuck you” of the elite. I think they’ve deeply damaged several leagues and cups in order to have their so-called Champions’ League and I’m so glad none of the bastards won it.

The original post seems to me like comparing the SAT or A-level exam scores of two students who have the same birthday, while ignoring factors like class and the efficacy of the local school system. The relative populations and numbers of teams in two leagues are considerably less important to their success than the cultural structure in which they reside, let alone the sports that they play.

Connection to the local, regional team is not nearly as meaningful in the United States, a country which is far more transient than the UK. As has been pointed out, the US is far more comparable to Europe. How many more people do you think would move from London to Barcelona if the language was the same, and no passport or visa was required? Millions of sports fans in the US root for their teams from halfway across the country.

To further stress the point that local access is not key to US success for sports, as a business model, we can compare the NFL and MLB. Baseball teams play 162 games a season, 81 at home per year in their local stadium. The NFL plays 8 home games (assuming one of yours doesn’t get exported to Toronto or London). Personally, I would say that baseball games are considerably more fun to attend. However, despite the advantages in availability and quality of product, the NFL dominates MLB and all other leagues in popularity and financial success, and it’s entirely due to television. American Football the best TV sports experience in our country, and in addition, the NFL has been the most media savvy league in setting up it’s TV deals. Going to games just isn’t what it’s about over here.

I agree with the OP in that I don’t think BPL shouldn’t adopt the American system, because it is a distinctly American system, but the insinuation that our system is inferior is fairly baseless.

Incidentally to my mind there are a fair number of incorrect or tendentious comments and claims in this thread, not surprisingly given the number of posts, but here’s a few things before I go to bed:

#54: Oxford can’t win the Premier League, but it could win the FA Cup

English football clubs are “they” rather than “it”.

#78: there are 94 teams in the English league system

There are 92.

#94-95: What size crowds does UK association football draw?

It varies tremendously. Man U draws about 75k, Blackburn under 25k.

It’s “draw” rather than “draws” and “k” is a questionable usage when we’re talking about people rather than money, but most importantly, it doesn’t stop at Blackburn and 25,000. even if we’re only talking about full-time professional football you’ll find league Conference teams with full-time squads and average crowds a tenth (or less) of those at Ewood Park.

97-102: Most of the lower league teams are in serious financial trouble or will be within a few years.

this isn’t actually true.

Given the number of points deductions in recent seasons, the likelihood that the clubs who suffered them are not alone in having severe problems and the unlikelihood that the recession will help in this respect, I’m not clear as to Daniel’s reasons for thinking it untrue.

(It’s true that teams are always expected to go bust because of debt yet very rarely do: however, whether the much-played CVA card is going to be available to them indefinitely is something of an open question. We may see a lot more reborn and reconstituted clubs, in the future, than we used to. That’s not altogether a bad thing but at the same time it’s not really something I’d want to welcome when such an important part of a club’s identity is their unbroken history.)

#116: Chelski

Though commonly used the term is a silly one since -ski is a Polish usage, not a Russian one.

Oh, on Blackburn – Alan Shearer signed for them because they offered more money than anybody else including Manchester United. (As it goes I suspect the lasting impact of Jack Walker on English football will have been to inject a large dose of inflation into it.)

“Wales’s biggest and most vibrant cities, Merthyr Tydfil, Newport, Wrexham, Swansea, Cardiff, and Colwyn Bay,”

I never thought I would ever read a description of Colwyn Bay as “big and vibrant”…

I may have missed it, but I don’t see any discussion about clubs vs. franchises–this is the crucial distinction (Wimbledon/MK Dons aside).

Also, is it really fair for a team with a paucity of supporters (Atlanta Thrashers, Sac Kings, AZ Cards, KC Royals etc.) to be on a level financial playing field with teams whose support is tenfold or greater (Yankees, Red Wings, Lakers, Cowboys etc.)?

