The elephant in the (court) room.

By Alan Chapman

With NASL team RayoOKC playing their first season in the metro, and USL team Oklahoma City Energy FC playing their third, Oklahoma Soccer fans are getting a chance to participate in one of the most important but quietest debates in sports. It may not grab the headlines like the name of the Washington D.C. football team. It might not provoke accusations of disloyalty like the free agency clause. It won’t tip its hand with a tribal affiliation. It certainly doesn’t throw excuses in the path of logic based on a player’s skill or media perception (Brady, I’m looking at you and your under-inflated balls). But, it simmers under the surface and is the implicit underlying subtext of many more soccer debates than you’d think.

Promotion and relegation versus a fixed League franchise system.

First, a little context. Just about every other respected and professional league system in the world operates on a promotion and relegation system. The top three teams move up a league – promotion; the bottom three move down - relegation. With time, skill, investment and recruiting, any team can become the best in the country. Think of the OKC Dodgers putting together a good team, building a series of wins and ending the season by winning the Triple-A Baseball National Championship. Next year they would play in the MLB and the worst MLB team would play in AAA. In a couple years they could win the World Series. It’s simple, it’s dramatic, it adds multiple layers of complexity to the long term, year after year, season performance, and it allows lambs to become lions and giants to become, well, much smaller giants. Promotion means you are playing against a whole league of statistically superior teams so you’d better step up your game. Relegation means you will lose some income from TV rights, sponsorship, away tickets and kit sales, and you might have a star player or two want to transfer to a higher team, so you’d better step up your game. The common thread for the fan here is they get to watch a team stepping up their game. If all the clubs are beholden to one umbrella organization, they will ultimately play for The Man. With promotion/relegation, they will play for The Fan.

Obviously, there are problems. The influx of Money to the very top teams can lead to a culture of needing, or worse expecting, to win. That leads to a revolving door on the coach’s office. There is no draft system in professional soccer, so the money does tend to pool around the biggest clubs. Smaller clubs nurture talent not only for themselves, but also to sell to bigger clubs for a decent transfer fee. Leicester became only the sixth team to ever win the English Premier League, and Blackburn only won once. Manchester United have won it more than half the time. But, that misses the point. Anyone can win it. At the start of every season your destiny is in your own hands. There are 20 clubs in the EPL but in total 47 different clubs have played in it.

After going 0-16, why should the 2008 Detroit Lions play the 2009 season against the same opponents? Last season, the Philadelphia 76ers went 10-72, but come the fall they will once again line up in the world’s premier basketball league. Why should they? Is there not a team in the second tier that deserves a shot? Should they not spend some time in the lower leagues, rebuilding, growing and re-focusing, away from the relentless and unforgiving spotlight that is the NBA? If you support the Lions or the Sixers, this prospect is not one to be welcomed with open arms. If you are an owner, this situation could seem quite hazardous to your portfolio. However if you are a fan, a true fan, either of these teams or a lower league one, it is a shining beacon of hope for the future. Go online right now, find a Leicester City fan and ask them if it’s worth it. Watching your team get relegated, twice, is heartbreaking, but watching them lift the trophy is a moment of joy that cannot be equaled in professional sports. Your team is your team, in good times and bad.

But sadly, I don’t believe it will work here yet for three major reasons. Money, money and money. Let’s deal with these individually.

First: money. There are simply not enough teams right now to make this work. Well, that’s not strictly true; rather there is too much space between teams to make it work. Not space as in talent, resources, skills or any other intangible thing. Actual real space. People here don’t fully realize how big the USA is. You know it’s big, you revel in the rich geographic diversity and you celebrate its inherent bigness. But as a European let me tell you, it’s really big. Mind blowingly big. Stupidly big. Continent sized big. “Seriously, we’ve been driving for two days and we’re still in Texas?” big. Dear Lord this is a big country. That’s why pro ports have conferences: because, and I can’t emphasize this enough, America is big. From a purely financial perspective it would be virtually impossible for most soccer teams to travel that much in a season. And as for fans traveling to away games? Forget about that. London to Manchester is just over 200 miles. Drive 200 miles west from OKC and you are in the badlands of north Texas still 50 miles out from Amarillo.

