Promotion and relegation
[1] An alternate system of league organization, used primarily in Australia, Canada, Singapore, and the United States, is a closed model based on licensing or franchises.
Even in the absence of such extraordinary circumstances, the pyramid-like nature of most European sports league systems can still create knock-on effects at the regional level.
Promotion and relegation have the effect of allowing the maintenance of a hierarchy of leagues and divisions, according to the relative strength of their teams.
[2] The payouts are higher than the prize money received by some non-relegated teams and are designed to soften the financial hit that clubs take whilst dropping out of the Premier League.
However, in many cases, these parachute payments just serve to inflate the costs of competing for promotion among the lower division clubs as newly relegated teams retain a financial advantage.
In some countries and at certain levels, teams in line for promotion may have to satisfy certain non-playing conditions in order to be accepted by the higher league, such as financial solvency, stadium capacity, and facilities.
While the primary purpose of the promotion and relegation system is to maintain competitive balance, it may also be used as a disciplinary tool in special cases.
As of the 2020s, empirical evidence increasingly pointed to the conclusion that promotion and relegation, standing alone, was insufficient to ensure adequate parity in any given game or the overall financial performance of a sport (as distinguished from individual players or teams).
The other major professional sports leagues in the United States and Canada have followed the MLB model of a franchise based system.
In contrast to baseball's NABBP, the first governing body in English football survived the onset of professionalism, which it formally accepted in 1885.
Certainly it provided the opportunity for more clubs' developing large fan bases without incurring great travel costs.
For decades, teams finishing near the bottom of The Football League's lowest division(s) faced re-election rather than automatic relegation.
But the principle of promotion and relegation had been firmly established, and it eventually expanded to the football pyramid in place today.
[4] However, this form of matchmaking is not typically used for StarCraft II e-sports tournaments, which have various kinds of structures depending on the organizer, the most important being the ESL Pro Tour as of 2021[update].
Starting in 2020, however, this was changed to a Regional Major Ranking system, at first a points-based system which was used for ESL One Rio 2020 and PGL Stockholm 2021 (The top rankings from the ESL One Rio 2020 RMRs were turned into PGL Stockholm 2021 points once IEM Rio was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic) and then a series of offline qualifiers starting with PGL Antwerp 2022, in which the teams from the Legends Stage (Now known as the Elimination Stage) from the previous Major automatically qualify for their RMRs and are joined by online qualifiers.
The addition of a semi-final in 2004 allowed for more than 26 songs, but in 2008 automatic qualification of the previous year's top 10 to the final was removed.
[5][6] From 1957 to 1966 and from 1983 to the present, the Argentine First Division has used a system called Promedios based on the average performance over a number of seasons.
This system has both positive and negative aspects, since all of the matches played for the championship in the last seasons are included in the coefficient for the clubs.
It also allows teams with a low budget with previous good campaigns to compete in international competitions without having to prioritize the championship to avoid relegation; examples of this are Club Atlético Lanús, winner of the 2013 Copa Sudamericana, or Club Atlético Talleres, winner of the 1999 Conmebol Cup.
