http://www.newyorker.com/news/sporting-scene/the-kings-of-seventeenth-place Good read in the new yorker. THE SPORTING SCENE THE KINGS OF SEVENTEENTH PLACE By Alan Burdick , May 14, 2016 please log in to view this image Lamine Koné, Younès Kaboul, and Jermain Defoe, of Sunderland, celebrate after a goal against Everton this week.PHOTOGRAPH BY JASON CAIRNDUFF / ACTION IMAGES / REUTERS Three years ago, when my grade-school-age sons began playing soccer seriously—by which I mean when I began coaching their Sunday-league team, and took it too seriously—they told me that they wanted to call our team Sunderland, after the reliably abysmal Premier League team. I asked why. “Because they’re the best of the worst, dad!” one said. Or maybe he said “worst of the best,” I can’t remember. Either way, he was exactly right: Sunderland is literally as bad as a Premier League team can be and still remain in the Premier League, a status they have managed to maintain for a surprisingly long time. The League has twenty teams, but at the end of each season the three with the worst records are demoted, or relegated, to the league just below. The stakes are enormous. A relegated team loses tens of millions of dollars in television-rights money, and often must sell off its best players as their salaries become unaffordable. And so, as the season draws to a close, two contests take shape. One is the battle for the top, or at least for one of the top four places, which enables a team to compete the following year in the Champions League, the lucrative Europe-wide tournament. The other struggle is at the bottom, to avoid relegation to the second division, which is called, unhelpfully, the Championship League. In effect, it’s a battle for seventeenth place. Sunderland, based in the northeastern industrial city of the same name, regularly persuades crowds of forty thousand or more to watch a brand of soccer that fans elsewhere might consider dross. For the past three seasons, the team has entered the final weeks seemingly destined for “the drop,” only to avert it at the last possible moment. They “seem to have escapology running through their DNA,” the Guardian recently marvelled. In the spring of 2014, the team avoided relegation by going unbeaten in six of their last seven games. Last May, the team clinched safety in the penultimate game of the season, with a 0–0 draw against Arsenal. Going into last weekend this year, the question, yet again, was whether Sunderland, which has hovered near the bottom of the standings since autumn, could pull off another great escape. “We’re fighting for the Premier League, but that’s our Champions League,” Vito Mannone, Sunderland’s goalkeeper, told the BBC. “It’s a strange feeling, but it feels like the Champions League final every game.” The concept of relegation is foreign to American major-league sports. Baseball has its minor leagues; the N.B.A. has the D-League; Major League Soccer sits above the North American Soccer League and the United Soccer League. But while players may move up or down, teams do not. Your Miami Seahawks might become the Baltimore Colts and then the Indianapolis Colts, and the Mets may suck for years on end, but only bankruptcy will let such teams disappear from the majors. (The last team to fold in the N.F.L. was the Dallas Texans, in 1952.) Some critics of the Philadelphia 76ers, a team with a stunningly poor record, contend that the team is effectively exploiting this loophole, losing games intentionally to lower their standing and improve their draft-pick options. Last year, Jurgen Klinsmann, the coach of the U.S. men’s national soccer team, lamented the lack of a trap door, which exists in virtually every other soccer league in the world. “This thrill of the relegation battle is nonexistent in the U.S. league,” he said. “The sporting side would benefit from it.” The thrill of relegation will be familiar to anyone who has watched a demolition derby. The Bad combats the Really Bad, who take on the Even Worse, and the Truly Worst are towed off and dismantled, hoping to one day reassemble themselves into a team worthy of returning to the Premier League. That’s the flip side of relegation: promotion. At season’s end, the three top teams from the Championship League move up to the Premier League and are replaced, in turn, by the top three teams from the league just below, League One. (Part of what made Leicester City’s title win this season so satisfying is that they’d entered the Premier League only last season—and then escaped relegation, in that first year, by going unbeaten in their last nine games.) It takes something special, then, to be consistently quite bad and yet just barely good enough. This season, Aston Villa was the former but not the latter. Villa, a member of the Premier League since its founding, in 1992, has been sliding down the table for the past several years. (The “History” page of the club’s Web site stops in 2011.) They finished seventeenth last season, and are currently on their fourth manager in fifteen months; they are also up for sale. A moving shambles, Villa spent much of this season in twentieth place and were relegated weeks ago. Norwich, accustomed to bouncing between divisions, finished nineteenth and were relegated for the second time in three seasons. And so eighteenth place awaited either Sunderland or Newcastle, their near-city rival. Newcastle, another yo-yo club, finished as high as fifth in the 2011-12 season; this season they spent extravagantly to improve their lineup, but still played haplessly. Over the weekend they sealed their doom with a 0–0 tie against Villa, making them the only team that failed to beat Villa this season. “The final whistle of a savagely awful match was like morphine,” the Birmingham Mail declared. Sunderland, meanwhile, worked their low-rent magic once again: on Sunday, after an inspired 3–2 win over last season’s league champion, Chelsea, they claimed seventeenth place outright. The tying goal came in the seventieth minute, from striker Jermaine Defoe, who has managed to score fifteen goals this season—an impressive tally coming from such a dismal side. American soccer strives to emulate European soccer, both in quality and visibility, and from time to time voices in and around M.L.S. ask whether relegation-promotion might have a place here. In March, Sports Illustrated asked a group of coaches and executives about the prospect of introducing such a system, and the responses were variations on “impossible” and “won’t ever happen.” “I’m not in favor of it,” Peter Vermes, the head coach of Sporting Kansas City, said. “It’s not in our culture.” What’s meant is that it’s bad for business. If you spend a hundred million dollars or more for an M.L.S. team, in a country still young to the sport, you don’t want to see it get relegated the following season. That’s one essential difference between American and European soccer. Here, you enter the major league of any sport in one of two ways: by buying an existing major-league team, or by waiting until the owners of the existing teams decide to expand the league and allow you (for a large fee) to establish a new one. It’s a franchise, like McDonald’s, and the league itself is not a meritocracy but a plutocracy, open to anyone who can afford the price of admission. In England, you can buy an existing club in the Premier League and hope to avoid relegation; or buy, or even start, a team in a lower division and try to work your way up. It’s still expensive, but at least it’s Malthusian. The Premier League has its own faults. Critics note that it’s unfairly weighted toward the handful of very wealthy teams that consistently place at the top. Still, there’s something to be said for earning your spot in the league, rather than buying it, even if that spot is at the foot of the table. Best of the worst, worst of the best—either way, you’re in the Premier League. And, for better or worse, and for yet another season, it’s still true: Sunderland is not dead. Long live Sunderland.
Thanks, that was a good read, a good appraisal of how it really is. a few dodgy use of words though Definition of Malthusian. : of or relating to Malthus or to his theory that population tends to increase at a faster rate than its means of subsistence and that unless it is checked by moral restraint or disaster (as disease, famine, or war) widespread poverty and degradation inevitably result.
. I have no idea what you have just wrote means. But the article was a good read. The best of the worst or the worst of the best?
Except in Countries 'flanders' where their National Game is a form of Football - like the USA and Australia (Australian Rules Football) - in which case Association Football gets relegated to the derogatory "Soccer"! Here in Oz the National team is known as the "Socceroo's" for instance.
Never sure why these so called sports that for 98% of the game they use their hands, they want to call it football. I lived in the States for a while and when anyone referred to it as "soccer" I simply told them I have no idea what sport that was.......I can be an obnoxious kernt when I want to be
I know what you mean. I stir the Aussies up by referring to Association Football as "The World Game" to which they reply "Kick it with your head"! But you are right, there is much more hand work in their games than feet so 'handball' would be more appropriate.
