Professional sports league organization

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Professional sports leagues are organized in numerous ways. The two most significant types are one that developed in Europe, characterised by a tiered structure using promotion and relegation to determine participation in a hierarchy of leagues or divisions and a North American originated model characterized by its use of franchises and closed membership. Both these systems remain most common in their area of origin, although both systems are used worldwide.



Structure of North American leagues[edit]

Professional sports leagues in North America comprise a stipulated number of clubs, known as franchises, which field one team each.[1] The franchises have territorial rights, usually exclusive territories large enough to cover major metropolitan areas, so that they have no local rivals. New teams may enter the competition only by a vote of current members; typically, a new place is put up for bid by would-be owners. This system is sometimes called a "franchise system" in the UK.[2][3][4] It was introduced in baseball with the formation of the National League in 1876[NB 1] and later adopted by the other North American leagues.

Although member clubs are corporate entities separate from their leagues, they operate only under league auspices. Partly because that relationship is so close, partly because the four major team sports leagues represent the top level of play in the world, North American teams almost never play competitive games against outside opponents. National Hockey League (NHL) and National Basketball Association (NBA) teams have played against European hockey and basketball teams in preseason exhibitions. The North American league, rather than any sport governing body, determines the playing rules and scoring rules of its game, and the rules under which players join and change teams.

The teams are organized with a view to each major city having a team to support. Only the largest cities have more than one team. As such the teams are often referred to as franchises. Even though they are not technically franchises in a business sense, the league is organised in a way that assures teams continued existence in the league from year to year, which fosters an ongoing connection with the team's supporters. On occasion a league may decide to grow the sport by admitting a new expansion team into the league. 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 merger of a rival league. Only a handful of teams in the National Hockey League, for example, existed before becoming part of the NHL. The rest of the teams were created ex novo as expansion teams or as charter members of the World Hockey Association, which merged with the NHL in 1979.

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 some cases as world champions. American and Canadian sports leagues typically have such "playoff" systems. These have their roots in long travel distances common in US and Canadian sports; to cut down on travel, leagues are typically aligned in geographic divisions and feature unbalanced schedules with teams playing more matches against opponents in the same division. Due to the unbalanced schedule typical in US and Canadian leagues, not all teams face the same opponents, and some teams may not meet during a regular season at all. This results in teams with identical records that have faced different opponents differing numbers of times, making team records alone an imperfect measure of league supremacy. The playoffs allow for head-to-head elimination-style competition between teams to counterbalance this.

Major League Soccer is a North American league that exhibits some aspects of the European structure because the sport it plays has a European rather than American origin. 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. Unlike teams in the four major sports, several Major League Soccer teams qualify to play competitive matches in the CONCACAF Champions League against teams from outside the U.S. and Canada, and MLS uses playing rules set by the international governing body of its sport. MLS followed its own playing rules until 2004, when it adopted FIFA rules. In another parallel with the European model, both the U.S. and Canada have separate knockout cup competitions during the MLS season that include teams from lower leagues. In the U.S., the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup has had MLS participation from the league's inception; starting with the 2012 cup, each competition features all American-based MLS sides. Similarly, all of Canada's MLS teams compete in the Canadian Championship. However, the league structure of MLS follows the North American model, with a single premier league and no promotion or relegation.

Some other North American systems also have a hierarchical structure but without the promotion and relegation of clubs exhibited in the European model. Major League Baseball uses a minor-league system to develop young talent. Most minor league clubs are independently owned, but each one contracts with a major-league club that hires and pays players and assigns them to its various minor clubs. The minor clubs do not move up or down in the hierarchy by on-field success or failure. Professional ice hockey has a system somewhat similar to baseball's, while the National Basketball Association operates a small developmental league. The National Football League does not have a minor league system as of 2011 but it has operated or affiliated with minor leagues in the 1930s, 1940s, 1960s, 1990s, and the early 2000s.

Structure of European leagues[edit]

Football in England developed a very different system from the North American one, and it has been adopted for football in most other countries, as well as to many other sports founded in Europe and played across the world. The features of the system are:

  • Matches played both inside and outside of 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 72 teams in the three levels below the Premier League are members of still another body, The Football League. The FA operates the national football team and tournaments that involve teams from different leagues (except the Football League Cup, operated by The Football League and open to its own teams and those in the Premier League). 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 the 2010-2011 season, the teams Birmingham City, Blackpool and West Ham United were relegated from the Premier League to the Football League Championship, the second level of English football. They were replaced by the top two teams from the second level, Queens Park Rangers and Norwich City, both of which won automatic promotion, as well as Swansea City (a Welsh club that plays in the English system), which won a playoff tournament of the teams that finished third through sixth. In the 2011-12 season, the teams Wolverhampton Wanderers, Blackburn, and Bolton were relegated to the Championship. They were replaced by Reading, Southampton, and West Ham. The two former teams had won automatic promotion, while the latter occupied the last promotion spot when they defeated Cardiff 5-0 on aggregate in the semifinals, and defeated Blackpool 2-1 at the final in Wembley Stadium.



