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Comment by jonwinstanley | Hacker News Reader

The league below the Premier League is even more competitive, there are 24 closely matched sides trying to gain promotion.

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The promotion and relegation system goes all the way down to amateur level. This chart is outdated but captures the complexity:

http://thepyramid.info/asp/pyramid3.asp

A big part of the appeal of local football is the knowledge that your team could theoretically get promoted all the way to the top. A closed league goes against this sense of fairness.

But the only way that could realistically happen is if a large corporation or a wealthy individual bought the local club and replaced all of it’s players with significantly more expensive ones and I don’t see what’s particularly appealing about that.

The closed American leagues are actually much fairer at least to the teams that are in them, TV money is split more evenly, there are caps on how much money can be spent on players and the teams at the bottom of the league table get more chances to acquire the more talented players due to the draft systems. Whereas in European football the pretty much the only thing that matters is how much money a club has to spend.

I kind of agree, but as all clubs have some sort of wealthy owner it becomes more about how well you use your money rather than how much you have.

There are plenty of examples of rich clubs performing badly and less rich clubs punching above their weight.

AFC Wimbledon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFC_Wimbledon

Combined Counties League divison 2 -> Two below premiership. Who beat a the team now 4th in premiership (West Ham) two season ago.

No wealthy individual replacing all the players, just fans.

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