User:Mdw0/Professional sports league organization

Professional sports leagues are organized in numerous ways. The two most significant types are a European model, characterised by a pyramid-style strcuture of hundreds of teams using promotion and relegation to determine membership in a hierarchy of leagues and a North American model characterized by its use of franchises and closed membership.

Entymology
The term 'league' has many different meanings in different areas around the world, and its use for different concepts can make comparisons confusing. Usually a league is a group of teams that play each other during the season. It is also often used for the name of the governing body as in Major League Baseball or England's Football League. Because most European soccer clubs have concurrent competitions their regular season home and away games are often referred to as 'league games' and the others as 'non-league' games, even though both separate competitions may be organised by the same governing body.

Admission of teams
Franchise system This system involves no change in the. because each team is linked to a particular city or area, and admission of new teams is rare and only occur in new markets, the clubs in this fixed system are sometimes referred to as 'franchises.' In this system, sometimes called a "franchise system" in the U.K., Only a vote of the existing franchises can admit more teams. When this is done, a new place is put up to bid among would-be owners. With a few exceptions, no second team is allowed in an area where a team already exists. This system of league organization was first developed in North America by Major League Baseball with the formation of the National League in 1876, and was later adopted by the other North American sports leagues, most notably the National Football League, the National Hockey League and the national basketball Association.

Promotion and relegation / Pyramid system

League power Although member teams are separate corporate entities from the governing body league, they operate only under the auspices of the league. The league, rather than any other sporting organization, determines the rules of the sport and sets the conditions under which players join and change teams. Since North American professional teams are so closely tied to their leagues, and, in the case of the four major team sports, clearly represent the top level of play in the world, teams almost never play games outside of their league.

Exceptions to the ownership structure described above do exist. Major League Soccer is technically not an association of franchises but a single business entity, though each team has an owner-operator. The team owners are actually shareholders in the league. The league, not the individual teams, contracts with the players.

The best teams in a given season reach a playoff tournament, and the winner of the playoffs is crowned champion of the league, and, in the case of the "the Big 4" major professional sports leagues are referred to as world champions.

Extra-league fixtures
Teams in franchise-style leagues such as used in North America or Australia rarely play any competitive matches outside those organised by the governing body. On the other hand there are a number of competitions that teams in the pyramid structure may play outside of the normal home-and-away matches known as 'league games.' Major League Soccer teams, however, play many games against international competition, due to the global nature of the sport and the presence of regional (CONCACAF) and international (FIFA) organizations.

Most of the teams in the four major North American pro sports leagues were created as part of a planned league expansion or through the creation of a rival league that later merged with its older counterpart. Only the few oldest teams in the National Hockey League, for example, existed before becoming part of the NHL or its former rival, the World Hockey Association. The rest of the teams were created ex novo as expansion teams or as charter members of the WHA, which merged into the NHL in 1979.

The North American system has some features of the European model in terms of a pyramid struture. Major League Baseball has an associated minor-league system used to develop young talent. Although most minor league teams are independently owned, each one is contracted toa major-league team, which hires and pays the players and assigns them to a given level in its minor-league hierarchy. The teams themselves do not move up or down in the hierarchy. Professional ice hockey has a system somewhat similar to baseball's, while the National Basketball Association operate a small developmental league and the NFL used to operate one in Europe.

A number of leagues outside of the United States also use this system. Most sport leagues in Australia are based on the franchise model, with the most notable examples being the Australian Football League (Aussie rules) and National Rugby League (rugby league). Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan uses this system due to American influence on the game. In cricket, the Indian Premier League, launched in 2008, also operates on this system. The Super League, which is the top level of rugby league in the United Kingdom and France, will be run on a franchise basis from 2009.

Where a country is comprised of distinct administrative or political regions, such as counties or states, some leagues are comprised of teams representing each region. Examples of this system are English cricket's County Championship, Australian cricket's Sheffield Shield and Super League Malaysia playing football. In rugby union, the Southern Hemisphere Super 14 competition operates on a franchise system, but it grew and developed from an international provincial competition where each major province contributed a team, rather than each city. In 2006, a promotion/relegation system was introduced affecting only the South African teams, but as of November of that year, it was confirmed that it will never actually be employed.

