Had the Pirates and Clippers played in something like the English Premier League, the Pirates would have been relegated in 1995. And the Clippers would have been gone in 1981-82, sparing Los Angeles this team entirely.
In North America, though, despite years of failure, both teams have been consistently rewarded by their league. The Pirates – via luxury payments from teams like the Yankees – are actually profitable. And the Clippers have routinely been granted high draft choices and – via the intervention of Commissioner David Stern – were recently given the amazing talents of Chris Paul.Would relegation be good for KC? It would probably mean that we could actually have a team competing in each of the major 5 sports (I am officially counting soccer). There would simply be no reason that we couldn't have a team competing in whatever a step down from the NBA would be competing at the Sprint Center with a chance to make it to the NBA if they did well enough.
On the other hand, all of our current major sports franchises would have been relegated in the past two decades at a point, and one of them would probably have been stuck in Triple A for God knows how long. So, I guess I am still trying to puzzle out how I feel about it as a KC sports fan. Anyone have any thoughts?
1 comment:
As much as I love the system of promotion and relegation, I don't think it could ever work in professional sports here in the US. Owners pay far too much money to purchase their franchises and expansion fees are far too high to get them to go to a system where they may not be playing in THE top tier professional league.
This system is far too engrained in the US sports psyche to ever fly here...even though it is brilliant and would fix so many deadbeat owners.
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