Comment by switz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by switz | Hacker News Reader

Interesting thought experiment, but as is often the problem in North American sports, it hurts small market teams. What free agent is going to willingly join a small market team out of the champions league that has less capital to expend than large market teams. You end up with a negative feedback loop in which small market teams have an even tougher time affording to compete or incentivizing free agents to join. This is already a problem and a structure like this (namely, the 3-5 year qualification period) only compounds it. If a smaller market team hasn't had any qualifying seasons in 5 years it essentially pits them into purgatory.

Personally, I'd like to see the season shortened (in # of games) to give each game a more outsized impact. Give teams a bit more rest to enable shorter rotations (star pitchers get more game time) and expand the playoffs slightly (via play-in games) to lessen the soul crushing nature of missing the playoffs by a single game after a grueling 162 game season. Not that any of these ideas are novel or perfect, but it's clear baseball has engagement issues that are not improving any time soon.

>but as is often the problem in North American sports, it hurts small market teams.

In the case of baseball, the negotiations are being held up by the small-market owners because the existing system is so beneficial to them. There is a de-facto salary cap through the Competitive Balance Tax, which directs money straight from the richest to the poorest teams. Meanwhile, there is no guarantee that the poor teams spend that money on actually improving their team.

I don't see any non-North American system where small-market teams perform this well. In the NFL, small-market Cincinnati was just in the Super Bowl because of a draft process that rewards poor performance.

Leicester City. And they won the EPL trophy straight out of League One the year they were promoted.

I would also argue that this would negatively impact small-market teams, which would all but guarantee a much smaller overall total revenue stream for the sport. (If I'm a small market fan, why should I pay to watch sub-par performance? There's a reason AAA ball or MLSNext or G-League teams draw much smaller crowds.) Players would get paid less, owners would get paid less. Who is going to sign up for that?

What's funny is that with the power shifts in the NBA to the players these days is that the stars are essentially dictating where they want to play, and those spots (generally) do not include small-market arenas. Indeed, several players have been pretty vocal about this. So we may already be headed in the direction of multiple league tiers for each sport already just by virtue of the shift in player mobility.

> Leicester City

This is the exception that proves the rule. The fact that winning the EPL was such a monumental upset and that you have to go back 5 years to find it, kind of proves the entire point. Them falling back to 12th place is further evidence of the difficulty of maintaining success as a small-market in European soccer. Compare to the sustained small-market successes in US sports like Oakland A's or Tampa bay Rays in the MLB, Green Bay and Pittsburgh in the NFL, the Memphis Grizzlies or San Antonio Spurs in the NBA.

> And they won the EPL trophy straight out of League One the year they were promoted.

This is false, they finished 14th in EPL for the 2014-15 season. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014%E2%80%9315_in_English_foo...

If they had a hard salary cap + floor like the NFL that would help some. But otherwise agree 100%.

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