I like Bill Simmons. He writes some entertaining stuff.
The guy only really started watching football during the World Cup, so that gives you some kind of idea of how much investigation he put into his search for a team
And, having read some of his previous articles, I think he'd be tickled by the idea of promotion and relegation in sports. After this seasons basketball playoffs a lot of writers in the US were salivating at the quality shown in the first round of the playoffs. The idea of seeing the top x teams playing, with the prospect of going down to a lower level would excite them. However the prospect of half the teams making more money than the other half (and the other half being seen in a less friendly eye), owners facing the possilibity of seeing a multi million dollar (in some cases almost billion dollar) team having half it's value wiped out because of dodgy results, and for the league to face the prospect of teams in major cities dropping into "lower leagues" .. it'll never happen in the USA. There's too much money involved. And sadly it's the kind of thing that could realistically happen in the UK.
A case in point would be the New York Knicks in the USA. This is the team with the highest salary in the NBA, in the biggest sports area of the country. And more importantly, the biggest market. However for the past few years they've made some terrible personnel decisions and last year either finished with the worst or close to the worst record in the league. If this team were playing in a promotion/relegation structure they'd be out of the elite. In the sporting sense it's a good thing. They'd get a while to make amends, get some wins to get their confidence back and jump right back up as should-be-good teams do. However for marketting purposes it's a disaster, especially in the American market. Your biggest markets don't always care if their team is losing, they'll still watch and buy the merchandise because they're facing the best teams. If the Knicks were relegated you'd be wiping hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue away.
Now let's take their equivalent in Premier League history. Leeds Utd. Due to the lack of a salary cap and reduced monitoring (plus transfer fees, which don't exist in the US .. only trades) they ran themselves into a ground and got relegated. The Premiership barely blinks. British supporters can be fickle, but they're loyal. Man City fans could get 30000 supporters at Maine Road even during the darker days. They'd still buy the merchandise. If one of the big 4 (Arsenal, Man U, Liverpool, Chelsea) manages to screw up an entire season the Premiership won't suffer. The root supporters are loyal to their team in suffering and in health. On the flip side foreign supporters will go for the glory teams in the glory tournaments and flip sides on a whimsey. Joe Schmoe supporters who will only turn up for the big games aren't as big a factor to the UK system as they are in the US. For the really big teams to suffer (the big 4 + Spurs, Newcastle, Aston Villa and Everton) they'd have to be relegated and either stay relegated for 5+ seasons or drop again and not go up for 2+ seasons). For examples of these look at :
Coventry : Top flight for 30+ seasons, now mostly off the radar.
West Ham : Bounce back after a couple of seasons below, look as good as ever.
Sheffield Wednesday : Where did they go? They were in the Premiership for 8 seasons.
Wimbledon : Ditto.
One of the more bizarre examples would be Sunderland. Their last stable period of anything was in the 50's. Since then they've never gone longer than 3 seasons through a period of stability, either battling relegation in the top flight, or challenging for promotion in the second division. Even at their lowest eb between 1985 and 1995 they only finished mid table twice, with 2 promotions and 3 relegations. And their last 5 years have been extreme examples of too good for second tier, too crap for top tier.
Now I need to work
passplay> is anyone else sitting with their balls gently nestled in a bowl of red jello?
