Soccer: Please DO NOT End Relegation in the EPL
This just in….foreign owners of English Premier League teams want to end the relegation system. This is perhaps the worst and most saddening news I have heard in sports, maybe ever.
Foreign owners control majority stakes in 10 of the 20 teams in England’s top flight. The current system relegates the worst three teams each year to the lower division and replaces them with the top two plus the winner of a four-team playoff. But new ownership does not like that.
“There are a number of overseas-owned clubs already talking about bringing about the avoidance of promotion and relegation in the Premier League,” League Managers’ Association chief executive Richard Bevan said at the Professional Players Federation conference in London. “If we have four or five more new owners, that could happen.”
And it would be the worst thing to ever happen to the sporting world. You know how the bottom-rung teams are just absolutely God awful to watch the last month of every NFL, MLB, and NBA season? That doesn’t happen in the EPL. The players, coaches, owners, and everyone else give it their all to avoid being in the bottom three. Because they want to stay in the top division. Nothing takes the optimism out of the next season by playing a division lower than you just did. And it doesn’t hurt that the Premier League is worth as much as 90 million pounds.
Pretty good incentive to play hard all year. Pretty good reason to avoid a mid-season fire sale that leaves a fan base disenchanted. Pretty good format to ensure that each and every game truly does count. Of course that’s the very reason the new owners want to eradicate it. They don’t want to risk losing that much money a year. This is more of an investment than a hobby or passion. Its all about the value. And its utterly wrong.
This is tradition. This is the way it is always been. This is beyond the addition of the designated hitter. This is beyond the wild card. This is beyond anything that has ever happened in the modern sporting world. This simply cannot happen.
If this goes through what do you tell the teams that were just relegated the year they eradicated relegation? Sorry you will never play top-flight football again. Its not a possibility. You are basically banished to an Arena Football league status. Fun to watch, but limited in potential and meaning. Peter Coates, Stoke City’s chairman, is a man whose club has been in and around the relegation battle in recent years. Yet he sees no sense in this.
“You’d take away the thing that’s so important: the opportunity to go up and down which creates a mass amount of interest. There’s as much interest in the relegation battle as the title battle.”
Any decision like this in the FA requires 14 of 20 clubs to vote yes. Currently only 10 are owned by foreigners so this is not going to happen tomorrow. But with the recent surge in interest from foreigners the possibility in the not-so-distant future exists. And it’s scary.
The disenchantment this decision would make would be remarkable. The current set-up sees the Premier League as far and away the most popular domestic league. Clubs like Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea, and Liverpool have huge followings all across the globe. One estimate said over half the world tuned in to an EPL game at some point last season. Probably not true, but such popularity inspires such exaggeration. Getting rid of relegation would create so much ill will that the damage would likely knock the Premier League from their considerable perch.
So this is a plea. Please owners, PLEASE do not get rid of relegation. It is one of the best things going for you.
And if you do rid yourselves of it, I will be the biggest fan that the final year of relegation sees three of your clubs sent into football oblivion like you’d deserve.
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