2009-2010 Premier League season banner

Late last week ESPN officially acquired the rights to broadcast the early Saturday Morning English Premier League game (typically 7:45am CST sometimes 9am CST) and the Monday afternoon game (usually 2 pm CST) in the United States.  Even better news, the games are in HD are you listening Fox Soccer Channel?

The debut of the EPL on ESPN featured perennial power Chelsea v. Hull City, minus the service of Jozy Altidore, who was still in the states waiting for his work visa to go through.  The game received very good ratings considering the circumstances.  ESPN did not announce the deal until about 12 hours before game time, and most of you would have looked on your cable or satellite guides and seen that there would be a hunting show or Bass fishing in the time slot.  Acctully my Dish Network guide still says Fishing and hunting this Saturday morning too, so Dish Network hasn’t caught on.

For the past few years I have been relying on a few peer to peer TV sites and ustream’ers out there on the internet to stream pretty much any game I could image online these days, but the quality would normally be sub par and the chance that the stream would go down at least once was very likely.  The down fall of watching streaming games is that I would have to watch games live.  So having the luxury to sit down and turn on ESPN makes for a very nice way to start my Saturday morning coffee, or sleeping in and catching it on my DVR whenever I’m ready.

EPL TV Schedule in the US thru November 2009

Here is how ESPN introduces the 2009/2010 English Premier League season in the UK:

Who knew watching last place teams could be so much fun?  The Europeans might have it right when it comes to sports leagues and how there rewarded for good efforts on and off the field.   There is the obvious battle to finish 1^st, but there is a twist.  Teams cannot finish in the bottom 3 of the table, or they will be relegated to the lower division. 

Let’s take the English Premier League for instance.   In England the hierarchy of the leagues is: The Premier League (EPL), Championship League, League One, and lastly League Two.  There are 20 teams in the EPL, England’s top football league.    In order to stay in the EPL the team cannot finish in one of the bottom 3 positions.  The bottom 3 teams in the table are relegated to the Championship league at the end of the season.  The bad news for teams relegated is that ticket sales drop b/c the teams are playing lesser teams without the star power.   Another hit the teams take from the demotion is the lower leagues provide less funding, due to their diminished TV contracts.

Newly relegated teams receive and golden parachute for 2 years.  This Golden parachute is the money they would be rewarded with if they were still in the EPL.  The money comes from the EPL’s lucrative TV contracts.  After 2 years if the team fails to finish in the top 2 of the Championship league to get automatically promoted, the parachute money stops, and the teams are forced to drop payroll, by letting their top paid players go.  There is a playoff for the final promotion slot, with the 4 teams that finish 3-6 in the Championship league table.

This really makes the last few weeks of EPL football worth watching.  In the case for about 6-7 teams going into the last few weeks their teams future is on the line.  The EPL was won by Manchester United last week, but there are still 2 spots for teams to be relegated.  West Bromwich Albion has already claimed last place.  There are 4 teams that are fighting it out for the 2 relegation spots left.  So this last weekend of football will decide a lot.

There was a really good in depth read about this that I found last year in an issue of  American Way Magazine. 

The US domestic leagues don’t have relegations; all the teams are safe unless the city itself cannot afford to host the team.   This is where you see teams that move to another city.  Like last year when Seattle would not build the supersonics a new arena, so the team moved to Oklahoma City.  For the most part, if a team is bad they get rewarded with a better draft pick, a great opportunity to get better talent on the field/court. 

Most teams that consistently finish poorly are limited by their resources.  The MLB is everyone for themselves league when it comes to TV contract for the teams.  In NYC where the media market is huge, the Yankees and Mets have huge deals.  The Yankees even have their own network, YES.  While a team like the Kansas City Royals are forced to build from within and bring up their talented players through their farm system.  Once their players gain popularity and are no longer protected under the rules of the MLB, the team cannot afford them and they are either traded off for younger unproven talent or lost to teams that can offer them more money.  See Carlos Beltran, Johnny Damon, Jermaine Dye. 

The NFL has a league wide contract each team gets the same funding no matter their market making in much more fair for the lower TV markets, which causes a great deal of parody in the league.

 There are a lot of good things about each leagues structure.  For my dollar the last few weeks of the European leagues have a very interesting twist that makes for a great deal of drama.

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