For example in the Netherlands we have Football right. There's 9 divisions. You get promoted or demoted at the end of the season, such that on average you're roughly in the middle of a spectrum of 5% worse and 5% better teams.
Of course there's lots of individual differences and some teams get much better suddenly in one season, and ought to play a division higher right away. But that's an issue for online mechanics as well. Online mechanics make that 5% range more granular, sure, but the notion that thousands of teams aren't rearranged isn't true, that's exactly what happens in most sports!
Of course going to the court and playing a quick match with strangers doesn't have this effect, but the vast majority of football players play in some formal sense in a team which plays in some organisation's league system with divisions. At least that's how it is here, although football is an extraordinarily deep sport in most countries and so the difficulty of opposition will be less granular in other sports.