Conferences by their very definition negate the true benefit of promotion/relegation. You would only be able to move up or down within your geographic conference and you’d end up with a championship game. So what if the second best team in the West is better than the best team in the East? How would you know? You could debate it all through the off season and you’ll still not reach an agreement. Vertical movement with a league system by default relies on full horizontal movement between clubs. Without that horizontal equity, why bother changing the system?

Second: money. Professional soccer in the United States has a small but loyal following, a following that is growing every day. The women’s game already dominates the world. For the USMNT it seems like every World Cup is hyped by the sporting press as “The year America falls in love with soccer,” but somehow they never quite do. Well, here’s the dirty little secret: some people don’t want you to. There is money in pro soccer here in the USA - enough so the powers that be can get a decent slice of the pie, but not so much that wealthy investors are too tempted to sweep in and buy up all the interests. Local business people with a passion for the game can invest in a team, help the sport and their local community, and potentially, but by no means with any guarantee, see a return on their money. Local sponsorship is still a reality; it hasn’t all been sold by the governing body to multi-national conglomerates. All this is possible without writing NBA-sized checks.

The rest of the world likes to watch American teams play and laugh condescendingly at “the adorable Americans, aren’t they just precious!” They will tell you, ad nausium, that “The USA only plays sports that the rest of the world doesn’t play because they don’t like losing.” If I had a dollar for every time I had ever heard anyone say “They call it the World Series, but they are the only country that plays in it” I wouldn’t be sat here writing blogs. They love nothing more than an aging superstar from one of the European leagues, not really worth the space in the locker room anymore but too respected to just dump, getting an offer from the MLS. He can strap on his boots and his Brett Favre-endorsed back support and head over to the New World for one more farewell tour of the Colonies, like The Rolling Stones in Under Armor shorts. But here’s the thing - it’s fear, pure and simple. The rest of the world is terrified, terrified, that the USA will actually fall in love with soccer. If America commits to soccer like they do to other sports, the Big Four, the NCAA, Olympic teams, even high school sports, the rest of the world may as well pack up their cleats and sit down. Maybe take up put-put golf. Because an America that embraces soccer with the same passion and intensity that it embraces the other things it loves will be unstoppable. At that point the money flows in and the small fish get grilled. The fact that currently soccer here is fueled as much by passion as by money is refreshing and stands in stark contrast to many other leagues around the world. Will we still be able to say the same if the “investors” push out all the “fan-owners”? So growing the game and playing as an equal on the world stage is not in everyone’s best financial interest.

This is where the debate traditionally gets ugly. It turns into a “MLS owners are money grabbing fat cats and the NASL owners are plucky underdogs just in it for the love of the game” type twitter war. This may be partially true but it is not the whole story. MLS wants to grow the sport by expansion franchises. In 2013 the USL was integrated into MLS Reserve League competition for one of two reasons. Either to promote the development of talent in the game in the USA, or, to choke off the threat from the smaller USL markets to the big MLS money. Pick which reason you want and run with it. Many in the USL have embraced this concept and are acting as MLS feeder teams, one day hoping that a crumb will fall from the big table and they’ll be allowed to enter the hallowed halls of MLS. NASL almost has no choice but to position itself as being attacked from above by MLS and below by USL when all they want is for soccer to succeed here. The narrative writes itself. Amongst the fans and the press in the OKC metro this gives you the following choice: Rayo is either the good guy fighting against the Energy puppet controlled by the dark side overlords, or they are the spoilsports getting in the way of the real local club just trying to get on in the world. Again, take whichever metaphor suits you best and lean into it.

Third: money. Please believe I am saying this with nothing but love and respect for the United States of America, arguably the richest tapestry the modern world has woven. In many ways the pinnacle of civilization and still a beacon of hope to so many throughout the world. But, if I may suggest one tiny flaw; you do like to sue each other. Quite a lot. There is not a doubt in my mind that every club that was relegated would immediately review the video of every game, find the bad referee call, the missed opportunity, the playing surface, the rest between games that their opponents had, the phase of the moon, the shape of the clouds on any given day, whatever. They would sue anyone and everyone they could to avoid relegation because relegation by definition means a loss of earnings and stature. I’m not happy saying that, but I believe to my core that we all know it to be true. “Make the clubs sign a waiver of the right to litigate” I hear you cry! Oh, you mean the contract that the judge will possibly throw out because the team suddenly reveals it signed it under duress, it wasn’t fair, it is a hindrance on the free trade between the states, a violation of the RICO act, the league doesn’t have the authority to do this, etc, etc.? Even if they lose their lawsuit, it will be tied up in the appeals court system way past the start of the next season. “Use television replays to ensure the Ref is right when he makes a call,” you say? No. Use replays and you will very soon end up with a three hour match consisting of nothing but 90 minutes of free kicks sparingly dispersed between erectile dysfunction commercials. If you watch a lot of NFL football, you know how this ends. The end result of changing this would be the relegated teams, or more accurately their lawyers, would disrupt the entire league system.

