Leicester City. And they won the EPL trophy straight out of League One the year they were promoted.
I would also argue that this would negatively impact small-market teams, which would all but guarantee a much smaller overall total revenue stream for the sport. (If I'm a small market fan, why should I pay to watch sub-par performance?
There's a reason AAA ball or MLSNext or G-League teams draw much smaller crowds.) Players would get paid less, owners would get paid less. Who is going to sign up for that?
What's funny is that with the power shifts in the NBA to the players these days is that the stars are essentially dictating where they want to play, and those spots (generally) do not include small-market arenas. Indeed, several players have been pretty vocal about this. So we may already be headed in the direction of multiple league tiers for each sport already just by virtue of the shift in player mobility.
This is the exception that proves the rule. The fact that winning the EPL was such a monumental upset and that you have to go back 5 years to find it, kind of proves the entire point. Them falling back to 12th place is further evidence of the difficulty of maintaining success as a small-market in European soccer. Compare to the sustained small-market successes in US sports like Oakland A's or Tampa bay Rays in the MLB, Green Bay and Pittsburgh in the NFL, the Memphis Grizzlies or San Antonio Spurs in the NBA.
> And they won the EPL trophy straight out of League One the year they were promoted.
I would also argue that this would negatively impact small-market teams, which would all but guarantee a much smaller overall total revenue stream for the sport. (If I'm a small market fan, why should I pay to watch sub-par performance? There's a reason AAA ball or MLSNext or G-League teams draw much smaller crowds.) Players would get paid less, owners would get paid less. Who is going to sign up for that?
What's funny is that with the power shifts in the NBA to the players these days is that the stars are essentially dictating where they want to play, and those spots (generally) do not include small-market arenas. Indeed, several players have been pretty vocal about this. So we may already be headed in the direction of multiple league tiers for each sport already just by virtue of the shift in player mobility.