Oswestry Town merged with Total Network Solutions (previously Llansantffraid FC), who changed their name to “The New Saints” when Total Network Solutions was taken over by British Telecom.

A number of English teams used to play in the Welsh Cup, a fact which had minor political consequences, written about in Ian Bone’s autobiography and covered on my blog.

All of these have demonstrably happened to one degree or another.

All of these are features of the UK game, true, but I’m less convinced on the point of causation. The French and German leagues are just as “uncompetitive” as the UK one, with very different corporate and economic structures. Although some clubs are unprofitable and overindebted (but by no means all – per the Deloittes annual report, clubs like Reading were always run on an operating profit even when they were in the PL, as are about half of Championship clubs), ’twas ever thus; there were plenty of unprofitable, overindebted clubs before the Premier League.

The PL does look like it’s been a significant driver of wage inflation and transfer cost inflation (though I am tempted to regard the second of these as more of an example of the general speculative bubble in all asset prices in the same period). But this is arguably just a transfer of value from owners to players that I find it hard to get excessively worried about. Seven of the starting players in the Barcelona team that won on Wednesday had not had transfer fees paid for them.

(Part of the reason, of course, is attitude, theirs and mine. I stopped, for years, going to top division games after the Premier League was set up, and almost entirely stopped watching Match of the Day after that programme ceased to show games outside the flight, on the grounds that if they were saying fuck off to everybody else, then I’d reciprocate. Incidentally,watching several BBC sports bulletins last Sunday evening and the following morning, I caught absolutely no mention of what I believe was the second-best-attended football match of the day. Almost sixty thousand saw Scunthorpe beat Millwall: but if it ain’t the Premier League, it didn’t happen. I think this approach is part money-worship, part-philistinism and generally small-minded all round.)

There’s two parallel discussions here; NFL-style drafts & caps, for and against, and the post Premier League UK football industry, for and against.

I think that if you’re going to have a socially-owned or mutual model, you have to have a salary cap and all the other gubbins, because unlike a capitalist firm, a mutual can’t pay dividends and so has to reinvest all of its operating profit in the football business. A profit making firm would never do this; the point at which the financial return on a marginal player purchase would be less than the cost of capital would be reached a long way before total dominance. (This ties into my theory that the problem with the PL is an excess of “football people” and a dearth of “accountants”, very much not the other way round).

On the other debate, I am now deciding to push back substantially on the value to anyone of “competitiveness”. How, exactly, do you watch a league? Most people watch games. It seems to me at the very least to be a breach of one of the von Neumann/Morgenstern axioms if your enjoyment of the game you are watching depends on the results of a whole load of other games yet to be played

(I have this Beckettian vision of football supporters sitting in a windswept ground, saying
“cracking game, isn’t?”
“Yes, but in a wider sense it is empty and meaningless because of the dominance of Manchester United since the 1990s”

Or of the difficulty in persuading North American sports fans to go to the cinema because
“Who wins? Live and Let Die – Bond. Octopussy – Bond. The Living Daylights – Bond. Goldeneye – Bond. Yawwwwwwwn!”)

Furthermore, even for people who follow the football by looking at the league standings every week, it’s only for the first few months that a league can appear “competitive” in the sense of being open to everyone to win. The nature of a league competition is that toward the end, a group of between two and six teams will have pulled away and will be the only ones with a chance to win. So the “competitiveness” theory would suggest that sports leagues get less interesting as the season wears on and that seasons which quickly turn into a closely fought two-horse race are the boring ones. All of which seems a bit odd to me, and therefore I reiterate my disagreement that competitiveness (where defined as the Gini coefficient of the day one betting odds, which seems to be the metric we’re using here) is a particularly important property of a league.

On the other debate, I am now deciding to push back substantially on the value to anyone of “competitiveness”.

Good. Ample supporting evidence is to be found in Cubs fandom & in Packers fans from the Forrest Gregg era. The kind of fan who tracks win/loss statistics and championship viability but doesn’t enjoy watching individual games isn’t terribly representative of fans generally.