Structure of European leagues

 * See also: Sports in Europe

English football (soccer) developed a very different system from the North American one, and it has been adopted for soccer in most other countries, as well as to many other sports founded in Europe and played across the world. The system is marked by:


 * Teams are organized as "clubs". They be either unincorporated associations operating as a social club or owned by an incorporated entity operating as a business.
 * Clubs are grouped in several tiers. Each club's tier is determined by their performance historically.
 * There is promotion and relegation between adjacent tiers primarily based on performance in the previous season. Relegation may also be imposed based on other criteria, such as entering into administration.
 * A single tier, or two or more adjacent tiers, may be run by a single organization, known collectively as a league, giving rise to a hierarchy of leagues. The clubs that play in a league are members of the league organization.  Where a league comprises of more than one grouping, each grouping is called a "division".
 * New clubs may be formed at any time and at any location. New clubs are required to join a league at a low tier.
 * Teams play games both inside and outside of their leagues.

European football clubs are members both of a league and of a governing body. In the case of England, all competitive football clubs are members of The Football Association, while the top 20 teams also are members of the Premier League, a separate organization. The FA operates the national football team and tournaments that involve teams from different leagues. In conjunction with other countries' governing bodies, it also sets the playing rules and the rules under which teams can sell players' contracts to other clubs.

The promotion and relegation system is generally used to determine membership of leagues. Most commonly, a pre-determined number of teams that finish the bottom of a league or division are automatically dropped down, or relegated, to a lower level for the next season. They are replaced by teams who are promoted from that lower tier either by finishing with the best records or by winning a playoff. In England in 2010, Burnley, Hull City and Portsmouth were relegated from the Premier League to the Football League Championship, the second level of English soccer. They were replaced by the top two teams from the second level, Newcastle United and West Bromwich Albion, as well as Blackpool F.C., which won a playoff tournament of the teams that finished third through sixth.

The tiered structure is sometimes referred to as a "pyramid" system as the higher tiers have only one grouping, while tiers lower down may tend two have more groupings, often regionally based. In the major European footballing nations of England, Italy, Germany, Spain and France, the higher tiers are professional, while the lower tiers tend to be semi-professional or amateur. The largest sports pyramid worldwide is the English football league system.

Unlike in North American pro sports, where the "league" is the only competition member teams play in, European teams play matches both inside and outside of their leagues. In English soccer, a team may follow a league game with a match in the FA Cup (a tournament involving hundreds of pro and semi-professional teams), and then a game in the UEFA Champions League (a competition involving the best European teams from the previous year.

In any given year, a country could have several trophy winners. In 2004-05, Chelsea won the Premier League championship, Arsenal won the FA Cup and Liverpool won the UEFA Champions League.

A similar system is used by other sports popular in Europe such as rugby union, rugby league, field hockey and team handball.

Comparison between the North American system and the European system
In the European system, the league does not choose which cities are to have teams in the top division. For example, Leeds, the fourth-biggest city in England, saw their team relegated from the Premier League to the Championship in 2004, and then saw their team relegated to the third-tier League One in 2007. Leeds will remain without a Premiership team as long as it takes for Leeds United or in theory any other local club to do well enough in the second-tier division to win the right to play in the Premiership. Famously, the French Ligue 1 lacked a team from Paris for some years.

Territorial rights are not recognized, and successful new teams in a geographical location can come to dominate the incumbents. In Munich, for example, TSV 1860 München were initially more successful than the city's current biggest team Bayern München. Major cities such as London may have many teams in the professional leagues: for example, in 2010–11 it has five teams in the Premier League alone, an additional eight teams in the three fully professional leagues within The Football League, and at least one fully professional team (AFC Wimbledon) in Conference National, the top level of Non-League football.

The "closed shop" aspect of baseball's National League was not deemed to be necessary to ensure stability in England because a national English football league did not require the sort of travel commitments that were necessary in the U.S. A secretariat was created to organize and run the Football League. Later lower tiers (divisions) were added.

This system is widely used in football around the world, notably in Africa and Latin America as well as Europe. The most notable variation has developed in Latin America where many countries have two league seasons per year, which scheduling allows because many Spanish-speaking Latin American nations lack a national cup competition. Promotion and relegation has historically been used in other team sports founded in the United Kingdom, such as rugby union, rugby league and cricket.

The system is also used in Europe even when the sports were founded in America, showing that the league system is not related to the sport itself, but more on the tradition of sports organisation in that region. Sports such as basketball in Spain and Lithuania and ice hockey in Russia use promotion and relegation. Alternately, in Australia the A-League follows the tradition of Australian sports having a franchise model that better suits a country with great distances between the country's main population centres, similar to the situation in the U.S. and Canada.

East Asian countries (Japan, China, South Korea, Taiwan) have a particular differentiation among leagues: "European" sports such as football and rugby use promotion and relegation, while "American" sports such as baseball and basketball use franchising, with a few differences varying from country to country. A similar situation exists in countries in Central America and the Caribbean, where football and baseball share several close markets.