The World Cup has more Americans paying attention to soccer than ever before. But the more I watch the sport internationally, the more I think one of the biggest differences isn’t what happens on the field. It’s what happens when the season ends.
I recently sat down with Todd Smith, author of Relegated, to talk about promotion and relegation in English soccer, and why the stakes are so much higher than what we’re used to in American sports.
Here’s the basic idea if you’re not familiar with it. In leagues like the English Premier League, the worst-performing teams at the end of the season don’t just have a bad year and move on. They get relegated. They drop down to a lower division entirely, and a team from that lower division gets promoted up to take their spot.
That means every single game matters, all the way to the last week of the season. There’s no tanking for a better draft pick. There’s no “let’s just rebuild next year.” If your team finishes at the bottom, you’re out.
And it’s not just the club that suffers when that happens. Local businesses, jobs, sponsors, entire communities can feel the impact of relegation. That’s a level of stakes we really don’t have in American sports.
So here’s the question I can’t stop thinking about. Would promotion and relegation make American soccer better?
Would it create more meaningful games late in the season? Would it eliminate tanking? Would it help smaller clubs actually have a path to grow? Or is the franchise model we’ve built everything around in the U.S. just the better way to do things for our market?
I don’t think there’s an easy answer here. But I do think it’s a conversation worth having, especially with the sport growing so fast in this country right now.
I’d love to hear what you think. Drop a comment, send me a message, let’s actually talk about it.
The full interview with Todd Smith is up now on The Gametime Guru Podcast.
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