It’s been a week now since the Super League was the talk of the sporting world, and while I’m sure many have made this point already, I did see someone dumped out a “What would a baseball super league look like??” post for a major publication over the weekend, so if others are making this point, let me join the chorus, since it’s evidently not loud enough.
All American professional sports are super leagues.
Major League Baseball.
The NFL.
The NBA.
The NHL.
Even Major League Soccer, which is relatively young and plays a sport where promotion and relegation are the norm, is a super league.
The reason the Super League got such a reaction was not that the quality of competition was going to be elite. It wasn’t even the angle that it was the richest teams conspiring amongst themselves to try to generate more money (evidently a poor business decision, judging by how their own consumers reacted) while leaving “the little guy” out to dry. The reason it got such a reaction was that it was anticompetitive. With a Super League, nobody can break in and nobody can fall out. Sure, they had the rotating qualified-for spots in the plan—their dinner guests for a particular evening or season. But those were limited, and more importantly, the clubs involved couldn’t lose their spot at the table.
That’s exactly the case with American professional sports leagues. They’re monopolies. Government-granted monopolies. They block out competition with systems that reward winning, sure—there’s certainly a market for winning—but don’t actively punish losing.
When I was eighteen, I was in A Coruña, Spain either on the night Deportivo de la Coruña was relegated from La Liga or shortly beforehand. It was a big deal in the city—the team, which had won the league in 2000 and won two Copas del Rey over the prior two decades—was in the midst of bouncing back and forth between Spain’s top two tiers, and we heard about it. We heard all about it.
Since then, I’ve checked in on Deportivo every few months, or every few weeks, or sometimes after a year or two. They’re in the third tier these days. A semi-professional tier. It’s going to be fully professional next year, but they might not be able to stay in it: If I’m understanding correctly (and it’s hard to understand exactly what’s going on, since few in the English-speaking world are sharing updates on the third tier of Spanish soccer), they could clinch retention with a win this weekend, but a loss or a draw would leave them in danger of another season of semi-professional competition. This, to make a comparison, would be kind of like if the Arizona Diamondbacks were about to play a two-game series against a minor league team and a junior college to see if they could keep playing against fully professional opponents next year. The stakes for Deportivo are high. How high? I don’t know, exactly, but I’d imagine they might be existential.
In America, Deportivo would be fine. Their ownership would be protected by its cabal of fellow owners, allowed to wallow in mediocrity, continue to cash revenue-sharing checks, and perhaps even have a limit placed on how much it and its opponents could spend on payroll (the NBA, NFL, and NHL have formal limits—salary caps—while Major League Baseball has an informal limit) so they could save on the expense side while continuing to pull in profits, creating a theoretical financial incentive to field bad teams (professional teams in the United States don’t open their books, so we don’t really know what the incentives are or aren’t). They would never be relegated. There would be no consequences that sizable for the losing.
This isn’t necessarily better or worse than the European soccer system. It’s just what we have here. It arose organically, just like their system did. Would we prefer a more free-market system, like theirs? I don’t know. I think I would, but at the same time, I’m a Cubs fan and the Cubs would’ve been way down the pyramid by now if Major League Baseball had consequences for losing beyond just missing out on winning’s benefits. Because Major League Baseball is, compared to leagues that promote and relegate teams, anticompetitive. It’s a super league. Just like the others here in the states.
