Why American sports are socialist

With a small, and relatively fixed, number of clubs in each league, America’s professional sports organizations have a different challenge to keep individual teams from falling helplessly behind. If the Philadelphia 76ers are historically bad every year for a decade, it risks destroying the city’s fan base and hurting television revenues.

The EPL and the NFL may appear to have very different concerns, but on both sides of the Atlantic, sports leagues are trying to answer the same questions: How does a sports league account for its worst performers? How does it retain the fans of the league’s least successful teams?

In English football, where there are hundreds of similarly talented squads, the promise of churn keeps those fans interested: Late-season games between bad teams take on enormous significance when a loss might lead to relegation. In American football, where there are exactly 32 similarly talented teams, the promise of parity keeps those fans interested: If an NFL team stinks this year, all the more hope for next year. Promotion and relegation increases in-season drama, while the American system increases post-season hopes.

Finally, American professional sports leagues do promote and relegate, but at the player level. Baseball teams often demote bad players to AAA or call up AAA players into the big leagues. NFL teams do the same by moving an athlete from the practice squad to the roster. Here again, promotion and relegation solves the same problem of abundant competition. The best AAA player really is probably better than some MLB players, and the best practice-squad wide receiver is probably fit to play on Sunday.