Conversely, I think ejh gets at a very good point in #131, and I think that comment might have something to do with what some folks are actually wanting when they complain about “competitiveness,” though I’m not able to articulate exactly what the relationship is.

How, exactly, do you watch a league? Most people watch games.

That’s not really right: games aren’t standalone things, and people’s consumption of them isn’t restricted to their real-time experience of them.

And indeed Spassky – but it’s commonly rendered -sky in English. I’ve never seen “Trotski” before, for instance. (As I obviously know less about this than I thought, I’d be interested to be told the reason, but I wonder if it would be that in Russian the sound is rather longer than in Polish? You also see -iy occasionally.)

I’ve never seen “Trotski” before, for instance.

Really? I’ve seen that, and I’ve seen Dostoevsky rendered Dostoevski, and Tolstoy rendered Tolstoi.

From wikipedia:
British Standard
Endings -й, -ий, -ый may be simplified to -y.

Maybe that’s a description of where the -y standard is from?

They didn’t when the Dodgers left Brooklyn.

I’ve not been able to get to the bottom of this but it looks to me as if the proportion of money spent on player salaries may actually be slightly higher in the US, NFL at least than it is in top flight football which surprised me. Does anyone know more?

I’ve not been able to get to the bottom of this but it looks to me as if the proportion of money spent on player salaries may actually be slightly higher in the US, NFL at least than it is in top flight football which surprised me. Does anyone know more

yes, slightly higher as far as I can see, although cf the original post – the 7 NFL teams in a region roughly the size of England would correspond to the top PL teams, not the average.

Italics there by mistake, by the way. I’m not speaking loudly and slowly as if to an idiot.

Does “games not leagues” change much? A quick (and possibly fallible) check of the 2008-09 season shows me that Man U, Chelsea and Arsenal each lost only one game to a team outside the Big 4. Liverpool lost a few more, but (on this admittedly limited check) it looks as if the typical Big4 vs Rest game is about as unpredictable as Harlem Globetrotters v Washington Generals.

Of course there are plenty of other games to watch. But on this analysis, why not send the Big 4 off to a European Super-15 (or whatever) league and have a domestic competition where the final league table is of some interest?

When my father was a kid (the 1950s) in Buffalo, New York, International League baseball was a big deal there, reported in the papers side by side with the American and National Leagues (the two Major Leagues). The Buffalo Bisons played against teams from New England, New York, Pennsylvania, two teams in Ottawa, four in the Carolinas, and — before the revolution — one in Havana.

The IL is still around; it has just been relegated to minor league status. The Bisons are now the AAA team for the Cleveland Indians. The IL’s Rochester Red Wings, in the Minnesota Twins’ organization, are the oldest continuously-operating professional baseball team. There are no more Canadian teams, as the Ottawa Lynx have moved to Allentown, PA, and the Toronto Maple Leafs became the American League Blue Jays.

I guess my point is that regional alternative leagues were popular until fairly recently. Television changed a lot.

Nick Valvo,

Even in the 50’s the IL was a minor league in the sense that its teams likely had working agreements with specific major league teams, if they weren’t owned outright. Minor league baseball was locally popular lots of places, but was not the equivalent of the majors.

What changed was not only television, but also the increasing sophistication of the major league teams in the use of their minor league affiliates. The best minor league players go to the majors when rosters expand in September, pennant race or no. Injured major leaguers are sent to the minors for rehabilitation. AAA teams are generally used as a sort of safety valve/reserve vehicle for roster moves. All that makes it hard to establish loyalty to minor league teams.

And Arsenal lost a bunch. I did say it was fallible – shouldn’t do that kind of thing late at night :-). Still, the general point is right, I think.

