Promotion and relegation

In most sports leagues around the world (with the North American professional leagues as the most important exception), relegation (or demotion) means the mandated transfer of the worst team(s) of a higher league into a lower league at the end of the season. Usually an equal number of best team(s) from the lower league enjoy the opposite procedure, promotion, but occasionally the number of team promoted and relegated can differ. For example in 1995 the English Premier League reduced its numbers by two, by relegating four teams, while only allowing two promotions from the lower division. This is seen as the defining characteristic of the 'European' form of professional sports league organisation.

Promotion and relegation have the effect of regularly rearranging the leagues according to the teams' playing strength, and also prevents the games of the lower-ranked teams of each league from becoming boring towards the end of the season. Relegation can potentially mean severe hardship or even bankruptcy for demoted clubs. Relegation can be a heart-wringing melodrama for the fans, but just avoiding it can also be a source of pure bliss and continuing legends, sometimes even more so than winning the title.

The following are the promotion and relegation rules for the English Premier League and Football League, to serve as an example:

1. FA Premier League (level 1): Bottom three teams relegated.
2. Football League Championship (level 2): Top two automatically promoted; next four teams compete in a playoff, with the winner gaining the third promotion spot. Bottom three relegated.
3. Football League One (level 3): Top two automatically promoted; next four teams play off, with the winner gaining the third promotion spot. Bottom four relegated.
4. Football League Two (level 4): Top three automatically promoted; next four teams play off, with the winner gaining the fourth promotion spot. Bottom two relegated.
5. Conference National (level 5): Top team promoted, subject to stadium being of required standard; next four teams play off, with the winner gaining the second promotion spot (again with the same stadium requirement). If stadia are not of the required quality, teams from League Two are not relegated. Note that Conference National is not part of The Football League, but is instead the top level of the National League System, a comprehensive system of lower-level leagues which itself has promotion and relegation between its levels.

The current promotion and relegation rules for other major European leagues are as follow:

1. Spanish La Liga: Bottom three teams relegated. Top three teams from the Segunda División automatically promoted.
2. Italian Serie A: Bottom three teams relegated. Top two teams from Serie B automatically promoted; next four teams play off, with the winner gaining the third promotion spot.
3. German First Bundesliga: Bottom three teams relegated. Top three teams from the Second Bundesliga automatically promoted.
4. French Ligue 1: Bottom three teams relegated. Top three teams from Ligue 2 automatically promoted.
5. Dutch Eredivisie: Bottom team automatically relegated; top team in Eerste Divisie automatically promoted. Next two Eredivisie teams enter into a play-off system with the eight best remaining teams from the Eerste Divisie (the six winners of six-match periodes plus the two best other teams), with the two winners being promoted to or remaining in the premier division.
6. Scottish Premier League: Bottom team relegated. Top team in Scottish First Division automatically promoted if its ground meets Premier League standards; otherwise, there will be no relegation from the Premier League.

Other relegation schemes consider points acquired over more than one season. For instance in the Argentine first division, the points average of the last 3 seasons is computed, and the 2 teams with the lower averages are directly relegated. The 3rd and 4th from the bottom play home-and-away matches against the 3rd and 4th from the top of the second division respectively (process called "promoción"), and the winner of each key stays in, or moves to, first division. Thus, the number of teams promoted each year varies between two and four. Newly-promoted teams only average the seasons since their last promotion (see 2003/2004 Argentine Relegation for an example).

Non-relegation systems

Main article: Sports in the United States

A notable exception to this system is sport in North America, where teams are not relegated, owing to the lack of comprehensive governing bodies covering all playing levels in all four major North American professional team sports. None of the four sports have a comprehensive association analogous to England's Football Association and governing bodies, if they exist, are limited in scope. North American educational institutions, rather than sport clubs, act as primary feeders (directly from university in the case of American football and basketball, indirectly in the case of baseball) to supply players to three American professional team sports, while hockey has a separate youth club system supplemented by school team participation that prospective North American players progress through. While American baseball and hockey do in fact have lower professional levels, the fact that minor league team players are either employees of (baseball) or under contract to (hockey) their affiliated major league team make team promotion and relegation incompatible with the present structure of any North American team sport.

Recently, the United Soccer Leagues of North America (with teams from across the United States and Canada) discussed a possible relegation system, and implemented two leagues, the USL division one and two. However this would still be different from the usual promotion system, as the European systems usually extend over all ranks from the worst village amateur teams to the nation's top professional teams.

External link

• Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation Source for historical information on promoted and relegated teams.