Sports League: North America vs Europe

When I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, I watched NHL hockey. The era was when the Edmonton Oilers won the Stanley Cup multiple times in a row.

This formed my understanding of sports - teams play each other over a season for top positions in their league to playoff for a championship.

This model plays out across different sports with leagues - NHL (hockey), NBA (basketball), MLB (baseball), NFL (football), MLS (soccer), etc.

For those teams at the bottom, they just stayed there. When play-off season started, their season ended. Teams at the bottom could just stay there season after season.

Until I realized: this is only how North American sport leagues work.

After watching All or Nothing: Manchester City - I learned how the football league operates in Europe is different compared to North America.

(I will use football to refer to what North Americans refer to as soccer from here on out.)

Football in Europe have multiple leagues - each country has their own rankings of their leagues and a team has their league to play in for the season.

If a team is on the bottom of the league, they won’t just stay there season after season, there is a process of moving teams between leagues.

A bottom ranking team will be demoted (relegated) to the league below. Teams at the top of lower leagues are promoted to higher leagues.

In most North American sports league, a team at the bottom will probably just stay there, year after year.

With this model, teams that are on the “bottom of their league” must keep fighting or face relegation to a lower league - there is a cost to losing than the “team’s reputation”. A team can’t just “keep losing”.

For me, this single difference makes European football leagues far more fascinating to watch and follow season to season than North American sports leagues and converted me to spending time studying football.