As we’re number-crunching, the figures on the Big Four’s domination appear to be as follows:

a) they’ve filled at least three of the top four places in each of the last twelve seasons

b) they’ve filled all four places six times, including the last four seasons

c) since 2001/2 (Chelsea were sixth) none has finished lower than fifth

d) in the past three seasons the gap between fourth and fifth places has not been smaller than eight points.

FACT(i): prior to the introduction of the Premier League, there was no occasion on which the the top four of the top division were the same in consecutive seasons, let alone four (or more) Indeed there were only eleven occasions(ii) in which three of the top four places were occupied by teams that had been in the top four the previous season, and this never happened for more than two consecutive seasons, let alone twelve.

(i) probably

(ii) 1984/5 and 1985/6
1981/2 and 1982/3
1977/8 and 1978/9
1973/4 and 1974/5
1972/3 and 1973/4
1961/2 and 1962/3
1959/60 and 1960/1
1903/4 and 1904/5
1891/2 and 1892/3
1889/90 and 1890/1
1888/9 and 1889/90

(Where sets of two seasons overlap, e.g. 1888/9 and 1889/90, 1889/90 and 1890/1, it is not the identical three teams involved, so Preston Villa Wolves Blackburn becomes Preston Everton Blackburn Wolves becomes Everton Preston Notts County Wolves. Only two teams are common to both sets.)

Incidentally, does anybody imagine that people would attend less if there were a more competitive league?

and take it that if people keep on attending then they’re not that bothered

But if they keep on attending in increasing numbers and in the face of extortionate price rises, then I think you really do have to take it that they’re not that bothered. I also think we need to separate out people’s complaints about “uncompetitivness” and those which simply relate to their team not doing very well. The respective boards of Spurs and Newcastle, for example, certainly didn’t want to end the oligopoly at the top – they just wanted their team to be in it.

Also “Big Four” including Chelsea/sky/ski is retrofitted. Chelsea weren’t a top four club before Abramovitch.

I wasn’t sure what you were saying people complain about.

OK, got it on second reading. Took me a while, because practically all the football supporters I know are either Man U (and think the dominance of the Big Four is great) or City (and think it would be great if only City could get into it). The latter do hate Man U’s dominance of the league, but that’s just because they hate Man U, always have hated Man U and always will hate Man U – they’d hate them just as much if they were relegated.

whenever this has been proposed in the past, it has been suggested by one or more of the Big Four, and vehemently opposed by the smaller clubs

I’m not sure this is right, by the way, simply because I can’t recall it ever being proposed, not seriously anyway. I don’t suppose there’s any confusion with the situation in Scotland, where the Tweedles definitely want to leave and the other clubs don’t want to let them?

Ah, yes, the European League. May or may not happen, but if they think it’ll work, they’ll do it in the end, regardless of whether they’re given what they want now.

That said it’s not so clear that the Big Four would necessarily want to cut their ties with English football (though Manchester United might, I think) since domestic football does provide them with a fallback that wouldn’t be there if they opted for Europe and only Europe. (Though on the other hand, one can’t imagine – regrettably – that they wouldn’t be allowed back if they asked.)

over the last ten to fifteen years, the audience for association football has expanded massively, and the new supporters have overwhelmingly attached to a small number of clubs.

Actually this wouldn’t quite be my view, though it might depend on what we mean by “supporter”: pretty much all clubs have experienced considerable increases in attendances, the actual paying spectator isn’t so unevenly distributed. But of course the “passive” spectator, the TV audience, is indeed overwhelmingly attracted to the Big Four. Pandora’s Box if ever there were one.

Incidentally, I’m fairly sure that the clubs who voted for the Premier League didn’t really anticipate this, expecting (and welcoming) the gap that would grow between them and the lower divisions, but not so much the chasm between them and the CL entrants. However, from their point of view – considered as individuals rather than custodians of football clubs – it doesn’t really matter, since who cares if the club you run ends up winning nothing and owing fifty million quid, provided you’ve made millions yourself in the interim?