Why Pro/Rel Would be a Dumpster Fire for MLS

You'll agree with me, I swear! Although I'm not sure I agree with myself...

Photo by Deklerk Basson on Unsplash

Ah, promotion and relegation! Three little words powerful enough to make the staunchest soccer nerd swoon!

It’s what makes European leagues so alluring. It’s the vehicle by which documentaries such as Welcome to Wrexham are made possible. It’s a pathway for the smallest of the small to dream that one day, if everything breaks just right, they could be in amongst the greats of the sport.

And it’s what we need in the United States (and Canada, don’t forget about Canada) to propel our league from fledgling to dominant, from a sideshow to a powerhouse. At least that’s what internet folks who swim in these waters would have you believe. In their eyes, the soon-to-be thirty MLS clubs, fat cats who never had to truly earn their privileged position at the top, would be forced to fight tooth-and-nail for survival, while the small clubs in the current-day USL and NPSL would finally have a way up the ladder to the big time.

Making every game count has been such a tiresome drumbeat of the Pro/Rel crowd that I even included it in my analysis of the myth of EPL exceptionalism!

Teams at the bottom of the league, it is said, have little to play for and little motivation to get better. Owners can get away with fielding teams on shoe-string budgets, and due to the collective nature of the league they can still be sure of their share of the profits. Pro/Rel is a surefire way to toss out the chaff of bad ownership and bring in new blood to freshen up proceedings. (Oh God, am I convincing myself that Pro/Rel is a good idea in my article that’s expressly against it?!?)

However, in order to imagine how this system of rising and falling could actually impact our league, we must examine the origins of it and the circumstances surrounding it.

The whole thing was a political compromise!

You see, in the late 1800s in England, soccer was getting super popular. We owe this, in large part, to the lack of anything better to do. Also, people started social clubs to fight off the crippling loneliness and despair brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Both ideas were equally important, I’m sure.

So the English Football Association threw open its doors and admitted hundreds and hundreds of clubs. They sponsored the annual FA Cup, but beyond that competition, teams were free to organize their own fixtures and even fuck around with the rules because there would be no one to stop them from doing so.

An old guy named William McGregor, having seen these shenanigans and been disturbed by them, conceived of the first “Football League,” which would have each team play each other team twice a season to decide a winner. This league proved to be an organizational masterstroke, but the problem remained that it only contained twelve of the literal-hundreds of clubs around England. Teams finishing at the bottom of the table were not automatically-relegated (as is often assumed) but instead had to “apply for reelection” to the league for the following season, whatever the fuck that means.

Rival leagues sprouted up (sound familiar, MLS fans?!?), including one known as the Football Alliance. Having two top-flight football leagues in the same country simply wouldn’t do, so the wheels of political machinations began churning and a compromise was struck involving the absorption of the Football Alliance by the Football League. To accommodate the too-many clubs, the Second Division was formed. Interestingly enough, most of the Football Alliance teams were placed into the Second Division, which left them pissed.

Promotion and relegation were introduced in 1893 as a means of moving between the two divisions, with the bottom two of division one and top two of division two generally swapping places for the next season. However, this was not set in stone, and teams could still be “elected” to places in a higher division if circumstances allowed. Arsenal famously were elected to be members of an expanded First Division following World War I, despite having finished behind many clubs which were not, in fact, elected to go up.

Automatic promotion and relegation finally took hold in England throughout the early 1900s. As football leagues sprang up around the world, they invariably copied the English FA as a sort of gold standard. The worldwide use of promotion and relegation has created some of the most inspirational stories in all of sports, with teams like Luton Town having appeared in each and every level of English football. We love to watch a giant team like Juventus or River Plate suffer the drop and have to spend a year slumming it against “inferior” competition.

But does the origin of this system tell us anything about its proposed modern implementation?

Having been conceived as a sort of political compromise metered out to ease the tension between rival leagues, there are precious few parallels to be drawn with modern-day Major League Soccer.

English football clubs were, as a general rule, grassroots social organizations that began in the humblest of fashions. Most clubs did not even employ professional players until 1888, years after the formations of some of the biggest clubs on earth today. Promotion and meritocracy grew as a tool to protect and promote the meritocracy of English football, and was only successful because in terms of the game on the field AND the financial side of things, a true meritocracy basically did exist.

There was no investment by petrol-states or multibillion dollar American corporations. The best teams were the best run and the savviest and those teams rose to the top, while the chaff was tossed out, with clubs frequently folding when they just didn’t have the chops.

