In most sports leagues around the world (with the North American professional leagues as the most important exception), relegation (or demotion) means the mandated transfer of the worst team(s) of a higher division into a lower division at the end of the season. Usually an equal number of best team(s) from the lower division enjoy the opposite procedure, promotion, but occasionally the number of teams promoted and relegated can differ. For example in 1995 the English Premier League reduced its numbers by two, by relegating four teams, while only allowing two promotions from the lower division. This is seen as the defining characteristic of the 'European' form of professional sports league organisation.

Promotion and relegation have the effect of regularly rearranging the leagues according to the teams' playing strength, and also prevents the games of the lower-ranked teams of each division from becoming less meaningful towards the end of the season, or even being purposefully lost for a better position in the next years draft. Relegation can potentially mean severe hardship or even bankruptcy for demoted clubs. Relegation can be a heart-wringing melodrama for the fans, but just avoiding it can also be a source of pure bliss and continuing legends, sometimes even more so than winning the title.

The following are the promotion and relegation rules for the English Premier League and Football League, to serve as an example:

1. FA Premier League (level 1): Bottom three teams relegated.
2. Football League Championship (level 2): Top two automatically promoted; next four teams compete in a playoff, with the winner gaining the third promotion spot. Bottom three relegated.
3. Football League One (level 3): Top two automatically promoted; next four teams play off, with the winner gaining the third promotion spot. Bottom four relegated.
4. Football League Two (level 4): Top three automatically promoted; next four teams play off, with the winner gaining the fourth promotion spot. Bottom two relegated.
5. Conference National (level 5): Top team promoted, subject to stadium being of required standard; next four teams play off, with the winner gaining the second promotion spot (again with the same stadium requirement). If stadia are not of the required quality, teams from League Two are not relegated. Note that Conference National is not part of The Football League, but is instead the top level of the National League System, a comprehensive system of lower-level leagues which itself has promotion and relegation between its levels.

The current promotion and relegation rules for the top two divisions of other major European leagues are as follow:

1. Spanish La Liga: Bottom three teams relegated. Top three teams from the Segunda División automatically promoted.
2. Italian Serie A: Bottom three teams relegated. Top two teams from Serie B automatically promoted; next four teams play off, with the winner gaining the third promotion spot.
3. German First Bundesliga: Bottom three teams relegated. Top three teams from the Second Bundesliga automatically promoted.
4. French Ligue 1: Bottom three teams relegated. Top three teams from Ligue 2 automatically promoted.
5. Dutch Eredivisie: Bottom team automatically relegated; top team in Eerste Divisie automatically promoted. Next two Eredivisie teams enter into a play-off system with the eight best remaining teams from the Eerste Divisie (the six winners of six-match periodes plus the two best other teams), with the two winners being promoted to or remaining in the premier division.
6. Scottish Premier League: Bottom team relegated. Top team in Scottish First Division automatically promoted if its ground meets Premier League standards; otherwise, the bottom team will remain in the Premier League.

Other relegation schemes consider points acquired over more than one season. For instance in the Argentine first division, the points average of the last 3 seasons is computed, and the 2 teams with the lower averages are directly relegated. The 3rd and 4th from the bottom play home-and-away matches against the 3rd and 4th from the top of the second division respectively (process called "promoción"), and the winner of each key stays in, or moves to, first division. Thus, the number of teams promoted each year varies between two and four. Newly-promoted teams only average the seasons since their last promotion (see 2003/2004 Argentine Relegation for an example).

Non-relegation systems

A notable exception to this system is sport in North America, where teams are not relegated. North American educational institutions, rather than sport clubs, act as primary feeders (directly from university in the case of American football and basketball, indirectly in the case of baseball) to supply players to three American professional team sports, while hockey has a separate youth club system supplemented by school team participation that prospective North American players progress through. While American baseball and hockey do in fact have lower professional levels, the fact that minor league team players are either employees of (baseball) or under contract to (hockey) their affiliated major league team make team promotion and relegation incompatible with the present structure of any North American team sport.

