What if Major League Soccer had a pyramid structure similar to that of the English Premier League? What if they adopted promotion and relegation as a way to create excitement for the fans and both consequences and rewards for the performances of the teams?

That was the topic of discussion this week on the Unfiltered Soccer podcast with Landon Donovan and Tim Howard when they were joined by Adam Crafton, a writer from The Athletic.

“I suppose the major difference is the rest of the world kind of has this idea of a pyramid,” Crafton began, explaining what separates leagues like Serie A in Italy or the Bundesliga in Germany from Major League Soccer here in the U.S. “[It’s] this idea where there is a top division, but you don’t have a fixed place within that division.”

He went on to explain that the benefit of this structure is that, as the season comes to a close, it’s not just the top of the table the fans are keeping their eyes on, but also what’s happening at the bottom. “Bad performances have consequences,” he explains, “and good performances are rewarded.”

But for every pro, there is a con. Tim Howard used a fictitious MLS ownership scenario to explain. He theorized that if he, Crafton, and Donovan were going to buy an MLS team but at the end of their first year the value of that team might depreciate due to relegation, they would probably get together and say “I’m not signing up for that. I’m not spending nearly a billion dollars to then, in twelve months, have my asset be depreciated so much that we have to have a fire sale.”

But finances weren’t the only thing that worries Howard about bringing promotion and relegation to the U.S. How would a professional sport in America create a thriving second division when it has never successfully happened before?

“America has never adequately supported a second division,” he told Crafton and his co-host, Landon Donovan. “Everybody loves football; NFL is king. So they tried to create the XFL in the spring because there’s no football, the USFL in the spring because there’s no football. It doesn’t get supported.”

Donovan theorized that there might be creative ways for promotion and relegation to come stateside, pointing to a format that was previously used in Mexico.

“They used to do it over, I think, a three-year period,” he shared. “So you would have an average league position over three years and if you were at the bottom after those three years you would get relegated. So you had a little bit of a cushion; if you had one bad season it didn’t destroy you.”

Maybe one of the most poignant moments from the discussion was when Donovan shared a quote from Nashville SC CEO Ian Ayre who said that MLS owners being in favor of promotion and relegation would be like “turkeys voting in favor of Thanksgiving.”

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