The recent POLITICO report “The NBA’s billion-dollar bid to crack Europe is already hitting political resistance” is interesting to me, not because I much care about a league I only casually follow’s expansion prospects but because of this, buried several paragraphs in:
Basketball also marks the latest clash in a broader debate over the European sports model, which is based on promotion and relegation between leagues, and solidarity payments across a pyramidal structure. The NBA operates under the American sports model, in which franchises maintain permanent places in closed leagues, generating significant revenues for team owners and creating highly paid superstars matched only by top European football clubs.
[…]
“The main reason we don’t support NBA Europe is that closed leagues and competitions benefit only the top percent of the commercially successful clubs, but cause significant harm to the sport at national level,” one senior European government official told POLITICO.
While the EU doesn’t run sports in Europe, it does police the marketplace in which sports operate — and officials were quick to defend the values the EU seeks to uphold.
“As policymakers, including at EU level, there is a clear duty to uphold the competition acquis, but also to give full weight to the wider EU values repeatedly underlined in court judgments, such as solidarity, openness, and fairness,” EU Sports Commissioner Glenn Micallef told POLITICO.
Stipulating that some of this is deflection from a goal of keeping the profits from European sports in European hands, there is indeed a radically different sporting culture in European professional leagues. As noted in passing in the piece, the plan to create a permanent Super League in European soccer a few years back almost immediately collapsed after enormous public outcry.
Something like the European system of promotion and relegation would be unthinkble in the major American sports. The cost of entry into the NFL and NBA is in the multi-billion dollar range at this point; there’s simply no way that someone would make that investment and risk being downgraded into a minor league.
Where the idea has gained substantial traction—at least in the minds of sportswriters and fans, if not those with decisionmaking power—is in college football. The highest level of the sport, known as the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A), has a whopping 136 teams. These range from elite programs like Alabama, Ohio State, Texas, Michigan, and Notre Dame to the likes of Akron, Ball State, Kent State, and Louisiana-Monroe. The so-called Power Four conferences have annual revenues in the billions, while the so-called Group of Six conferences have revenues in the millions. Despite the inclusion of James Madison and Tulane in this year’s FBS playoffs, these schools simply have no realistic shot at winning championships given the revenue and talent disparities—especially with recent changes allowing transfers without sitting out and pay-per-play. (Indeed, JMU’s quarterback will play for a Power Four program next season.)
Indeed, Division I split into two subdivisions for football way back in 1978 to solve this problem. But it didn’t solve the bigger issue: athletics, especially football, are a financial loser outside the top division. So, even programs that lack the resources to play at the highest levels are strongly incentivized to do so.
Steven Taylor and I were at Troy (then Troy State) when the administration decided to move from Division I-AA to Division I-A in the late 1990s. We both thought it nonsensical. For example, the per-game ticket sales requirement to meet the division’s requirements exceeded the population of Pike County, where the campus is located. But the school’s chancellor, Jack Hawkins, argued that playing at any scholarship level was a money loser and that moving to the highest level was the ticket to raising the school’s name recognition.
The Trojans had been an NAIA school as recently at the 1969 season and played in the Division II Gulf South Conference from 1970-1990, where it was a rival to my Jacksonville State Gamecocks. They moved up to the I-AA the following year, initially as an independent, before joining the Southland Football League from 1996-2000. They transitioned to I-A the next year, initially as an independent, before joining the Sun Belt Conference in 2004.
Jacksonville State, where I finished my undergraduate and master’s programs, took the same journey, just a bit more slowly. They moved up to Division II and the Gulf South Conference at the same time as Troy (1970), but stayed through the 1992 season and didn’t move up to I-AA until 1996 and to FBS until 2023.
Neither Troy nor Jax State has any business playing on the same field as cross-state powerhouses Alabama or Auburn. While there are occasional upsets,* they’re in separate leagues for all intents and purposes.
Promotion and relegation would solve the competitive fairness problem (while surely causing others). We could separate out the Power Four and Notre Dame into a super league that competed for the top-level championship, while the remaining schools play for a championship of their own. BUT, the bottom schools in each Super League regional division would move down while the top schools in the next division would move up. That would eliminate the anti-trust concerns that motivated giving automatic berths to “the five highest-ranked conference champions” and add some excitement at the lower levels of the sport.
Alas, the American sporting culture likely won’t go for this. The money that a Purdue (0-9 in the Big Ten and 2-10 overall) or Arkansas (0-8 in the SEC and 2-10 overall) would lose moving into the MAC or Sun Belt would wreak havoc on the school’s athletic department budgets. European soccer teams seem to manage that problem somehow.
*Jax State beat Ole Miss (in double overtime) in 2011 and Florida State in 2021; Troy beat Cincinnati in 1999, Mississippi State in 2001, Missouri in 2004, and LSU in 2017.