MLS, on the other hand, is about the furthest from grassroots as one can possible imagine. It’s a Single Entity, as we so often hear, meaning that the league owns all the clubs and player contracts, and owners are merely franchisees the way that your weird uncle “owns” a Taco Bell in Oswego. The idea of the league having to agree on the newest expansion franchise and sheepishly accept their almost-a-billion dollars echoes the practice of “voting in” league members in the early days of the football league.

Are we very much kidding ourselves when we dream of “a level playing field” for American teams of all divisions, all the way up and down some sort of utopian pyramid?

The fact of the matter is that there is no possible level playing field when the teams themselves were selected and exist for the simple fact that a billionaire or group of billionaires wanted to own them. MLS clubs are not grassroots organizations, and any attempt to portray them as such comes off as ham-fisted and disingenuous. Even the heartwarming stories, like FC Cincinnati creating such a lovable ruckus that MLS had no choice but to “promote” them from USL, ignores the fact that the club was only three years old at the time and was founded by a couple of dudes who managed hedge funds.

Sure, there have been plenty of clubs to “transition” from their humble NASL origins to MLS, but their ownership groups invariably include very, very rich people.

The idea that very rich people, who spent lots of their very rich people money on franchises, would possibly risk their investments in the name of meritocracy is laughable, especially when we consider that the American class of oligarchs has a habit of doing the opposite in order to consolidate power: tipping the scales in their own favor to make sure no one else can compete.

And what happens to those small clubs that begin the climb up the soccer pyramid in the United States? We know that soccer is more of a financial game than ever before. Does Kingston Stockade FC need to attract their very own very rich person investors in order to compete once they reach the big time? (There are a lot of New York City gays who love antiquing in the Hudson Valley, after all.) Are there that many billionaires that would want to own professional soccer teams in the United States? Are we creating an arms race of capital which ironically ignores the fact that many teams even at the “top level” do not draw the kind of fan engagement one would wish for a first division club? Does every sentence in this paragraph end in a question mark?

Implementing promotion and relegation in MLS would create nothing more than a laughable farce, with the top teams owned and sponsored by the league further consolidating their power and using their influence to destroy groundling challenges to their hegemony. We know that sports are exempt, largely, from antitrust legislation in the United States, and that MLS would waste no time quashing clubs from further down the pyramid rather than creating relationships with them.

We can’t implement the same system the English did, since the world is too different a place. Even attempting to do so would involve tearing down the league structure as we know it, and stymying any and all momentum North American soccer has going for it.

So what IS to be done about it, you wet blanket asshat?

I know, it disappoints me, too. We all want MLS to get better, to be the big cheese in a world of, well… smaller cheeses. However, if we begin with the premise that the only way to ensure competition is to put a billionaire’s wallet at risk, we need look no further than to a varied and more prioritized slate of international competitions.

With the expanded Club World Cup looming on the horizon, it stands to reason that individual clubs (and not just MLS ones) could stand to make buckets of money. Leagues Cup has proved to be simultaneously annoying and successful. The revamped CONCACAF Champions Cup has offered a streamlined pathway to continental glory. The former Club World Cup will still exist as well, simply reverting back to its old name, the FIFA Intercontinental Cup.

By ensuring more MLS participation in these lucrative events, MLS owners will be able to “vote with their wallets” in terms of pushing for higher league places. The league, conversely will need to make it worth the owners’ while through loosening roster restrictions and funneling more money into clubs that qualify for international competitions. This is what we refer to as the carrot.

But what does this do for teams further down the pyramid? I propose sister tournaments to be contested between divisions. Lower table MLS clubs, which don’t qualify for, say, the playoffs, will be fed into regional competitions with teams of the different USL leagues, which can set their own standards for qualification. This is loosely the idea of the Brazilian state league system, for lack of a better point of comparison. Therefore, while their fellow MLS clubs are competing in the playoffs or an international tournament, these poor-performing basement-dwellers will be forced to slum it in regional competitions while playing in rural Wisconsin against clubs named for silly cryptids. (Go go Bigfoot City FC!) Heck, why not include lower-table Mexican sides, or even the Canadian Premier League teams! (But can Messi do it on a cold night in Halifax?!?) This is what we refer to as the stick.

This would give each and every team, at all levels of the US Soccer pyramid, something to play for. And isn’t that all any fan wants?

(Dear MLS executives: you can direct message me for my Venmo handle.)