The NBA, NHL, and MLS have relatively close relationships with the US and Canadian national federations for those sports, but this mostly pertains to youth development initiatives and the selection of players for the national teams to compete in the World Championships (or soccer's World Cup in the case of MLS), and ultimately, the Olympics.

Recently, the United Soccer Leagues of North America (with teams from across the United States and Canada) discussed a possible relegation system, and implemented two leagues, the USL division one and two. However this would still be different from the usual promotion system, as the European systems usually extend over all ranks from the worst village amateur teams to the nation's top professional teams.

In Japan, professional soccer uses a promotion and relegation system, but professional baseball, owing to American influence, does not. The same circumstances are found in East Asian countries with both games, namely South Korea, China, and Taiwan.

Historical comparisons

The reason promotion and relegation systems never took hold in the U.S. likely comes down to sheer geographical considerations. In baseball, the earliest of the U.S. sports to develop professional leagues, the National Association of Base Ball Players was established in 1857 as a national governing body for baseball and would in many ways resemble England's Football Association when it was founded in 1863. Both governing bodies espoused strict amateurism in their early years, with hundreds of clubs joining each organization.

However, the National Association was not able to survive the onset of professionalism. The Association responded to the growing trend of clubs secretly paying players by establishing a "professional" category - this category then broke away from the Association and formed the National Association of Professional Baseball Players in 1871. This Association was also more inclusive than the league that followed it, but ultimately the new Association also proved too unstable and was replaced by the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs in 1876. The founders of the new League - club owners rather than players as was the case with the NAPBP - saw that to survive and prosper, baseball's top competition needed to be a "closed shop" with a strict limit on the number of teams, especially in the same city. The guarantee of a place in the league year after year would permit the NL owners to consolidate the fan bases in their exclusive territories and give them the confidence to invest in infrastructure such as larger stadiums which would guarantee the revenues that would allow them to bear the costs of travelling half way across a continent for games. The new league also had the stability to enforce rules on member clubs for the good of all. One example of this was that teams that chose not to honor travelling commitments because they were out of the pennant race late in the season were banned from the league. The original NA's loose structure did not allow for this, and in the 1870s it broke up into state and regional organizations.

The NL's dominance of baseball did not go unchallenged, with the National Association fighting off a challenge from the American Association in the 1880s before accepting parity with the new American League in 1903. The NL's agreement with the AL did not change the "closed shop" nature of professional baseball but rather entrenched it, since the AL was established as a "closed shop" as well.

On the other hand, the FA survived the onset of professionalism, which it formally accepted in 1885, probably because the increased geographical concentration of the population and the clubs meant, among other things, less travel costs and more clubs attracting large fan bases. Moreover, professional football did not gain acceptance until after the turn of the century in most of Southern England, so the earliest league members only needed to travel through the Midlands and North. When the Football League was founded in 1888, it was not intended to be a rival of the FA but rather the top competition within it. The new league was not universally accepted as England's top-caliber competition right away, however. To help win over fans of clubs outside the Football League, league places were not guaranteed - rather a system was established in which the worst teams at the end of each season would have to win re-election against any clubs wishing to join.

A rival league, the Football Alliance was formed in 1889, however when they were merged in 1892 it was not on equal terms, rather most of the Alliance clubs were compelled to play in the new Football League Second Division in a system where the best teams in the new division would be allowed to move up to the First Division, replacing the worst teams from that division. Another merger with the top division of the Southern League in 1920 would help form the Third Division, and no other rival league since has been formed from non-league clubs to try and achieve parity with the Football League. While a re-election system for teams finishing near the bottom of the Football League's lowest division(s) would remain in place for decades, but the concept of promotion and relegation had been established, eventually expanding into the football pyramid in place today. The FA, rather than disappearing or breaking up, has remained in place as English football's overall governing body.

External link

• Rec.Sport.Soccer Statistics Foundation Source for historical information on promoted and relegated teams.

Football (soccer) terminology

Relegation