I have read suggestions, unbelievably, that the way around this is to compensate the owners in the MLS if their teams are relegated. Yes, you read that right. If your team isn’t successful and drops down a league, we will still pay you as if that didn’t happen. To paraphrase in plain English: We can’t make a better product because if someone else makes an even better one we will lose some profit. We all have to agree to a collective level of mediocrity. That is a corporate mission statement if ever I heard one. “Stuff you need. It’s expensive because if one of us made it cheaper then we’d all have to. Shut up and Sign here.” I just typed that and now in my head I can hear how it is actually being said about so many different issues. I mean, consumer choice is one thing, but what about my monopoly on this? Compared to the major European leagues, television money for MLS is a small change, so that impact shouldn’t be hard to absorb. The issue is in the very nature of being a franchise instead of an independent organization within a larger league system. The value of the franchise would be impacted if a team was relegated. Let’s say you value your franchise at 200% of its yearly revenue. If you get relegated that yearly revenue could realistically be expected to drop, therefore, the franchise value would drop accordingly. Now to those of us who didn’t spend our spare millions on purchasing an MLS team the response might be along the lines of “Well, looks to me like you’d better make sure the team is good then.” But to those who did the response might be “OK. So who’s going first”? Conversely, the lower league teams could expect to see their value increase if they were promoted. That’s kind of the whole point. The game, and the revenue, grows across all teams because the system encourages a better product for all. It’s the short term profit verses long term returns argument.

So what do we do? For those of us that embrace the benefits of the promotion/relegation system this is an easy fix: get loud. I would suggest that in this election year, we act as much unlike politicians as we possibly can. Grow the game is not just a hashtag, it should be a lifestyle. Tell your friends about soccer, and especially about your local team. Invite them along to a match. When someone asks “why do you like soccer, it’s boring” take a minute to explain it to them. Get passionate. Understand that to many “it’s boring” actually means “how the heck are they still playing? Why has nobody called a time out yet? What is going on? I’m so confused!!!” You wouldn’t think of answering “Yeah but what about your sport? It has XYZ issues.” It shouldn’t be a choice between soccer and football, baseball, hockey, basketball, or whatever other sport is being played. Part of the global appeal of soccer is that it can, in essence, be played by anyone. You don’t need special equipment, you just need a ball, or something close to a ball, that will do. The whole “jumpers for goalposts” cliché didn’t come about by accident. Soccer fans here, the small but enthusiastic minority that we are, have nothing to fear from being loud. We are unashamedly pro-soccer, not anti-“the other”. Root for the national team at work and someone will ask “are America playing in something?” Grab them by the lapels and don’t let go until they at least understand that you love this game, and why you love this game, even if they aren’t there yet. Soccer at its best is a flowing game. The other major sports have time outs, huge squads, different players with specific skills for specific plays, points awarded for transgressions, and so on. The one fundamental difference with soccer, the one thing that really differentiates it from the big four American sports comes down to this: If you sit down, you stay sat down. Period. You play for 45 minutes per half, no designated hitter, no relief pitcher, no sending the kicking team in, no Number 6, no commercial breaks, none of it. If you are substituted you stay substituted. It is a game, not a disconnected series of “plays” that specialist team members can participate in

Nothing will change until the game is big enough to support the change, but we are also up against a whole host of reasons that people have to maintain the status quo. If MLS is to be the top flight of soccer I would like to get there by earning our way in, not waiting for an expansion slot to become available to purchase. Play your way in not pay your way in. We are a team, not a fast food restaurant. If soccer in the USA is to truly realize its potential on a local, national and international stage the teams and their fans have to back the leagues, and the governing bodies, into a corner.

Promotion/relegation is good for the game and I truly believe that it could actually be the catalyst that makes “America fall in love with soccer.” It is undeniably good for the teams and good for the fans. But right now we don’t have enough of either for it to work.

(I still think we should play the Energy once a year though)