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, Leeds United, relegated from the Premier League to the Championship in 2004, and then saw United relegated to the third-tier League One in 2007. Leeds will remain without a Premiership team as long as it takes for 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, France's capital and largest city, for some years. Likewise, Berlin clubs in the Bundesliga have been rare, due to the richer clubs being all located in the former West Germany.



Systems around the world[edit]

Leagues around the world generally follow one or the other of these systems with some variation. Most sport leagues in Australia are similar to the North American model, using playoffs and no relegation, but without geographical divisions, with the most notable examples being the Australian Football League (Aussie rules) and National Rugby League (rugby league). Nippon Professional Baseball in Japan uses the North American 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, has been run on a franchise basis since 2009,[8] but will return to a promotion/relegation model with the 2015 season. Another example of a franchised league in European sport is ice hockey's Kontinental Hockey League, centered mainly in Russia with teams also located in Belarus, Croatia, Finland, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Slovakia, with a team from Ukraine currently on hiatus due to ongoing unrest in that country.


The European model is also used in Europe even when the sports were founded in America, showing that the league system adopted is not determined by the sport itself, but more on the tradition of sports organisation in that region. Sports such as basketball in Spain and Lithuania use promotion and relegation. In the same vein, the Australian A-League does not use the pyramid structure normally found in football, but instead follows the tradition of Australian sports having a franchise model and a playoff system that better suits a country with a few important central locations where a sport needs to ensure there is a team playing with no risk of relegation.[9] Likewise, another notable example of "European" sports using the American model is the Super Rugby competition of the southern hemisphere, featuring 15 franchises from across South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.


Historical comparisons[edit]

A major factor in the development of the North American closed membership system during the 19th Century was the distances between cities, with some teams separated by at least halfway across the North American continent, resulting in high traveling costs. When the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs was established in 1876, its founders judged that in order to prosper, they must make baseball's highest level of competition a "closed shop", with a strict limit on the number of teams, and with each member having exclusive local rights. This guarantee of a place in the league year after year would permit each club owner to monopolize fan bases in their respective exclusive territories and give them the confidence to invest in infrastructure, such as improved ballparks. This in turn would guarantee the revenues needed to support traveling across the continent.[10]

In contrast, the shorter distances between urban areas in England allowed more clubs to develop large fan bases without incurring the same travel costs in North America. When The Football League was founded in 1888, it was not intended to be a rival of The Football Association but rather the top competition within it. The new league was not universally accepted as England's top-calibre competition right away. To help win fans of clubs outside The Football League, a system was established in which the worst teams at the end of each season would need to win re-election against any clubs wishing to join. A rival league, the Football Alliance, was then formed in 1889. When the two merged in 1892, it was not on equal terms; rather, most of the Alliance clubs were put in the new Football League Second Division, whose best teams would move up to the First Division in place of its worst teams. Another merger, with the top division of the Southern League in 1920, helped form the Third Division in similar fashion, firmly establishing the principle of promotion and relegation.[10]

See also[edit]


  1. ^ Before 1876, baseball clubs joined the professional class (1869–1870) or the professional association by announcing their intentions and paying any required fees, an open system.


  1. ^ Rader, Benjamin G.; 2002; Baseball:A History of America's Game; Second Edition; University of Illinois Press
  2. ^ "Steve James: The Twenty20 franchise system simply will not work". Daily Telegraph, London, UK. 18 April 2010. 
  3. ^ "ECB head dismissed talk of Twenty20 franchise system". Taipei Times, Taipei, Taiwan. 
  4. ^ Shropshire, Kenneth L. "The sports franchise game: Cities in pursuit of sports franchises, events, stadiums and arenas"
  5. ^ FIFA Regulations On The Status And Transfer Of Players
  6. ^ Article discussing the financial disparity between the Premier League and the Football League
  7. ^ Bundesliga history
  8. ^ Article discussing the potentially negative affects of franchising on Rugby League
  9. ^ "David Gallop places consolidation of A-League high on agenda". The Sydney Morning Herald. 

Further reading[edit]